Are Your Desires Really Yours? How to Recognize and Reclaim What You Truly Want with Luke Burgis

In this episode, Luke Burgis explores the question, “Are your desires really yours?” and how to recognize and reclaim what you truly want. He discusses how to tell the difference between “thin desires (fleeting, imitated wants) and “thick desires” (the deeper longings that bring lasting fulfillment), and why discerning between the two can change the direction of your life. Luke also shares practices for uncovering your true hierarchy of values, creating alignment between what you want and who you want to be. Explore how to pivot from “I don’t want to” to “I do want to, I just dono’t feel like it” and how to feed the desires that lead to meaning instead of comparison or regret.

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of the concept of mimetic desire and its origins in the work of René Girard.
• Discussion on how desires are often imitative and influenced by others rather than being inherently personal.
• The importance of discerning between beneficial and harmful desires in one’s life.
• The parable of the two wolves as a metaphor for the internal conflict between positive and negative desires.
• Differentiation between “thin desires” (fleeting and influenced by external factors) and “thick desires” (deeply rooted in personal values and identity).
• The role of self-reflection and narrative in understanding one’s desires and motivations.
• The significance of establishing a hierarchy of values to guide decision-making and desire cultivation.
• The impact of social interactions on shaping desires and the responsibility individuals have in influencing others.
• The concept of “stalking your greatest desire” as a means to align personal desires with one’s life mission.
• The importance of having a trusted partner for exploring and communicating desires, emphasizing the value of attentive listening.

Luke Burgis is an entrepreneur who has founded and led multiple companies.  He is currently Director of Programs at The Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America.  He is also the founder and Director of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator that he started to build, train, and invest in people and companies that contribute to a healthy human ecology. 

Connect with Luke Burgis: Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Luke Burgis, check out these other episodes:

How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag

Finding Zen in the Ordinary with Christopher Keevil

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Episode Transcript:

Luke Burgis 00:00:00  I think there’s a typical attitude that people want what they want, and whatever they want is fine. Well, that’s true, but not everything we want, not everything we desire, is going to be good for us.

Chris Forbes 00:00:17  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good Wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:02  I used to think my desires were mine, that they arose from some authentic core of who I am. Turns out I mostly learned them from other people. Luke Burgess wrote the book wanting about mimetic desire. The idea that we want what other people want because they want it. We’re wired to look around and copy what seems valuable, which means many of us are pursuing things we never consciously chose to pursue. We just saw someone else going after and thought, well, that must be worth wanting. As a former heroin addict, this concept fascinates me because I know what it’s like when desire takes over completely, when the strength of wanting something feels like proof that it’s the right thing to want and it’s not. We talk about fulfillment stories, thick versus thin desires, and the pivot that I often use daily. I do want to do this. I just don’t feel like it right now. That distinction has got me in motion countless times. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Luke. Welcome to the show.

Luke Burgis 00:02:08  Hey, Eric, thanks for having me on.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:09  I am really excited to talk with you about your book, which is called Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire and Everyday Life.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  I think the concept of what we desire and why is so fascinating and so important. So we’ll get into that in just a second. But let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable there is a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson. He says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Luke Burgis 00:03:03  I’ve thought about this parable for many years, and I’ve come to understand it on three different levels. But all of those different levels have to do with desire.

Luke Burgis 00:03:14  So for me, the parable is about which desires we should starve and which desires we should feed. So the first layer of that for me, I would call it just a basic relational level, how I’m in relationship with other people. Sometimes I have the desire to right my perceived wrongs to own somebody in some kind of an argument. I for an I kind of desires. And those are unhealthy. And those are the kinds of desires that I want to starve. And I want to feed empathy and compassion and understanding, the desire to listen, the desire to, understand somebody else’s perspective. That might be different from mine. And of course, you know, on that basic level, there’s fleeting, ephemeral desires. The desire, you know, to indulge myself with, you know, alcohol or little fleeting instant gratifications that I know are not going to lead to long term fulfillment for me. So those are the kind I want to starve. The second layer I would call a spiritual layer, maybe even a theological layer.

Luke Burgis 00:04:23  You know, and I’m a Christian, so I would understand certain desires as being sinful, which is really a source of alienation, and then other desires being the ones that lead to fulfillment or love. And those are the kind of desires that lead to to union and to healthy relationships. And the third layer is a mission oriented layer. So I believe I have a mission in life. I think that everybody does. And certain desires arise in me that are not aligned with my mission, their desires that, if pursued, will take me off track. And very relevant example of this is some desires that arose in me just during the pandemic, during the course of the pandemic, especially last year, early 2020. I hadn’t even finished writing my book yet, and I was dealing with, you know, trying to keep my elderly parents safe. I’m trying to plan a wedding. which, you know, has been moved. And, you know, we’re married now, but that was a whole story in itself and focused on writing this book and communicating these ideas.

