Thinking for yourself MoC • On motivation and getting started MoC

What you think you need might not be what you really need

In the wake of Don't try - objectives do rarely work, not only goals can lead to deception: so do needs.

In the end you don't know what you don't know. So you may think that you need something in order to get where you want to be, but that need is likely a deceptive stepping stone.
If you'd get what you think you need you might not be more advanced.

You don't even need to need something in order to achieve something else. It could just be something you think you need to have, or a situation that needs to be exactly like you imagine, except that if you reach that state it wouldn't make any difference in your life.

For instance, right now I think I need to:

But do I really need to do all those things? I tend to think that if I had these things sorted, I'd be closer to achieving my goal. But how can I know? Maybe the things I actually need to do are different than what I think I need. Maybe it is something I can't even think of because I'm not aware of its existence, let alone the implications of its existence.

Take my rather successful freelancing career. At no point when I started I thought that taking a traditional, full-time office job would lead to it (I actually didn't even had the freelance lifestyle as an objective).

You think of a hard to reach stepping stone toward your goal, without even knowing if this stepping stone actually leads to your goal

We almost always think about the obvious things we need to do or have. The things that are, apparently directly related to our end goal. Oddly, these things that seem obvious also seem to be elusive. They seem to be not too far but just out of reach.
Is it a trick we play on ourselves? What's certain is that it can easily influence us into a self-defeating, helpless mindset You think you need to achieve something, but you can't quite do that thing. Thus you feel hapless.