“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need….” -Rolling Stones
This song starts to play in my head at interesting moments. Lately it is on instant replay as I sort through current events and try to organize them in categories of what I want and what I need. Here again I seem to be proving the Daniel Gilbert’s theory of Stumbling Around Happiness, which demonstrates that we humans have as little accuracy in remembering what happened in the past as we do at predicting how we will feel in the future. Our mental filters are selective in both directions and our belief that our experience is unique prevents us from really learning from others about things, which we have no experience.
I knew many people who took investments from a variety of sources. People who sold their businesses, took partners, gave up control of their business in one form or another. I don’t really have any stories on the tip of fingers where those changing dynamics lead to long term cooperative relationships. New vision and experience replaces old vision and experience, and perhaps that is the way it works best.
How and why I maintained the idea that I would become an integral part of the new vision is hard to explain in hindsight, even to myself. Letting go of that fantasy has proven harder than I would have expected. Still in many respects, the situation I find myself in completely fulfills what I needed. I have true business expertise invested in the Good Clean Love dream. Truly it has more potential in this moment than ever before, with or with out me.
It is hard to be expendable in your own dreams. But in the end, we all are replaceable. Our unique slant on things is just that unique, but irreplaceable, hardly ever. Most of us hit these walls in life that give us what we need, even if they don’t really feel like what we want. In fact the space between need and want is often nothing but confusion. I hear it from my kids continuously. Their idea of what they need and want run together so frequently that it is hard to discern one from the other, and they rarely do. I am no better really, and among adults it just ends up looking like perpetual confusion.
Clarity is everything. Winning and losing are closer than I ever realized and the only way through is vigilant and deliberate thinking which doesn’t slip into indignation about what you want and strives for contentment with real needs met.
