What do you actually want?

The deepest Google Doc & the science of adult development

First, some quick notes

1. I am thrilled to share that, less than 1 week after launching, we are now at nearly 5,000 subscribers (and counting). Clearly, something about the importance of teaching adulting has struck a chord!

2. In the next post, I’ll start answering readers’ questions. If you are in your early 20s and have a question (related to finance, career, relationships, or personal development), ask it in the comments. I can’t promise to feature everyone, but the sooner you post, the higher the chances. Note: If your question is personal and you would prefer to remain anonymous, no problem, you can email it to me.

This newsletter is going to cover very practical things. I’m hoping that, through reading it, you will gain a lot of knowledge.

However, all this knowledge is pointless

—unless you know what you want. What’s the point of knowing how to invest money, if you don’t know what you’re saving for? What’s the point of knowing how to date, if you don’t know what kind of relationship you want? What’s the point of trying to become happy, if you don’t know what will make you happy?

To answer those questions, let’s imagine a Google Doc with all of your deepest wants:

Where did these beliefs about what you want come from? Let’s open the doc’s revision history…

As you can see, some of these beliefs may be hard-won—tested through experience and questioned and re-questioned. But most were instilled by others. Until now, those beliefs have never been tested (let alone revealed that you have them!). Those are…

Hollow beliefs

Here’s how to tell if a belief about what you want is hollow: if you thought about it deeply now, would you still believe it?

In some cases, the answer will be yes—the belief may have come from your parents, but you still truly do believe it, for your own reasons—and it can now graduate from hollow belief to hard-won belief. In other cases, the answer will be no—and you need to discard the hollow belief in order to build a new belief from the ground-up, based on your own ideas and experiences.

Many hollow beliefs come from randomly specific people at randomly specific times in life. For example, you may be attracted to people with a specific body type, because that’s the type of person the most popular kid in your high school class was dating—and you made the unconscious inference that if the most popular person wants to be with someone of this body type, it must be the best. A surprising number of hollow beliefs come from movies, TV shows, books, and songs, whose words seemingly passed through us at the time, but whose messages wormed their way into our minds.

You must go through every belief, one at a time, and question if you still believe it. You must question everything.

Tapping a belief to see if it is hollow or not

If this sounds suspiciously like having a quarter-life crisis… good! I think most people end up having mid-life crises because it takes them a long time to realize they are living a life that they never chose. They wake up one day asking, “Did I really want to be married to this person? Did I really want to be in this career?” Their perceived lack of agency leads to a feeling of emptiness, which they desperately try to fill with things that feel novel: affairs, or expensive cars, or running away from home to travel the world, as the cliches go.

Of course, you may change as you get older. Revising your beliefs as you grow is good—but never having built hard-won beliefs to follow in the first place is not. I want you to have a quarter-life crisis now, so that you won’t have a mid-life crisis later.

I had a quarter-life crisis related to my career about two years into my first job. I realized that I had picked my job at Bain & Company, a prestigious management consulting company, solely because it was prestigious. My senior year of college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I followed the heuristic that had served me well in my life until then: aim for the thing that is hardest to get. Get the best grades, get into the best college, get the best job. But when it comes to jobs, there is no “best”—only the one that is best suited to you and your unique superpowers.

I realized that all of my life choices so far had been following one path. But it wasn’t a path I dreamed up. The “achievement mindset” that pushed me to aim for the most prestigious choices was subconsciously instilled by my parents (immigrants who motivated me to work hard in school), teachers (who believed in me and had high hopes in me—“you have so much potential”), and my peers (especially in the hyper-competitive environment of Princeton). Many of these people had good intentions, but the confluence of them created one big hollow belief.

In other words, I realized that I was living life according to what I thought others expected me to do.

The science of adult development

Modern psychology has validated these insights with research. This field is called “adult development.” The theory goes: just as children go through developmental stages, so do adults. But whereas the stages of children are necessarily tied to their age (for example, it’s impossible for a 1-year old child to form entire sentences, but when they hit the 2-3 year mark, they can), the stages of adults are not necessarily tied to age.

That’s bad news and good news. The bad: you can get stuck in perpetual adolescence (as with some people I’m sure you know). The good: you can evolve to higher stages more rapidly. It’s all up to you.

Different adult developmental scientists define these stages differently, but the most general formulation is as follows:

1. The Impulsive Mind – blindly following your impulses (often tied to childhood)

2. The Imperial Mind – following your desires in the moment, with little regard for the future or for the needs of others (often tied to adolescence)

3. The Socialized Mind – mostly caring about what you think others expect from you

4. The Self-Authored Mind – mostly caring about what you want to do

5. The Self-Transforming Mind – being able to hold multiple seemingly contradictory beliefs in equal regard

What we’ve been discussing so far is the transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4: from the socialized mind to the self-authored mind. The vast majority of adults are stuck (for their entire lives!) in the socialized mind. This newsletter will help you evolve to the self-authored mind.

Getting to the self-authored mind means naming what you think you want, identifying where that belief came from, questioning if it’s still right, and forming new beliefs—along a range of dimensions. It’s a grand journey.

For the time being, think of it this way: your whole life, you’ve had Read-Only access to the Google Doc of your deepest wants; now, for the first time, you’ve been granted Edit access.