Luke Burgis 00:05:27  And everywhere I looked, different desires were being modeled to me. Now, you know, the desire to move to upstate New York, the desire to start trading in the markets hardcore, you know, from crypto to getting in and the on the bull market last year. And I have a background in finance and investing. So it was incredibly tempting for me to want to get in on that. And you hear about, you know, the success that other people are having. Even earlier this year with some of the meme stocks, and there was an incredible desire to allocate a lot of my time and effort into doing that. I’m also a very competitive person, so I was incredibly attracted to the idea of getting into that, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But for me, that was a desire that I had to starve. Why? Because in this particular season of my life, I had a mission very clear. you know, taking care of my family. finishing writing a book as well as I possibly could.

Luke Burgis 00:06:21  I had to pour into that particular task and evaluating my desires based on that sort of vocation or mission throughout the various seasons of my life and throughout my life. Taken as a whole is really important to me, and I noticed that that wasn’t aligned. Maybe someday it will be. But I had to starve. That I had to feed and cultivate the desire to want to do other things more, you know, to to want to be with my family and, you know, my my now wife to want it so into my, you know, creative side and to right and to get better at that. So fundamentally that parable for me is is about desires. You know, my own desires are like two wolves fighting inside of me. And I know that some of my desires, you know, if I feed them, are going to make me miserable or are certainly not going to lead to fulfillment, and then others are. And the key for me is just discerning the difference between the two. And that’s not always easy.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:17  There is so much in what you just said there that I could unpack, and I think we’ll probably spend the rest of this conversation sort of doing that. But I think you summarize so much of what I loved in your book in that answer, and instead of responding to it directly, I want to back up a second and make sure that we talk about this idea of mimetic desire, because I think this is a really important idea. Obviously you do too, because you wrote an entire book about it. But what do we mean by mimetic desire? What does that mean?

Luke Burgis 00:07:52  The word mimetic comes from a Greek word that simply means to imitate. So mimetic desire is imitative desire. It means that humans tend to imitate the desires of other people, that we want what other people want because they want it. So not coincidentally, we happen to want the same thing that somebody else wants. When somebody else wants it, that thing becomes more desirable to us. That’s the key to understanding mimetic desire. So we’re social creatures, and we take our cues about what’s valuable, about what’s desirable from other people.

Luke Burgis 00:08:29  And the source of this term, mimetic desire, is a French thinker named René Girard, who taught at Stanford for many years and some other universities, and he noticed this key feature of human nature. Now, scientists have known, classical philosophers like Aristotle and Plato knew that imitation played a central role in human behavior. Aristotle said that humans are the most imitative creatures in the world. It’s one of the things that separates us from from animals. We have incredibly complex and powerful faculties of imitation. But imitation was always understood on a external level. So the imitation of art, of language, facial expressions, of styles of dress. And Girard realized that our powers of imitation go under the surface of all of the external things, and that we have this ability to read the intentions of other people, or to read their desires, and to desire what other people want. And this is part of what it means to be human. It’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just the way that we are.

Luke Burgis 00:09:40  We’re incredibly mimetic when it comes to more abstract things like, you know, the kinds of lifestyles we pursue or careers or hobbies or things that we’re interested in. We may not lean on mimetic desire as much with fulfilling our basic needs. Like, If I’m thirsty, I want something to drink. I don’t necessarily need anybody to model the desire for water to me, but once we move into the world of what I would call desires that are things that are less need based and more desire based. Humans are types of creatures that require models for their desire. So according to Gerard, we require models for for almost everything in this so-called universe of desire. And that’s incredibly important to understand for me, because we typically think of desire as arising just independently and autonomously, and we never think very seriously about how or why we’ve come to want something in the first place. And we typically don’t acknowledge the other people or the other social forces that have caused us, you know, to desire something. And that could be like, you know, to be a political revolutionary, or it could mean to pursue a career path.

Luke Burgis 00:10:57  If we don’t understand the forces that are acting on us and specifically on our desires, we’ll just sort of be at the mercy of them. And worse yet, we can even be manipulated, whether that’s by, you know, companies or people that want us to want something that is in their best interest but might not necessarily be in ours.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:18  Right. What I think is so interesting about that is that, as you said, we tend to think that our desires, they feel like they’re part of us. They feel so intrinsic to who we are. An example I often use, I’m talking about in a slightly different context, but I’m talking about it in the sense of sort of the Buddhist idea of everything is conditioned, right? Is I’ll say. You might say something like. And you could be a man or woman doing this, right. This is not a one sex or the other thing. But you might say I prefer people who look like x, I prefer blondes. Let’s just take that as an example, right? That may feel so unquestionable.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:01  It just arises and it’s very obvious and it’s very strong. But the reality is there’s something that occurred in my life that would have caused that to be the way it is. Maybe I saw a Marilyn Monroe movie at a particularly impressionable age. Maybe my mother was blonde or brunette, or as you said, I learned this desire from somewhere else. And so I just think this is a really interesting idea that everything that we desire, again, beyond the basic needs is somehow, again, to use the Buddhist term, conditioned in that it Arose as a result of conditions. And the conditions that you’re saying are imitative. It was modeled for us, right?

