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Lessons - The Dreams You're Chasing Aren't Even Yours (Scott) · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In today's lessons episode, I want to expose a relatively painful truth that is destroying
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  millions of lives. The dreams that you're chasing aren't even yours. If you're working towards
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  goals that look impressive, they leave you feeling empty inside. If you've been copying other
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  people's success, they're asking what actually makes you happy. When you secretly worry you're
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  living someone else's version of a good life, you have to listen. I'll show you why most people
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  spend decades pursuing these borrowed dreams that they absorb from social media and society,
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  and how to stop copying everyone else's desires and start choosing your own before you waste your
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  entire life living the wrong life and building towards the wrong thing. Today I'm going to show you
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  why the dreams that you're living aren't yours, but first the story. Grace was dying after 67
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  years of marriage, re-children, and a life that looked perfect from the outside. She lay in the hospital
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  bed with tears streaming down her face. I wanted to travel the world she whispered to her palette of
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  care nurse. I wanted to write stories. I wanted to live alone in a small apartment in Paris
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  and eat croissants every morning. She paused, struggling to breathe, but everyone expected me to be
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  the perfect wife, the perfect mother. I lived the life they wanted me to live, not the one I dreamed
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  about. And sadly, Grace died three days later. And her nurse, Ronnie Ware, would later write that
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  this was the most common deathbed regret she heard. I wish I had the courage to live a life
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  true to myself, not the life others expected of me. But here's what Ware didn't realize,
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  and what you need to understand. Grace's story isn't about lacking courage. It's about something
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  far more disturbing that I really want you to understand as soon as possible. Grace never had
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  her own dreams to begin with. She was living a lie. A lot of us are living a lie. French philosopher
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  René Gerard, he spent his life studying something that he called memetic desire. The idea that human
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  beings don't actually know what they want. Instead, we copy the desire of others. We see someone
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  driving a Tesla, and suddenly we want a Tesla. Not because we've analyzed our transportation needs,
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  but because someone we admire or envy made that choice seem desirable. We could watch someone
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  building a startup getting married, moving to New York, buying a house, having kids, and we start
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  wanting those things too. And Gerard called this the romantic lie. The belief that our desires
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  spring from some deep, authentic place inside us. But the truth is more unsettling. We are constantly
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  borrowing other people's dreams and mistaking them for our own. Think about it. Why do you want the
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  relationship that you want? The career you're building. The lifestyle that you're currently pursuing.
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  Is it because you sat quietly with yourself and carefully considered what would bring you joy and
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  meaning or is it because you've seen others live that way and you decided that it looked appealing.
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  Now, most people, if they're honest, will realize that their desires are borrowed and copied and
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  mimicked, and they are living someone else's vision of a good life. Now, social media has turned
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  memetic desire into this precision weapon every single day. You're exposed to thousands of curated
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  versions of other people's successful lives. The entrepreneur with the beach side laptop,
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  the couple with the perfect wedding, the friend with the dream job. Each image plants a seed. Maybe
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  I should want this too. So you start following people whose lives you want to copy. You bookmark
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  their posts. You screenshot their quotes. You study their life and their strategies for living that
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  life. And without realizing it, you start to replace your own inner compass with someone else's GPS.
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  And then what's the result? Well, you end up spending years and maybe decades chasing goals
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  that were never really yours to begin with. You build the business. You saw someone else build.
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  You move to the city. Everyone else thinks it's cool. You optimize for the metrics and make others
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  impressed. And then one day you wake up feeling empty. And it's because you achieved someone else's
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  dream, not your own. That is a tragedy of an unlived life. There is a special kind of suffering
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  reserved for people who reach the end of their lives and realize they never actually lived.
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  And palliative care workers report the same story over and over. People on their deathbeds don't
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  regret the chances they took or the mistakes that they made. They regret the chances they didn't
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  take because they were too busy living up to other people's expectations. They regret working
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  jobs they hated to buy things they didn't need when press people they didn't like. They regret
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  staying in relationships that felt safe but empty. They regret playing too small because big dreams
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  seem too selfish, too risky, too different from what everyone else was doing. And most heartbreakingly,
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  many of them regret never figuring out what they actually wanted in the first place. Carl Jung
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  wrote about this phenomenon. The tragedy of the unlived life. The parts of ourselves that we never
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  explore because we're too busy being who others expect us to be. The dreams you never pursue
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  because they don't fit the template of success that we've absorbed from our parents or friends or
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  culture. It could be the past that we never walked because they seem too weird or too risky or too
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  far from what others would understand or approve of. And this is the deepest source of human suffering.
