How To Get What You Want
In my experience, the more advanced version of "getting whatever i want" tends to be a matter of being in a good position to achieve the next goal or step on the road to the promised land.
Envisioning the promised land is easy. The hard part is getting there. And the journey changes you.
Let's say you want to become a billionaire but have no job. You're a student or about to start a lovely graveyard shift at McDonalds.
Instead of focusing on your want to become a billionaire, which might lead you to obsessively watch a lot of Scott Wu interviews on youtube (like me), the more advanced version points us to some nonintuitive questions and behaviors.
First of all, after you get home at 6am with no sleep and having stayed late to clean up puke from stupid drunk customers, you typically have 2-3 options:
- shower
- eat
- sleep
- watch TV until you fall asleep
- shoot yourself in the head cuz working the greasy potato fryer sucks ass
These are good and reasonable options.
But there's a secret option: get a different job, now. By that I mean, like, yesterday. Literally. Because you work the graveyard shift and what is time even really. Life could be a dream.
So the move is to apply to jobs right?
No. Wrong. Absolutely never no no no.
Do not apply to jobs. This only makes shooting yourself in the head go up the list to the top. You'd prefer that one goes down the list. Or disappears from the list.
So, the secret secret move is to call your buddy Rob from college. Yes, Broccoli Rob, that guy you secretly hated in your Fraternity but now he's rich and plays too much golf and looks like an orange peel who leads a 1st world country from a tanning vat.
But. He's rich. And he might just pick up.
So you call him and you say Rob I just worked my ass off but I wanna be a billionaire help. Oh shit, that was his voicemail. Crap crap crap. Bedtime. Sweet blissful 7am-3pm sleep cannot come soon enough. At 4pm when I wake back up and start thinking about that cute chick at my shit McDonald's job, maybe I'll forget that I hate Rob and he probably hates me.
In fact, you're right. He does hate you. He thinks you are a loser. He has always secretly thought this. So now we probably just continue working at McDonalds right?
No, wrong again, let me try waiting one week exactly then at 7am next Monday I call Rob again. Why? I hate him. And yes, his lips curdled when he saw my name on his missed calls list. Not even a text back! wtf
But now we try again. Maybe just one more time after that too. We leave a voicemail instead of panic-hanging-up. We say, "Rob, buddy, I'm really sorry to bother you but I'm in a tough spot. I'm poor and I want to be rich. Please help. I don't want your money. I just want to see if I can buy you a $5 coffee next week Saturday at 8am before your round of golf. Do you have 15 minutes to spare, I really would love to ask you a couple questions about how you got so successful and what I can do differently to not have to work at McDonalds 6mo from now like I do today. Anyways, I hope you are good Rob. Have a nice life bro."
Rob might respond differently to this. He might say "yes sure, whatever, fine". And then you might even – finally – become something like friends. Or at least the Karate Kid. An intern at his country club carrying bags and getting $100 tips. Rather than scrubbing the toilets at McDonalds.
There is a long road of many more such steps to becoming a billionaire. But at least you feel like you made progress today, this week, in the last month, etc.
And 10 years later when you make it big, you might look back and say, "huh I'm glad I didn't work at McDonalds for one second longer than I had to."
I wrote this because AI will force every man woman and child on this planet to confront the same questions as this hypothetical go-getter that works at McDonalds. Whether you are 75 years old and broke and dying of cancer or 9 months old and your first words "goo goo gah gah" are said to an iPad rather than a breast nipple.
Like global warming, AI is a meme. It is a large idea. It is also a myth. It does not exist. It never has and never will. Science fiction is a better name for AI than AI.
But rather than arguing that we should call "global warming" something like "atmosphere cancer" which probably would actually help... and I have said calling AI something like "Computer Future" is more accurate in 2026...
We might want to think about the key question that AI makes us ask ourselves. That key question is the same one that every human has had to confront, naked and afraid in the dark, since the year -127 AD.
The question is, "how do I get what I want?"
And the answer is, "let's focus on the subproblem and try to figure out first, how do I get where I need to be today, then tomorrow, so that I can get what I want more easily from that position."
Position yourself for success tomorrow.
That's always the very best you can do, today.