Luke Burgis 00:12:46  And if we look hard enough and we become aware of this feature of human desire, we can usually always find a hidden model for something that we desire. And to your point, Eric. You know, when I look back in my life, I have been attracted to different partners for different reasons, and they’ve changed as I go throughout my life.

Luke Burgis 00:13:12  So, I mean, it would seem to indicate that there’s not merely some kind of a physiological reason for that. Like, why would it change through different years and not only in a physical level? Has my attraction changed, my preferences have changed, but also, you know, in the kind of person that I’m attracted to, you know, like there was a point where, you know, some incredibly A professional, you know, kind of investment banker career, you know. Woman was was kind of like something that I was, you know, really attracted to and not so much anymore. Why is that so even that, you know, was probably conditioned by what the other people in my life desired or were attracted to. And I can’t really be explained through financial means or through through purely biological answers. It’s a wide and sweeping topic that applies to so many different areas of life. My goal really is, is just to get us thinking as individuals and also as a society, how this is affecting our behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:16  You say that desire is memetic. We learn it. In essence, someone else wants it. So we then think it’s something that’s worth wanting. The question that I don’t really understand is what causes certain things, certain models, to be the thing that we click in on, right? Because there’s a bunch of different desires, right? If I just think about high school as an example, there were some people who were really into sports could have had that model, right? And other people were really into academics and I could have seen that modeled. You know, so what is it that causes us to choose a particular model? Do you have any insight into that?

Luke Burgis 00:15:00  Well, the thinker that inspired my book certainly did. And, you know, his answer was is essentially that it’s always because of a sense of lack that we feel we have, and we perceive that the model might have whatever it is we think that we lack. So he says that all desire is a desire for being. It’s a desire to be somebody else, or a desire to have maybe more freedom and control over our desires.

Luke Burgis 00:15:35  So oftentimes an incredibly confident person that seems as if they know exactly what they want or what is wanted at all times is an incredibly attractive and powerful model to most people, because most of us secretly are not really sure what to want. So I look back to my high school days. I grew up on the west side of Michigan, in a town called Grand Rapids, and early days of the internet. You know, I was hanging out in AOL chat rooms and stuff like that, and I got it in my head that the kids my age that lived in New York City had something that I didn’t have, whatever that was. Okay, maybe a level of coolness or street smarts or something like that. And I quickly adopted them as models. And part of that came from a sense of, you know, lack, you know, or insecurity that I had. And of course, this all happened without me knowing it. And you know, I had my heart set and going to college in New York City, and I did, and I got there.

Luke Burgis 00:16:39  And it turns out that all the kids my age are exactly just like me. They’re all they all have their own, you know, kind of they’re all looking into their own models. This kind of dynamic is extremely powerful. And adolescence, you know, everybody’s like trying to figure out who they are and kind of like latching on to the first thing or group or person that might give them, you know, a sense of identity. It’s like, if I could just if I could just be a little bit more like them than, you know, X, Y, and Z would happen, you know? C.S. Lewis calls this the desire to always be in the inner ring, and he sort of describes it as a process of there’s always a ring that’s more inner that we’re never in, and we always go through life thinking it might not even be true, that there’s an inner ring, an inner circle that we’re not part of. And we decide that certain people are and, you know, that fuels our desire.

Luke Burgis 00:17:35  And he says, you know, obviously that onion can be peeled to infinity, basically. And, you know, that I think is a large part of the reason why we adopt different models and very importantly, why people’s models change as they go through life.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:07  So why is this important for us to try and understand that our desires are driven by imitation? Why is this important.

Luke Burgis 00:18:19  If we don’t see the things that are driving our desires? At best it can make us pretty miserable because There’s always another model modeling a different desire for us, and we can just kind of float through life like a dilettante, you know, or feeling like we have whiplash and pursuing new desires, perhaps getting new things, buying new things, entering into new relationships, changing careers, and, you know, never understanding why we’re so unsatisfied because we’re just, you know, we just simply have new models. Typically, though, it leads to conflict between people and resentment and, and, you know, jealousy or envy, you know, without us really understanding why that happens.

