Introducing From Here to There
Introduction
If you’re anything like me—and I don’t take for granted that you are—then on any given day you want many things. You want (in my case) to be a good brother, and a good son; you want to be a good partner and friend; you want to be a good coworker and neighbor; you want to be a good writer and teacher and scholar; and, on top of all of that, you want to be the best version of yourself possible—but come 11:53am you’re also extremely hungry. You’re famished and all other goals be damned.
Sure, I want to be a good coworker— but first, I need a sandwich. I can’t be a good person on an empty stomach! I’m just a man, after all.
And so, when asked 'What do you really want?' the answer can feel a bit conflicted, to say the least, because I want a hundred things at once. Maybe even more than that.
Still, it seems, we figure out how to answer this question. It’s worth noting, too, that we almost always know to answer this question in different ways at different times, and in different places. It wouldn’t be right, for example, when asked at a lunch counter “what do you want” to answer: world peace and a private jet. We just know that would be… well, wrong.
While this book is of course concerned with what someone might want and how they might go about trying to get that which they want, it was my work with students that first made me consider how people try to get what they want, why we’re so bad at it, and how I might be able to help people do that better.
Take the typical student I might be working with on any given day.
If you ask him (having worked the last 5 years in an all-boys school— a very fertile place for these ideas, considering boys (and unfortunately many men) seem uniquely inept at getting what they want or, at best, helplessly conflicted), a young man I may on any given day be working with in an academic support capacity, what he wants, he might tell you he wants better grades. When you ask him to clarify he may do one of two things: he’ll either shoot way too high and say he wants all As (too high considering he may be failing anywhere from 1-5 classes) or he’ll aim for the lowest possible bar you could imagine and say he either just wants to pass or that he’s actually willing to fail one or two classes (the maximum one could fail before being excused from this particular institution) and that he wants to just pass the others. It gets worse.
This same student—and there are many of them, this is not just one student poorly veiled as a hypothetical— may then in the following minutes, hours, days or weeks do a number of things that are in fact perfectly antithetical to the desires he just articulated. He may skip class, cheat on tests (and get caught), not do any number of homework assignments, forget to study for a consequential exam or choose to get in a verbal scrape with a teacher whose class they’re currently struggling in. And after all of this he may schlep himself back into my office, admit to all of those things, and then maintain that he wanted the same goal all along— to pass.
From countless instances like these, I began to wonder… why are we so bad at getting what we want and what on earth am I supposed to do about it? I’ve been tasked, after all, with helping students succeed!
At the same time, I’ve had a number of conversations with students that have opened my eyes to the complexity of this issue. I had one student, for example, who struggled to find success (failing) in upwards to three or four classes at a time and of course expressed a seemingly genuine desire to succeed in these classes. While we were exploring a number of the barriers that might keep him from finding success (in hopes of then addressing those barriers with strategies… a protocol we’ll explore in depth in later chapters) this student identified his phone as a potential barrier to his own success.
While I was impressed that this student had the self-awareness to know his phone may be getting in the way of his academic success, I was disappointed by how seemingly uninspired his proposed solutions or strategies were to this problem. They included turning the phone face down on his desk, putting the phone on silent, or putting the phone on the other side of the room. While there is of course a logic to each of these solutions, I had seen enough students attempt to solve the issue of their phones to know that none of these solutions on their own were going to be adequate. Worse still, I sensed this student knew that too.
It appeared this student was doing what all teachers fear (good teachers, anyway)— he was simply giving me what he thought I wanted. So I took a different tact. I asked, "How much money is a lot of money to you?" He said a hundred dollars. I said, “great— what if I were going to give you $100,000 if you were to pass all your classes this quarter— what would you do with your phone then?” He didn’t hesitate for even a second. He said… “I’d break it.”
This stunned me. The discrepancy between his proposed solutions when money was and was not on the table was… staggering. It dawned on me: he knows how to solve his problem. He knows what to do. Was it really the case, then, that he simply didn’t want to?
This situation, and a number of other situations like it, forced me to reconsider some presuppositions.
