The Positive Power of Not Getting What You Want

“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”—Dalai Lama

Passengers and drivers

When I first graduated college, I did what any hungry, by-the-book recent grad does: I accepted the first “good” corporate job I could find. And by “good,” I mean that it looked good on the outside: I went to my 9-5 job at a financial firm where I wore a pencil skirt and pumps, and when I explained what the company did, nine times out of ten I’d be met with blank stares. To the average person, that somehow seemed to qualify as “important,” or if nothing else, at least “good.”

The only problem was, I hated it.

At first, I did that thing where you pretend it’s not so bad. My friends would ask, “How’s work?” I’d laugh nervously, and in a few octaves higher than my normal voice, say a little too over-enthusiastically, “It’s fine! Everything’s fine!” I’m pretty sure I was the only one I was fooling.

Looking back, it seems to me this was the first of the Five Stages of Post-Grad Grief: first denial (“It’s fine!”), then anger (“I’d rather slowly walk over hot coals than be here.”), bargaining (“If you just get through three years of this...”), depression (“Woe is me!”), and finally acceptance (“Work, eat, sleep, die. So this is adulting.”)

It was when I arrived at this last stage, acceptance, that it hit me: Why did I have to accept this—any of it? Why did discontent have to be the golden standard? Why did I have to settle for anything less than doing something enjoyable? I realized I wasn’t some helpless bystander of my life—I was the captain of it. I could either continue to be miserable, or I could do something about it.

I decided on the latter.

In fact, I decided not only to do something—I decided to do something big. In a matter of months, I had quit my corporate job and moved halfway across the world to a small Spanish island. Had I ever been there? No. Did I speak the language? Also no. Heck, I hadn’t even heard of the place. But...I was 24 years old, so yolo?

It was possibly the perfect age. I was old enough to know that I had the power to change the thing, and young enough to be fearless of actually doing it. I realized that no one was going to save me. No one was going to come down and magically make my job un-suck. I wasn’t going to suddenly wake up one day and have a miraculous change of heart.

In the end, I could choose to be the passenger or the driver of my life. But only I was the one who could pick myself up and change seats.

on Island Time

That’s how, at the age of 24, I found myself moving into an apartment in a small seaside town on an island in the Mediterranean—all by myself, green and unsure, but so damn happy.

Life quickly transformed before my eyes. Afternoons that once consisted of spreadsheets soon transformed into ones with seaside dips. Webinars were replaced with weekday getaways to Italy and Portugal and Switzerland. And pantsuits were replaced by swimsuits—or sometimes, nothing at all.

It was bliss.

But the point I want to make here isn’t about the bliss itself, but what led me to the bliss. The point is the change in perception that allowed it all to fall into place.

When I first graduated, I held the narrow-minded belief that having a “good” job was what was supposed to happen—even if I was miserable. Candidly, the fact that I was miserable made it feel all the more worthy. I was putting in “my time” and sticking with it—that had to count for some kind of karmic points, right? I was building resilience, perseverance, and “character” (or so I was told). I believed that what I wanted was somewhere hidden underneath all the discontent—if I just looked hard enough, tried hard enough, persevered long enough.

So often we see discontentment as a block in the road to be fought with, wrestled with, and ultimately overcome. But what if we saw discontentment as a door? What if we saw it as our deepest selves sending us a very clear signal? What if it’s not a message of not being enough, but rather a very clear message that we are enough—that we’re simply going in the wrong direction?

In other words, perhaps discontent is simply a way of helping us reroute. Perhaps it’s our mind, body, and energy, saying, Nope! That’s not it. Try again. Maybe discontent isn’t a roadblock but a nudge to change something for the better. People say, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” But maybe making lemonade isn’t merely a satisfactory second-best option but rather what we were supposed to be doing all along.

When it came to my first job, the situation wasn’t so linear as hitting a roadblock and bulldozing my way through. Life was sending me a very clear message: This is not for you. There a million other paths to take. But it takes reflection and self-awareness to see that there are, in fact, other paths to take.

I understand now that I wasn’t stuck. I was being shown a new path.

At the time, I saw it as brave to suffer, to persevere. Now that I’m older, I see greater bravery in pausing to reflect and asking “why.” Why is there a roadblock to begin with? What feels more true, more worthwhile, more authentic: to power through or to reroute? It takes courage to dig deep, remain vulnerable, and be honest with yourself about what you truly need.

finding our Rocks

As humans, we thrive on making plans and knowing what’s to come. Predictability is wired into our DNA as a survival mechanism. We create these fixed, rigid ideas of what we want to happen, or what we think “should” happen. We create lanes with bumpers for ourselves to delineate what is acceptable and what is not. To protect ourselves against the unexpected, to help us survive.

But while these survival mechanisms may work in some circumstances, they can also bookend our possibilities. I remember when I was a kid, my friends and I would pretend to be explorers, and we’d create an “O” with each hand and look through them like binoculars. Suddenly, everything in front was crystal clear, but everything in the periphery was gone, blocked from view. Being so dead set on what we want to happen, or what we think “should” happen, is like that. We get tunnel vision. We box ourselves in. We become so fixated, so narrowly focused on the path ahead, that we block out what else is around us. We fail to see the full scope of possibility.

Newton’s first law of motion says that every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. Take water in a stream, for example: it will continue downstream until it hits a rock, at which point it will divert in a new direction.

Humans are the same way. We will continue in the same direction until something or someone throws us off our path. The beauty of being human is that we get to choose how we react to that external force, that rock—whether it is something to be overcome or understood.

My first job out of college was my rock. I bumped into it, and my mind, my heart, every cell in my body told me: Nope! That’s not it. Find a new path.

A lot of life is like that—bumping into rocks. But in order to get unstuck, we have to be self-aware enough to see it for what it is. We have to take off our tunnel-vision goggles to see where else there is to go.

Because whatever it is we’re looking for, it’s just on the other side of our rock.