Luke Burgis 00:19:05  I mean, just to give you an example, most authors that have published a book have all kinds of desires modeled to them to want certain things. So, you know, you want to be a New York Times bestseller. You want X, Y, and Z award. You want to be recognized in certain ways. And I think few people ask themselves why that thing is wanted. I mean, sure, you might sell more books, but like, the desire ends up taking over everything and you know, you forget why you set out on a certain path in the first place. It was it really so that you could, you know, get a michelin star for your restaurant or, you know, get on a make a certain list for your book. And these desires are mathematically given to us. And part of the process, I think, of maturing and understanding the way that this works is being able to see that and calling it, you know, for what it is and being able to exercise a little more freedom in what we desire.

Luke Burgis 00:20:03  So it’s not to say like we can just do away with this altogether because we’re social creatures, but what we can do is have the self-possession and the agency and the freedom to make these things more or less our own, rather than just sort of unconsciously accepting these things as the things that I’m supposed to want. I grew up in a home with two doctors. I’m supposed to want to be a doctor or whatever. And, you know, this is a really important thing. It’s maybe I do adopt the desire to be recognized in a certain way for my book, but if I do, at least I’m doing it with intentionality. At least I’m realizing what I’m doing rather than just following. and we have a lot of followers in our culture. We have a lot, you know, people, I think, uncritically accept both thinking and ideas and desires. And then five, ten, 15 years later, it might be that they’re in a career that they’re miserable in or a relationship that they’re miserable in, and they don’t realize how they got to be in that place in the first place.

Luke Burgis 00:21:07  And chances are, if we if we dig deep enough, it may be that there was a desire or the desire for some object that they, you know, they had pursued without really ever having made it their own and chosen to pursue that thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:23  You say that being anti mimetic is having the ability, the freedom to counteract destructive forces of desire. So given that all this is modeled, how do we start to find what our real desire is or our deeper desire is? What are some of the ways we can start to unravel this unspoken, understood forces that are driving us? Because desire is what drives us.

Luke Burgis 00:21:55  It is what drives us. It’s what moves us. I think of desire like an energy of movement that draws us towards certain people or certain things, and we’re always moving towards something or away from something. We’re never standing still. You know, it’s a bit old saying if you’re not going forwards, you’re going backwards. And that’s desire. So when I say being anti mimetic, I certainly don’t mean just be a contrarian and just sort of do the opposite of what everybody else is doing or what everybody else wants.

Luke Burgis 00:22:25  That, in fact, is mimetic behavior, because you’re just modeling your behavior on what the other people want. there are positive and negative mimetic desires and positive mimetic desire. The kind that I would want to feed to go back to the fable would be if I see some noble, good, virtuous trait in somebody that I admire and I want to be infected with the desire, I want to feed the desire to be, to be more like that person. And that’s good, as long as I don’t end up seeing that person as a rival or a threat to me, as long as they remain, that relationship remains healthy. There are other cases where I want to be anti mimetic when I see, you know, sort of radical political polarization and rhetoric. I want to have the freedom, I want to have the ability to not engage the way that other people are engaging. It’s possible, you know, when somebody hates me, when somebody, you know, wrongs me. The memetic response is to do the same thing back, right? It’s treat people the way that they treat me.

Luke Burgis 00:23:27  I think there’s a there’s a higher way. And I think that that’s to step back and respond in freedom and medically and to treat them the way that I would have liked to have been treated. I mean, this is old, ancient wisdom, but, you know, this is just a new way to kind of think about this. One of the ways, I think to uncover and reveal the difference between what I would call thin desires and what I would call thick desires, is to kind of you have to step back and kind of look, look at life with a little more perspective. A thin desire is highly mimetic. You know, here today, gone tomorrow. It’s like my desire to sort of like go headfirst into crypto that summer. Definitely a mimetic desire. There was no kind of solid foundation that that rested on. you know, if the market had crashed, if all none of my friends cared about it the next week, then it would have been gone for me too, you know.

Luke Burgis 00:24:19  It was completely dependent on what everybody else was doing. You know, there was nothing intrinsic about it. There was nothing that I had made my own. It was just following the FOMO, you know, the fear of being left out. All my friends are getting rich. Right. And, you know, I noticed that, you know, I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to have learned. You know, when I’m feeling that and I pursue something and how it can leave me empty because I’ve made a lot of money, and, you know, it just didn’t do for me what I thought it was going to do. And I sacrificed a lot to make that money. It doesn’t bring me any fulfillment today. And that’s one of the signs that it was kind of a fleeting, sort of mimetic desires that it was. There was nothing enduring about the satisfaction that it brought me. What I would call a thick desire is the kind of desire that’s cultivated, the kind of desire that you feed over a very long period of time.

