How do you know what you actually want?

Why high achievers struggle with this question

High achievers are often extraordinary at execution. Give them a goal and they will reach it. What they get very little practice with is the step before: choosing the goal. School, careers, and ambitious cultures supply a steady stream of ready-made targets, and meeting them is rewarded so reliably that it can feel unnecessary to ask whether you wanted them in the first place.

Sabra describes spending years getting very, very good at succeeding before realizing she had almost no practice asking herself what she actually wanted.

Borrowed goals

A borrowed goal is one you pursue because it was expected, admired, or safe—not because it reflects something you care about. Borrowed goals aren’t necessarily bad. Plenty of them lead to good things. But a life built mostly on them can start to feel like it belongs to someone else, which is often how people end up successful but unfulfilled.

One way to spot a borrowed goal: notice how you feel when you imagine achieving it with no one watching. If the appeal disappears with the audience, it may not be yours.

Making enough space to hear yourself

Wants are often quiet. They are hard to hear over deadlines, notifications, and the constant hum of other people’s expectations. For many people, the first real step isn’t introspection so much as subtraction: creating enough room—through rest, walks, journaling, or a genuine break—for something other than the next obligation to surface.

Sabra started journaling mostly out of desperation during burnout. On the page, a dialogue emerged between two inner voices, Intuition and Insecurity. Learning to tell them apart became one of the most useful things she ever did.

Paying attention instead of deciding

Trying to decide what you want in the abstract rarely works. Paying attention tends to work better. What makes you lose track of time? What do you find yourself reading about late at night? Which conversations leave you more energized than when they started? What do you envy—not in a bitter way, but in a way that feels like information?

These signals are small and easy to dismiss, especially for people trained to value only what can be measured. Taken together, they often point somewhere.

Experiments over certainty

High achievers often want a clear answer before they move. But wants tend to reveal themselves through action. Small, low-stakes experiments—a class, a side project, a conversation, a new routine—let you test a hunch without betting your whole identity on it. This is especially important if your sense of self is tied to getting things right, a pattern explored in Achievement & Self-Worth.