The Question We Usually Avoid: What Do I Want to Be?

6 hours ago

3 min read

We spend an enormous amount of our lives asking, “What do I want?”

It sounds like a profound question, but most of the time it isn't. We usually answer it with things: more money, more recognition, a better position, a successful business, a beautiful home, good health, a relationship, more freedom. Even when our ambitions are sophisticated, they are often still expressed through what we want to have, accomplish, build, or become known for. There is another question that sits underneath all of this, and we rarely ask it: What do I want to be?

In the Kabbalistic tradition, consciousness is multi-dimensional. There are different levels of the soul, different ways of experiencing ourselves and our relationship to the world. Part of the work is bringing those levels into greater harmony—to move beyond the purely physical experience of life and become conscious of the deeper forces through which we create, relate, and contribute.

I think some of the most interesting people in history have, consciously or not, operated from this place.

Take Dave Chappelle. His genius isn't simply that he wanted to be a successful comedian. At a certain point, the question becomes much larger: What can language, wit, discomfort, and comedy reveal about race, gender and being human? Comedy becomes more than entertainment. It becomes a way of holding a mirror to society, exposing contradictions, challenging assumptions, and creating a place where difficult truths can be experienced through humor.

Or Steve Jobs. His ambition wasn't simply to sell computers. His obsession was with what technology could do to change our relationship to creativity, design, communication, and positive vision. The computer became a tool for human expression. Of course, the story of Apple also contains enormous commercial ambition, competition, ego, and complexity. But what made the work culturally significant was the larger idea that technology could become an extension of human imagination.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to build a billion-dollar company, win an election, become famous, or dominate a market. But when the achievement itself becomes the vision, something gets smaller. The numbers become the goal. Power becomes the purpose. The market valuation becomes the measure of meaning. And this is where I think we are entering an especially important moment with artificial intelligence.

We are witnessing people with extraordinary intellectual and technological power creating systems that may fundamentally alter how humans experience life, or solve our greatest problems. But beneath all the conversation about capability, investment, competition, and market share is a much more profound question: What do we actually want this technology to become in the human narrative? Goodness? stop climate change? Create wellness for everyone?

The same distinction exists in politics, science, art, entrepreneurship, and leadership. There is a difference between seeking plain power and having a vision for what power can serve. There is a difference between becoming influential and asking what that influence is actually for.

We can spend an entire lifetime accumulating resources and still never have articulated the experience, meaning, or contribution we wanted our life to embody—or simply felt some joy through our life experience.

This is where one of my greatest passions and much of my work around purpose begins.

Purpose isn't simply about finding the right career or setting better goals. It is about moving from doing to being, to enjoying—from asking what you want to accomplish to becoming conscious of the kind of (human) experience you want to create and the value you want to bring into the world.

Perhaps the deeper measure of a life is not what we managed to receive or get from the world, but what we chose to breathe life into.

If you were to look back on your life twenty years from now, ask yourself: “What do I want my life to be?”

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