In Others’ Words: Getting What You Want
This quote has languished in one of my quote files — yes, I have more than one — for months. I read it over and over. I liked it every time I read it. Truth is, I like a lot of Mark Twain quotes. He’s one of my go-to quote guys.
But when I read it yesterday, it “pinged” and I knew it was time to dust it off and publish it in a blog.
“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.”
Obviously, the illustrious Mr. Twain is exaggerating on two points. He can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life … and he can’t find anybody who knows what they want. Twain’s pretty proud of his own talents, and in the same turn, he’s not impressed with other people.
It’s not easy figuring out what you want out of life. As children, we’re asked all the time, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” — as if we’re supposed to know the answer to that question when we’re 4 or 5 or even 10 years old. TRUTH: I assured my kiddos when they graduated from high school that they didn’t have to know what they wanted to be when they grew up. They still had time to figure that out. And their friends who supposedly knew? They’d most likely change their minds — and their majors — at least once before they graduated from college.
Sometimes we think we know what we want out of life, only to discover we were wrong. Misguided. Mistaken. Or getting what we wanted left us empty or searching for more. Maybe some modern day Mark Twain came along and taught us how to get it — but we weren’t being true to ourselves, to our heart. We were conforming ourselves to someone else’s idea of who were supposed to be, what we were supposed to want out of life.
It’s okay to want things out of life. Don’t rush it. Some of us don’t realize what we really want — who we really are — until later in life. And that’s okay. There’s no expiration date on dreams coming true.
In Your Words: How do you figure out what you want out of life? Who’s helped you discover what you want out of life?
In Others’ Words: Getting What You Want https://ctt.ec/6V0bz+ #InOthersWords #quotes #MarkTwain @bethvogt
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“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life … ” https://ctt.ec/bT83a+ #MarkTwain #perspective #lifequote @bethvogt
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