The hardest part is admitting what you really want

You can have anything you want. 

It’s a bold statement I’m happy to stand behind, knowing this: the hardest part isn't the getting, it's the courage to acknowledge what you actually want in the first place.

This sounds ridiculous. Saying something isn't hard ... and yet, when it's a million miles away from where you are today with an unclear path to delivery, the articulation makes you wonder if you are crazy. Fair enough. 

And yet, it’s the essential starting point most miss. 

But not my friend Jimbo. I was on a call with him this week when he shared his latest epiphany: “I've ended up with everything I dreamed of life, and looking back at 50, I can see that I always have.”

His latest ‘achievement’ – living a life where he works entirely on his own terms. 

He's not some corporate high-flyer or guru of any kind. Just a regular guy who grew up middle-class in England, moved to Australia in his twenties because he'd always dreamed of it as a kid, built a family, a great business, and over the years enough wealth to make bold decisions about how he wants to live.

My own realisation has been the same — I keep finding myself exactly where I wanted to be, over and over, yet the path here was not linear or planned in advance. Most often I can't even quite say how I got here. But I did.

Luck? Well, I think you make your own luck — to me this takes a particular type of courage: the audacity to acknowledge out loud what I want before I have any evidence I’ll actually get it.

Few people are this audacious. We want a roadmap — a clear path already walked by someone like us, proof that it's a realistic outcome, not just a fantasy.

To outline what you really want is rare. Most people secretly want a lot but don’t name it, even privately, in a futile attempt to protect themselves. 

What are they protecting themselves from? 

Disappointment. 

What do they get regardless? 

Disappointment.

Somewhere in their heart they know what they want. But they keep that ambition unspoken and conveniently undefined, as if the avoidance of it will protect them from knowing it’s there.

The inevitable disappointment happens insidiously. It’s not a sharp moment of loss, but a slow quiet accumulation of years spent living a life that they don’t love, showing up in a way that doesn’t feel quite like them, and a little dream still sitting inside them, one they never risked acknowledging.

Staying vague doesn't even protect you from what you're afraid of. It just delays it, and dilutes it, until it's harder to notice it's even happened to you at all.

I see this in leadership as much as in life. 

Few leaders have genuinely sat with the question of what kind of leader they actually want to be. What they want their legacy to look like. How they want to have impacted the people who worked for them, once all of this — the targets, the meetings, the endless busyness — is behind them.

Most are thinking about the next deadline. The most difficult target. Getting through the quarter with some grace.

Not because that's really all they want, but because they've never let themselves admit there might be more worth wanting from the experience of being a leader. 

Same fear, same avoidance.

The most courageous thing you can do is be bold about what you want, because you just might get it.

Without daring to name it, even just to yourself, chances are you won't.

So this Friday, I'll leave you with this: what would you have to admit, out loud, to risk actually getting it?