First, not all students want the same things (of course!) and second, not all students want the same things in the same ways. Duh. But here I saw it in real time.
He wanted to pass, but not bad enough to really address the problem of his cell phone. He didn’t want it enough to change his behavior. Yet, he had plenty of motivation: his parents were grounding him, he was at risk of not being able to play football for a few weeks, his beloved sport, and worse still it was a distinct possibility at that point that he wasn’t able to return the following year. Still, it wasn’t enough to get him to adequately address the issue of his cell-phone use.
While the realization that students have different motivations, of course, and that these motivations are all weighted differently for each student (and perhaps differently still at different moments) is sort of obvious, its implications were sort of fascinating to me. I realized I wasn’t just trying to get kids to pass. First, I had to make sure they wanted to pass! And, moreover, that they wanted to pass badly enough to want to change their approach to school.
Another story: a somewhat recalcitrant contrarian in my English class had made it clear a few days in a row that he wasn’t going to even feign interest in our latest unit. While there are approximately one million reasons why this may be the case for any given student at any given moment, I decided to sort of take it head on.
On the way out of class I stopped him. I said, “it’s clear you don’t care about this class. That doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that you may leave my class without me ever finding out what you do really care about. So tell me,” I said, “what do you want?” This seemingly stunned him. I repeated it. “I genuinely want to know: what do you want?” Again, nothing. So I reframed it: “imagine,” I said, “you could leave my class everyday to go pursue something you actually cared about, what would you do for those fifty minutes or so each day.” His answer: “I’d make money.” Great. How would you make money? I don’t know. You don’t know? No, I don’t know. Well, how do people make money? They get a job. Well, I suppose it depends on how much money you want to make… tell me, how much money do you want to make? I don’t know. You don’t know? Now, while I could easily have slipped into the whole SO YOU WANT TO MAKE MONEY BUT YOU’RE NOT SURE HOW YOU WANT TO MAKE MONEY OR HOW MUCH MONEY YOU WANT TO MAKE routine, I’ve found it goes a long way to approach these situations with genuine curiosity.
Do you want to be rich? How would you define rich? How do you think people get rich? What’s one thing you can do for 50 minutes a day in order to start working towards getting rich? A half hour later he thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to try to go to college for something that might help make him money and that getting a good grade in a class that’s kind of easy for him, like my English class, could help him get into a better school or a better program which in turn could help him make more money faster.
While it of course didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy hearing this student articulate his desire to do nothing but make money, I knew I was demonstrating genuine value to him as a person for the first time that year. My hope— which turned out to come true— was that that relationship would help me reach him on a deeper level.
Both of these situations and, again, many more like these had me for years wondering how to help students better direct themselves towards a goal and control themselves in pursuit of that goal. Both of these conversations could have easily been followed up by either student failing miserably to do one day what they said they’d do the day before. We’ve seen it far too many times. What’s more, this problem isn’t monopolized by children.
We all know adults who can’t seemingly get out of their own way. They want something, they seemingly possess all of the ability to achieve it— and yet, year after year, goals turn into dreams, and dreams fade into mirages. Worse, perhaps, many people conclude it never could have been in the first place. Worse still, they’ll blame external factors. They’ll blame some institution, some situation, some policy or politician, some inherently evil person or even luck itself. Worst of all, some will become bitter and resentful and we need only to read a Russian novel to know what’s darkly possible when a man feels slighted.
In short, this problem— of not being able to get what we want— affects all of us, children and adults. Moreover, I posit that the world would be a better place if we really tried to nail this, to do this well. To help people get what they want and to guide them in the process of learning how to do that better and better and for better and better, more humanistic reasons. After all, we shouldn’t underestimate the effect of being believed in.
It is the aim of this book, then, to explore this problem: why are we so bad at getting what we want? Furthermore, it is the aim of this book to propose a solution. That solution will come in the way of a framework, a new way of looking at this problem, as well as a number of exercises and activities to put that framework into action. This is a book about helping people—students, loved ones, or even yourself—become all they aspire to be.