Luke Burgis 00:25:09  So you could begin to put your finger on what some of those thicker desires are. You know, by looking back at your life and what you desired as a child, what you desired as as an adolescent or at an earlier time in your life. Good and bad, but specifically trying to identify the kinds of wants that that we had that did bring us a tremendous sense of satisfaction and joy and sense of self, the kinds of experiences where we were in flow, where we really just felt like our like most like ourselves. And, you know, for me, I had that experience in sports a little bit. I had that experience in certain subjects in school and certain relationships that I was in, certain projects that I undertook after college. And I think it’s possible to begin to see a pattern in those kinds of desires, and you begin to see the kinds of desires that you want to feed. And with perspective, you know, I look back on my life and I see which ones ended up leaving me empty.

Luke Burgis 00:26:09  And when I see those arising in me again today, I know that those are the kinds of desires that I want to starve. So in a way, doing that, let’s call it a history of our desires, sort of a narrative, psychological and narrative psychology gives us a hermeneutic, an interpretive key to understand a little bit better what’s going on inside of us, to be able to kind of spot it before it metastasize and grows into this overwhelming desire, because there are some that we need to just pivot from and realize, you know what? I do want this, but not everything I want is necessarily going to make me happy. And this is just a fundamental realization. I think there’s a typical attitude that people want what they want, and whatever they want is fine. What’s true? But not everything we want, not everything we desire, is going to be good for us. And, you know, we have to have the self-reflection to, to to recognize that and to not convince ourselves in the brightness, you know, of our own desires.

Luke Burgis 00:27:08  We justify everything that we want. You know, we’re really good at justifying what we want and pursuing it.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:35  Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you’ve been listening to. What’s one thing that really landed, and what’s one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection. That’s exactly why I started good wolf reminders. Short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, head to one you feed, net, SMS and sign up. It’s free. No spam and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that’s one you feel. Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. Strength of desire does not equate to the value of that desire. As a former heroin addict, I obviously took that to a far extreme.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:35  But I mean, boy, did I want it. You know, I wanted it to the extent that I was willing to burn everything in my life down. Obviously, it’s easy to see how destructive that was, but so many things in life, I think strength of desire is really confused for the right thing to want, or that it’s sort of, as we said earlier, that it’s who I am, you know, it’s intrinsic to me. I feel it so strongly it must be who I am. And that’s just not the case. A question for you is how does this idea of thick desire correlate to the idea of having values. Are they aligned or are they similar, or are they the same? You know, because one of the things that say something like acceptance and commitment therapy talks about, which is a type of therapy I think is a is a brilliant type is you find out what you value and then you commit your life to it, you know. So this sounds similar. Are those saying the same thing?

Luke Burgis 00:29:35  There’s a paradox here.

Luke Burgis 00:29:36  And the fundamental question is do we desire what we value or do we value what we desire? And yes, I think that it’s an iterative process because I think it’s very important to step back and establish values and not just values, but a hierarchy of values. And I talk about that in the book. And some of those values should be objective if you believe in objective values, right. Things like beauty and truth that are not merely determined through sort of cultural circumstances. You know, step back because that’s solid ground. But if I would have done that when I was 18, the values that I would have chosen would have been different than the values that I that I have today. There’s an iterative process where if we just value what we desire, then we get ourselves into big trouble. That’s like the default mode, right? Like we totally we desire things, therefore we value them. If we’re able to step back a little bit and establish, like concrete values that are not merely the product of our mimetic desire, of the culture of what other people are showing us as valuable.

Luke Burgis 00:30:53  Right. Like a lot of my values are simply not aligned with what I see in the world, and it’s taken me a long time to arrive at those values. And that is a way of being a little bit more anti mimetic. Like, I have these values and my understanding of them might change over the next decade. They will for sure, but at least I have like some solid ground. I have a true north and my desires begin to form around my values, right? I’ve decided that irrespective of how I feel right now, I know that one of my values is to love and serve my wife and my family and take care of my mother and father. Okay, who are you who are older right now? And that’s that’s a responsibility and a duty that I feel like I have. I might not wake up every morning and feel like I want to do that, but I know that that’s a desire that I want to feed. So this is an example of my values that I feel pretty confident in.

Luke Burgis 00:31:47  And my desires then are formed around those values. And if there’s a misalignment there that, you know, we all have our days. But, you know, if I find myself with a real misalignment, then I need to figure out what the heck is going on.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:00  Yeah. And I think the corollary to that is to sometimes Remember the desire. So as you talk about taking care of parents. Right. I’m in that stage of life, too. My partner and I both have mothers who are not well, father who’s not well. And so a lot of our time goes into that. And, you know, when I find myself and listeners of the show have heard me talk about this before, but when I find myself in the mode of, I have to do this, I kind of get well. I don’t like it when I stop and I go, oh, wait a second, I have a value of doing this, and thus I want to do it because it’s important to me.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:40  Then it reoriented me towards the whole experience, you know. So sort of going back and reflecting on the fact that I do want to do this, it is a want. It is a desire of mine. And I love what you said about sort of this hierarchy of values or desires, because I think that’s another piece that is so challenging to work through is what do I want? When the number of things I can actually have or devote time to is very limited, right?