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  Not living your own life. Now this brings us to the word authenticity because everybody says
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  just be authentic, right? But what if you don't know who you authentically are? What if you spend so
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  long copying others that you've lost touch with your own desires, your own values, your own vision
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  of what a meaningful life looks like? And this is the trap that most people fall into. They hear advice
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  about following their passion or being true to themselves. And then they panic because they realize
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  they don't actually know what that means. So their passion feels borrowed and their values feel
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  inherited and their dreams feel like hand me downs from people that they've admired. So the solution
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  isn't to live authentically. The solution isn't a dig deeper to find some buried authentic self
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  because that self might not exist. At least not in the way that we imagine. The solution is to
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  consciously choose what to want. Now here's what Gerard understood but not many people teach.
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  Since all desire is learned, you can learn to desire consciously instead of unconsciously.
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  You can choose your models instead of letting random influences on social media choose them
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  for you. You can ask better questions. Instead of what do I want, you can ask who am I copying
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  and do I want to become like them? Instead of what should I do, you should start to ask yourself
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  what would I regret not trying? And instead of what will make me successful, you should start
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  to ask yourself what would make me feel alive. This is the difference between mimetic desire and
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  conscious desire. The medic desire copies what other people have already chosen. Conscious desire
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  chooses based on who you want to become. And if you want to know if your dreams are really yours,
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  you just start to ask yourself some really tough questions. You can ask yourself if no one else
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  would ever know about your accomplishments, would you still want them? Because most people want
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  recognition more than they want the actual thing they're working towards. And if you strip away
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  the audience, you're going to start to discover what actually matters to you. And you can ask yourself
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  if you could live five completely different lives, what would they be? And this question bypasses
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  the either or thinking that keeps people trapped, right? You don't have to choose just one path,
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  but you do need to know what paths actually appeal to you. You should ask yourself what did you
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  love doing before you cared about what people thought? So childhood interests before they got
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  filtered through social expectations. That could also point to authentic desire. You should ask
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  yourself what would you do if you knew you'd die in exactly 10 years? And this removes the
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  pressure to build something that lasts forever and focuses attention on what feels meaningful
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  right now today. And then the last question you should ask yourself is what are you afraid people
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  will think if you pursue what you actually want? And more often than not, the thing that you're
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  most afraid of and what you're most afraid to want is the thing you most authentically want. Now
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  this brings us back to authentic living. When you go through this exercise, you are getting
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  closer to being in line with who you actually are having dreams that are actually yours to
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  living authentically. But when no one tells you about living authentically, is it can be very
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  lonely? Because when you stop copying other people's dreams and you start pursuing your own,
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  especially at the beginning, you start to leave the crowd behind. You stop getting likes for the
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  content that resonates with everyone else. You stop fitting into neat categories that people can
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  understand and approve of. You stop being able to explain your choices in ways that make immediate
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  sense to others. And this is the price of true dreams, the price of authenticity. You have to be
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  willing to be misunderstood. But what you gain is that you get to live your own life. You get to
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  die knowing you at least tried to figure out what you actually wanted and gave it your best shot.
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  You get to experience the rare satisfaction of pursuing goals that feel genuinely yours. Even
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  if they don't make sense, anyone else. Remember, your life is not a dress rehearsal. Grace
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  died with tears on her face because she realized too late that she'd live someone else's version
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  of a good life. You don't have to. You can start right now asking yourself the hard questions.
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  What am I doing because I think I should? What am I avoiding because it doesn't fit a template?
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  What would I try if I knew I couldn't fail? What would I try if I knew I probably would fail,
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  but it would be worth attempting anyways? Your life is not a dress rehearsal. This is the only shot
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  you get and the worst thing that can happen isn't that you'll fail at pursuing your authentic dreams.
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  The worst thing that can happen is that you'll succeed at pursuing someone else's. You'll build
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  the perfect replica of a life you never actually wanted. You'll reach the end having never asked
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  yourself what you truly desired and you'll die like grace. There's no need to sugarcoat it,
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  but tears on your face with spring about the life that you never had the courage to live. For most
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  of us, the dreams that we are living are not ours, but the dreams that you could choose to live are.
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  The question is, will you make that choice?