I was caught the other day singing the lyrics to the Rolling Stones song “You Can't Always Get What You Want," I say caught because I was singing it incorrectly. I sang, “you can’t always want what you get.” We rather love this little mistake. At Workability, we spend a lot of time thinking about, and working with our clients on, increasing our experience of responsibility. The conventional approach to life is to blame our circumstances for our happiness, sadness, well-being, any and all of our emotional states. If something we don’t want happens, we feel sad. If we get what we want we are happy.
For us, the far more interesting, fruitful, and worthwhile endeavor in life is to spend time “wanting” (we would use the word accepting here) what it is that we already have. It will always be true that “you can’t always get what you want.” Getting what you want at every moment, day after day, is incredibly fickle. It involves other people, the weather, world circumstances, and on and on. Wanting what you get is not fickle at all! It is completely in your domain to want what you get. In fact, as I write this newsletter, I am stuck at the airport due to a cancelled flight and I will be here for the next 9 hours. I could kick and scream and pout about it (which I did for a minute), or I could decide to “want what I’ve got.” What I’ve got is a lot of time to write newsletters.
To wanting what we’ve got