Luke Burgis 00:33:11  Well, you know, the hierarchy is important because our values sometimes come into conflict with one another. Right. And if there’s no hierarchy, then how do you choose? And the most memetic value at the time typically wins out, you know. So like to give you an example.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:25  The thing that provokes the strongest desire. Is that what you mean by that?

Luke Burgis 00:33:28  Exactly. Exactly. The thing that provokes the strongest desire. And that could be determined by like, just what I saw in the news that morning. You know, and that desire could change tomorrow.

Luke Burgis 00:33:40  So we have to have a bit more grounding than that. I mean, just to give you an example. You know, this this really happened to me. You know, my my father has Alzheimer’s. And, you know, neither one of my parents are doing that well. And, you know, something came up. One of my parents was in the hospital. I’m an only child. And one of my good, good friends at a bachelor party in Vegas. You know, So both values. Right? Take care of my parents. Like love. My friends want to be there for my friends. But it was pretty clear which one went out for me in the hierarchy of values. Right? It wasn’t that hard of a decision to make, but if I hadn’t established that in my mind, that could have really been a difficult situation, right? How do I make it to Michigan and the out to Vegas and back to Michigan in 48 hours? And, you know, I decided to go to Michigan and take care of my parents.

Luke Burgis 00:34:29  But things like that happen all the time. They happen in companies where people have different ideas of which of the company values are more important than others, and everybody could have a different idea of which ones are more important. And then this is where problems happen.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:43  Yep, yep. I feel you on the parents thing. My father has Alzheimer’s and my partner’s mother has Alzheimer’s. And so we are deep in that world. I feel you.

Luke Burgis 00:34:53  It’s a brutal disease, you know, and there are times when he’s speaking about desires. You know, there are times with somebody who has Alzheimer’s. You know, it’s heartbreaking. And, you know, it’s I don’t necessarily always want to hang out with my dad for a couple of hours, you know, because he asked me the same question, you know, 120 times. Right. And, you know, it can get exasperating and exhausting, you know. And, you know, it’s been a few years now, and I’ve learned to want to spend time with him more than I did in the beginning.

Luke Burgis 00:35:26  In a certain sense, I’ve learned new ways of loving him, new ways of spending time. It’s been a process. You know, all I want to say is like, it’s tough, thank God. It sounds like we both have help.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:38  I have this little pivot I do with myself and with coaching clients. And for some people, it really makes a difference. And other people it’s just semantics. But it really is like what you were just saying, you know, about going to be with your dad and we’ll find ourselves saying, like, I don’t want to. I don’t want to, you know. And for me, I just sort of will do a quick connection back to what matters. And I’ll go. Oh, I do want to. I just don’t feel like it. And for me, that pivot all of a sudden sort of separates for me my values, what I want most from my mood. Once I make that separation, it’s easier for me. I go, oh, I don’t feel like it in two hours.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:17  I might feel like it in two hours. After that, I might not feel like it. Like that’s constantly changing my moods. You know? I’m hungry, so I feel like it. I recognize the changing ness that I don’t want to build my life on my mood. I’ve done that before. I know it’s a disaster. So that pivot from, you know, sort of I don’t want to to I do want to, but I don’t feel like it is often a powerful one.

Luke Burgis 00:36:39  Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:40  So sort of along this idea of hierarchy of wants or hierarchy of values, you have a section in the book where you talk about stalking your greatest desire. When you find it, all of your lesser desires be transformed. So they serve the greatest one. Say a little bit more about that.

Luke Burgis 00:36:57  So this is directly related to the hierarchy of values. And you know I believe I have a purpose and that everybody has a has a mission, something unique to them. And because of the circumstances that, you know, you’re born into and, and your family and the unique situation that each one of us is in, in life, we have a perspective that nobody else has, which gives us the ability to, to to do something, you know, truly unique or communicate something.

Luke Burgis 00:37:26  And I think that, you know, part one of the purpose of life, you know, part of it is trying to figure out what that unique thing is. And one of the ways to build a hierarchy of values and desires is to understand your mission, or your purpose or your vocation. So knowing what it is, and this goes back to that layer that I spoke about in the very beginning with the fable. If I know what that is, I’m able to evaluate the various desires that I have, and see whether they take me closer or further away from whatever that mission is. That thing that I feel that I’m supposed to do, that I’m called to do, and without sort of an ultimate purpose. That is a value, first of all, you know, and it’s it’s the most important one, in my opinion. You know, what is it that I’m meant to be doing here? What am I put here to do? And all of the other desires kind of are seen in the light of that one and, and, and sort of serve that one in some way.

