What Happens When You Get What You Want? Success and the Challenge of Choice by Rick Eigenbrod Ph.D

Author:Rick Eigenbrod, Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: success inspirational goals setting personal development personal growth
Publisher: Rick Eigenbrod, Ph.D.

9: The chance to make a choice

The Grand Narrative of Success is a kind of game where no one cares about your last at-bat. (Please excuse this and any other sports metaphors that I might attempt.) It's all about what you're going to do the next time you're up. Predictably, getting what you want temporarily ends your place in the story of the Grand Narrative. When you get what you want, you're done, and you have nowhere to go but to a place where you're positioned to get more of what you want. That gets you back into the game. It gives you another at-bat.

When we don't find that new place, we may feel like we've run out of the story, but in fact the story has run out on us. Our current Grand Narrative is too limited because it only takes us to "more." It's too small because it has nothing to offer us after we reach our goal but to repeat ourselves. So we use proven processes to accomplish familiar goals that give us more. The problem? The more we get what we want, the harder it is to know what we want. And when we don't know what we want, we fall back into wanting more. Feeding the appetite of the Grand Narrative of $uccess creates hunger.

What's a person to do?

If we opt out of the Grand Narrative of Success, we're out of easy answers to the question of what we should be doing with our lives. Instead, we'll find ourselves somewhere in Stephen Sondheim's woods, after happily-ever-after, in an uncharted place, but also a place of possibilities.

Maybe "opt out" overstates what it takes to get a grip on our headlong pursuit of success/happiness. Opt out implies a total rejection of the idea of success and what it can bring. It can sound like living off the grid is the only viable alternative. Not so. In fact, it's my belief that success, if we allow it to, can lead us to explore life's timeless questions. More about that later.

Instead of "opt out," how about "seriously question"? Or "critically evaluate"? The point being that instead of blindly following the Grand Narrative, we should at least view it with enough skepticism to realize that there might be better ways to find what we're looking for.

Maybe you're wondering, how did we get from hiking the Camino de Santiago to maneuvering through the Grand Narrative? What's the connection between one guy completing a cross-country trek and another contemplating what to do now that he's sold his business and has plenty of money?

One connection is that they've both been disconnected—from life as they've known it and the structure, meaning, and identity that came with it. Eventually they will both reconnect with their lives in new ways, and as they do, they'll both have the opportunity to make choices about what that means.

At the end of their journeys, each venturer is confronted with the choice of where to go from there, what to do now that an end has come and left open a door to something else.

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