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Knowing how goals work can help us get more of what we want more of the time.

Many different words are used to capture the idea of keeping things in balance.

Noticing how things turn out can provide clues to the goals we have.

From time to time, I see articles about letting go of wants and why you should do that. Some even suggest that letting go of wanting is the way to get what you want!

No doubt some people find this advice useful. But if wants need attention, it might be more useful to know how they work. When fixing or improving something is required, knowing how it works is important.

If you don’t know how something works, you might not be able to change it when it needs changing. You might not even know if it's the thing that needs changing. When a light on the dashboard of your car comes on, that often means that something somewhere isn’t working. But it’s not the light itself that’s the problem. Putting some tape over the light so you can’t see it won’t fix things! It's the same with wants.

I’ve seen, for example, people suggest we should focus on habits rather than goals. In fact, James Clear’s #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits (2018), is a whole book about this.

Even in James’s words, though, a misunderstanding can be found. In the Introduction, James explains........

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