Luke Burgis 00:38:27  So thinking about, you know, just a basic way to just evaluate them, you know, like is this desire that I have to, you know, travel around the world over the next year because I’m so antsy. I’ve been locked up in my house. Is that desire in any way? Like furthering sort of what I feel to be like my mission and my vocation in life. And it makes it a lot easier to evaluate in that, in that light. Right. So I think that when you find your mission or your purpose? I call that in the book your Single greatest Desire. All of the other desires begin to take shape around it, and hopefully sort of fit into an ecology of desire in some respect.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:07  One of the ways that you talk about getting clearer on these thicker desires, you sort of reference this a little bit earlier, but I’m going to put a slightly finer point on it, which is what you call a fulfillment story. Say a little bit more about what a fulfillment story is and what are the key pieces to have in one.

Luke Burgis 00:39:26  A fulfillment story is simply you recounting a story, preferably to somebody else, because there’s the element of this that’s dialogical and interpersonal, and there’s no substitute for communicating to another human being and having that person deeply listen to you and then be in dialogue with you. It’s more powerful if you do this exercise than I’m describing with another person, and then they can do it back to you. So it’s you communicating a story about a time in your life when you feel like you took some action and you accomplished something, you did it well. You did it with excellence. And most importantly, it brought you a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that lasted okay, that that endured. And this that final point is the most important point. So it gave you some enduring satisfaction and joy to the point where if you think about whatever that thing is that you did today, even if it was 20 years ago, you rekindle that sense of satisfaction and joy just telling the story. Many of us have forgotten some of those times, and part of the beauty of the exercise is drumming them up, right? Like these forgotten memories, these forgotten experiences, and sharing them with another person.

Luke Burgis 00:41:00  You know, until I was 30 years old, nobody had ever asked me to share one of these kind of stories. So I’d worked in a few different companies. Nobody had ever asked me, hey, Luke, tell me about a time in your life when you undertook some action and it was incredibly fulfilling to you. It seems to be something that’s very important for people to know. I mean, because it expresses something that’s like essential to understanding who I am. You can understand that. I’m from Grand Rapids, Michigan, that my favorite pasta is what my favorite sports teams are. All of those things do not communicate to you anything essential about and unique to me. You know, a lot of people are, you know, fans of the same football team and like the same pasta. But the fulfillment story communicates something personal and something essential that none of those attributes can ever communicate. And I think that’s incredibly important for us to understand about ourselves in terms of understanding our essence, our thick desires, and who we are.

Luke Burgis 00:41:58  And it’s important for other people to understand that about us, too. You know, how beautiful would it be to work in a company where people knew this kind of thing about the people that they work with? So there’s a level of intimacy involved in that, which I’ve found incredibly powerful. And these fulfillment stories what what I call fulfillment stories, they don’t have to be a story about you doing anything particularly impressive to anybody else but you. That’s part of why this is such a personal exercise. You don’t have to have, you know, knocked some work presentation out of the park. It could just be, you know, I learned how to make a fantastic homemade, you know, pizza. The key is understanding what it is about these fulfillment stories. And if you find five, six, seven of these kinds of stories from from our lives, a pattern tends to emerge and you begin to see, well. So what is it specifically about these kinds of things that are so satisfying to me? Three different people could have the same experience from the outside looking in, want to state championship in their high school sport or something like that.

Luke Burgis 00:43:06  But those three people could find the satisfaction from that accomplishment could come from three totally separate things. Right. So, you know, for one of them, it could be their individual performance. The other one, it could be the camaraderie that was formed in the locker room. And, you know, the third one could have found so much satisfaction in the little sort of nudge that, you know, they gave a teammate at a critical moment in the game. So three different things, you know, so it’s not the win that was important. It’s why. And understanding the why is, for me key to opening up a world of understanding ourselves and the people that we are with better. And it’s a clue to what. Some of those thick desires might be.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:52  I found two parts of that section really interesting. One was, as you said, doing this in dialogue with somebody else. How important that is, because most of the time when we take on activities of this sort, we’re off doing it on our own, writing in a journal.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:11  Filling out a form. You know, there’s a lot of values and desire exercises, but they tend to be done by ourselves. So that was the first thing I thought was really interesting about this idea of a fulfillment story is, as you said, how important the dialogue element is. The second thing I found interesting was you said once you started telling them, you started remembering a whole bunch of other ones. And my initial thought when I was reading that was like, I think I can think of like one, which I’m sure is not true. And so I found it really interesting to think that if I embarked on this process, more would start to come up. You said as you did it. It was just like boom, boom. They just kept showing up to you. You know, once you sort of understood the pattern.

