What Do You Want to Want?
Audit and redesign your desires so your default wants stop steering your life
- Difficulty
- Expert
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 82%
The framework treats desire as programmable rather than fixed. Most wants are 'mimetic' — copied from those around us (Girard, Thiel) — and become a path of least resistance that, like a river, cuts an ever-deeper channel that is progressively harder to leave. The core move is to keep asking 'what do I want to want?', then use inversion to name what you clearly should NOT want. Kyle then runs four concrete shifts: from wanting an easy life to wanting struggle; from wanting to be somebody to wanting to do something; from wanting extreme wealth to wanting a frugal heart; from wanting to be extraordinary to embracing the ordinary. Crucially the order of priorities is re-sequenced (impact before fame, meaning before money) so that any fame or wealth that arrives rests on a foundation that survives when attention fades. Environment — community, partner, culture — is the highest-leverage lever for actually shifting desires.
Origin
Developed by writer Kyle Eschenroeder in his long-form blog post 'What Do You Want to Want?', built largely from inversions of his own unhelpful desires, drawing on Girard, Thiel, Emerson, Frankl, and Stoic sources.
Core principles
- 01Default desires are usually inherited (mimetic), not chosen
- 02Desires create your path of least resistance, and long-term you follow it
- 03Designed wants act like a trustworthy advisor; emergent wants are a slave-master
- 04The question itself is the intervention — engage it repeatedly, don't file it away
- 05Shaping a desire even slightly compounds into large life changes over decades
How to run it
- 1
Ask the meta-question
Shift from 'what do I want?' to 'what do I want to want?' Treat the question itself as the intervention and engage it in real time, not as a note to file away.
Pro tip Return to the question repeatedly; Confucius measured this kind of progress in decades, not months.
- 2
Spot your default and mimetic desires
Identify wants that are merely emergent — copied from those around you or driven by cheap dopamine. These are the desires quietly cutting your path of least resistance.
Pro tip Naval's heuristic: 'the modern devil is cheap dopamine' — flag any want that is just a cheap dopamine hit.
Watch out Left unexamined, these desires deepen into behaviour patterns that become superhuman-hard to redirect.
- 3
Invert — name what you should NOT want to want
It is often easier to define a bad life than a good one. List the wants that, taken to their extreme, would guarantee an unfulfilled life, then aim away from them.
Pro tip Ask: 'what wants, at their nth degree, would guarantee I lead an unfulfilled life?'
- 4
Run the four shifts
Reassess your major wants against four inversions: easy life to a life of struggle; being somebody to doing something; extreme wealth to a frugal heart; being extraordinary to embracing the ordinary.
Pro tip Tug on any one of the four and the others tend to move too — they are interconnected.
Watch out This is not self-flagellation or fetishising suffering; it is choosing harder, more meaningful paths, not adding pointless drama.
- 5
Re-order the priority, not just the goal
Keep ambition but re-sequence it: desire impact more than attention, meaning more than money. Then any fame or wealth that comes rests on a foundation that survives when attention fades.
Pro tip Play the attention game as marketing FOR the work you care about, never as the end in itself.
Watch out Desiring fame or wealth for its own sake makes your happiness hostage to people who can just as easily tear you down.
- 6
Engineer your environment to hold the new desires
Use the mimetic instinct in your favour: choose communities, a partner, and a workplace culture whose desires are slightly ahead of yours on the spectrums you care about.
Pro tip Book clubs, worship or fitness communities, and a great partner ('the best life hack') do a lot of the reprogramming for you.
- 7
Reinforce with reflection and an internal scorecard
Journal so there is a record of where you keep drifting, and adopt Buffett's internal scorecard — measure whether you are executing your own strategy, not external metrics like follower count.
Pro tip An external scorecard (money, followers) de-energises fast on asymmetric work; an internal one sustains you through it.
In the wild
Chris recounts Greg McKeown working with a Silicon Valley executive who reached the top of the corporate ladder but whose relationship with his teenage son had collapsed — the son leaves the room whenever the father enters. McKeown described him as someone who 'won at the wrong game': he dedicated his life relentlessly to a goal, but to the wrong goal, with time he can never recover. It is the vivid failure case the framework exists to prevent.
→ Illustrates the end-state of following unexamined default desires: measurable success paired with deep regret.
Revisiting the article years later, Kyle says the one change he would make is emphasising nourishing, wholesome, sustainable desires rather than struggle. A 22-year-old may need the warrior mindset of pushing against something constantly, but with age and children the tone shifts. He frames this as proof of the framework's own logic: because self-reliance and re-choosing desires are the point, the specific answers are expected to evolve with your phase of life.
→ Shows the framework is applied recursively — even its author re-runs it on himself and updates his designed wants.
Common mistakes
Treating it as a hack, not deep programming
This reprograms fundamental parts of the self and is measured in years or decades. Expecting a painless, quick result guarantees disappointment.
Mistaking 'embrace the ordinary' for accepting mediocrity
The point is not to stop striving or to be small — it is to strive from respect for your own life rather than from a mimetic need to be special.
Fetishising struggle
The struggle shift is about flinching less and choosing harder meaningful paths, not manufacturing suffering or drama for its own sake.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone at a values-reassessment moment who wants to consciously design what they pursue rather than drift.
Not ideal for
Someone seeking a quick tactical fix; this is decades-long fundamental reprogramming, not a hack.
From the transcript
“ask yourself, what do you want to want? Like genuinely, what do you want to want? Not do what do you want?”
“our desires create our path of least resistance. And in the long run, I think that we all end up following our path of least…”
“if you desire impact more than attention, then any fame you achieve will be based on a solid foundation and your happiness won't disappear when…”
From the episode
How To Work Out What You Want To Want From Life - Kyle Eschenroeder - #189
Kyle Eschenroeder