What do you really want in life?

I recently put this question to a group of real estate professionals. These people were high–income earners. Their response to my question was that it’s a very hard question to answer. 

I disagreed. You see, I know what I want in life, and if I can figure it out, so can you. 

I want to prosper. I want to create wealth. I want to help other people become wealthy. I want to help people who are disadvantaged go to another level, and to do that I need money.

I was once in Orange County in California, and I was asked by a friend to visit a young man named Steve in hospital. He was dying from AIDS. He was only 19 years old, but when I walked into his room and saw him for the first time, he looked like a 95–year–old man. 

He had lesions on his face and one side of it was black and blue. His eye on his dark side was shut tight and he was having difficulty breathing. The nurse helped him to sit up and we were introduced.

“How are you going, Steve?” I asked him. “Not good,” he replied in a weak husky voice

I asked, “Is the medication helping?”

He said, “No, medication’s not helping.”

This young man was dying in front of me. Then he looked at me and said, “A minister came in here yesterday and prayed for us all to get healed.”

Now, I believe things like that happen. I believe in miracles. So, I asked him, “Did anybody get healed?”

He looked at me and I could see his anger through the pain on his black and blue face. “No, man,” he said. “Nobody got healed.”

Then I asked the dumbest question in all of human history: “Steve, do you want to get healed?”

I’ll never forget what he said next as he turned to me and his open eye went red as a tear began to form.

“No, man,” he said, “I don’t want to be healed. I just want to be loved.”

Steve knew what he wanted, even though other people assumed he wanted something else. For the last six weeks of Steve’s life, my friend and members of his community surrounded Steve with love.

I used to run programs to help rehabilitate drug addicts and we had an 86 percent success rate using these techniques. If it can work for them, it can work for you! 

I’d ask them the question, “What does your world look like?” and they’d reply, “Well, I’m free of drugs and I’m happy and I’m getting on with my mum and dad and my mum’s hugging me…” The theme of our program was ‘turning nightmares into dreams’.

I remember one day a lady came into our facility and I asked her if I could help her. She said, “I’ve come to pick up my dream.”

It didn’t immediately occur to me what she meant. I said, “You’re here to pick up your dream?”.

“Yes,” she said. “My son, Robbie. He came in here nine months ago and he was a nightmare. Now he has graduated. He has become a dream. Where is he? Where’s my dream? Where’s my boy?” (Such beautiful words!)

The only thing we really had to do with some of those guys was to get them to think differently. 

“I’m planning for my future,” someone may say. “What does your future look like?” I would ask. “I don’t know,” they’ll say.

“Then how can you plan for it?”

My friend, if you’re planning to play a game of football, but you don’t know where the game is being played, then how can you possibly turn up to play? If you don’t know where the goalposts are, how can you score?

Pause for a moment and ask yourself these questions: 

What do you want?

Do you want to prosper?

Do you want to create wealth?

Do you want to build a great business? 

Do you want to have a loving family?

Do you want to give lots of money to people in need?

To help people work through these questions, I often use focus sheets. I ask people, “If your life was a blank canvas in front of you, what would you want to put on it?” It’s amazing how many people don’t know.

Now if I was to give you a blank canvas and I asked you to close your eyes and paint a picture in your mind of what you’d like your life to look like, what would you paint? What’s your family like? What are your kids like? What’s your career like? What’s your world like?

If your world was ideal, what would it look like? How would you think? How would you feel? How would you speak? How would you live?

If you don’t make up your mind, your unmade–up mind will make itself up for you. Don’t get to the end of your life and wonder, “How did I get here?” 

Everybody ends up somewhere, whether they mean to or not. Make sure you end up somewhere on purpose. When you know what you want, then you can start to make your plans.

What are you concerned about? What flicks your switch? What makes you angry? What makes you exuberant? What makes you feel a sense of drive? What makes you burn with fervour?

You can’t know exactly what you want without feeling passionate about the idea. There is no such thing as emotionless vision. Even the most lifeless, routine activities feel good when you have passion. 

Until next time

Yours in Prosperity

Pat Mesiti