Luke Burgis 00:44:52  Sure. And it’s true. And, you know, that’s why the challenge I kind of issue to readers is try because the sort of the nature of the memory is that, you know, one thing can kind of lead to another.

Luke Burgis 00:45:03  And it’s also why the partner is really important, why being able to communicate this to somebody who’s truly listening is really important. And that’s a key. This is just as much an exercise in listening as it is in telling the stories. Because if you find somebody who’s a good partner to be having this conversation with, they will hear and see things in the stories that you might not even realize, you know, they might notice that you continue to use certain kinds of verbs as you’re telling the story. You know, the verb might be, I organized or I took control of this thing and it’s like, well, that’s interesting. It seems like the kinds of action that you’re describing that seems to be so satisfying to you is bringing order to chaos. You know, a good listener will just pick up on little things like that, you know, and then ask the right questions to draw out more. I find is human beings. Certain people can close us up and other people can open us up. You know, when you’re sort of in front of somebody that you don’t trust or that doesn’t make you feel like you want to speak to them, you just shut down and you don’t reveal a lot about yourself.

Luke Burgis 00:46:14  On the flip side, there are some people that you know, because they they seem to be, you know, approaching us with in love and compassion and understanding makes us want to communicate even more. And the right interlocutor in this exercise is, I think, critical for bringing out the second and third and fourth and fifth stories is we have that effect on one another in the right context. So choose your conversation partner carefully.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:42  Having this sort of conversation with another person points to another thing you say late in the book, which is, try and live as if you have a responsibility for what other people want. Say more about that.

Luke Burgis 00:46:54  This speaks to the social nature of our desires and what it means to be human. I think we live in a very individualistic age where, you know, if somebody has chosen a path that, you know, we never would have chosen or, you know, has voted for a candidate that we wouldn’t vote for or has ideas or is hostile to something that’s important to us.

Luke Burgis 00:47:20  We often don’t realize the very role that we ourselves had to play in them arriving at that point, and especially people that are close to us in our lives. Right. I don’t I don’t mean to say that we’re responsible for what everybody else wants. I mean to say that we’re social. We are in some sense a brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper, and we have a responsibility to other people rather than just seeing them as different or other or threats as if they are walking their path on their own, because nobody is. And, you know, the idea is derivative from C.S. Lewis, who wrote about this in an essay of his called The Weight of Glory. And he just says, you know, think of everybody that you encounter as, you know, as having this responsibility. There’s no neutral encounter with another human being. There’s no such thing as a neutral encounter. Even the small ones, like, you know, the people that are in the self-checkout section of the grocery store that I go to practically every day, they’ve been there since the start of the pandemic.

Luke Burgis 00:48:20  One particular guy who’s always there, you know, seeing myself as having a responsibility to, you know, affect him in a positive way. You try to make him laugh when I go there because I know, you know, a lot of people are not in the best mood when they’re trying to get through the line at the self-checkout place, right? Trying to just. It’s kind of a habit of mind. A habit of spirit of, you know, just realizing that I could make in that very encounter, make him sort of completely affect his mood, for sure. But even his desire to serve other people in a way. So, I mean, this is incredibly important when it comes to our families and our friends. And I just think thinking of ourselves as not wholly cut off or independent from the way that other people are, or think and thinking of ourselves as having some degree of responsibility for that, based on the way that we relate to them, is been important for me in my life, in sort of stepping back and before I label anybody anything thinking about, well, what role do I have to play? How can I positively enter into this relationship so that both of us come away a little bit better than we started.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:32  As we wrap up? Take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join Good Wolf Reminders text list. It’s a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at once. You feed us. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. I love that idea of no neutral interaction with another person. That’s a really beautiful idea.

Luke Burgis 00:50:10  Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:10  Well, Luke, you and I are at the end of our time here. We’re going to continue in the post-show conversation where we are going to talk about the difference between calculating thought and meditative thought. And by meditative, in this case, we don’t mean what we normally think of as meditating. But I found this a really great part of the book calculating thought, meditative thought. We’ll talk about that in the post-show conversation. Listeners, you can get access to that as well as ad free episodes.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:38  Other post-show conversations. A special episode I do every week called Teaching Song and a poem, and the joy of supporting something that matters to you by going to one you. Net. Luke, thanks again so much for coming on. I have really enjoyed this conversation and I really enjoyed the book.

Luke Burgis 00:50:55  Oh, thanks so much for having me on Eric. I feel the same. Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:58  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.