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And the thing about a successful life, is a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully, are not our own. They are sucked in from other people. Chiefly, if you’re a man, your father. And if you’re a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one is quite listening hard enough. But I very much believe that that’s true.

And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want, and how we view ourselves. When we’re told that banking is a very respectable profession a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.

So what I want to argue for, is not that we should give up on our ideas of success. But we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas. And make sure that we own them, that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough, not getting what you want. But it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of a journey, that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

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