Wants Vs. Needs

How often do you let wants dictate your life?

Chances are if you are like most of us then you do it way more than you care to admit.

Again and again, we prioritize the wants over the needs.

Let me clarify here.

Wants:

A new MacBook Pro (because the one you have is just not up to speed)

A nap

The workday to be over an hour early

To go out to lunch to satisfy your craving for buffalo wings

Needs:

To save money for a house down payment

To stay awake and be present and engaged with your family

To stay an extra thirty minutes at work to finish the project you told your boss you’d finish by the end of the day

To work through lunch while eating a healthy, made-at-home meal

Now, be honest and ask yourself…Which of these lists make the most sense?

The needs list wins every time when we stop to think about the alternatives. But that’s the problem.

We usually don’t think about the alternative. We think about what we want.

I imagine that shiny, scratch-free MacBook Pro sitting on my desk and humming to life. I think about how incredibly fast it would be compared to my 2007 model that gets bogged down by the slightest task, like opening two tabs in my internet browser at once. I think about that beautiful Retina Display and how easy it is on the eyes. In my mind I justify it all with the fact that laptops are not really good for more than four years anyway and this one is at six years of use so it will die soon anyway…might as well replace it now.

So I go to the Apple Store and I give in because I just cannot help myself. I want it and I want it now. So away goes two thousand dollars. Just like that.

Without a second thought.

All I needed was another sixteen hundred dollars to be able to make a down payment on the house my wife and I have been looking at, but suddenly I am thirty-six hundred dollars away. And chances are my wife is going to be furious.

Good thing I didn’t actually do that…

You leave work an hour early instead of staying half an hour late to finish your big project. You figure your boss will understand that you couldn’t get it done by the end of the day so you will just finish it in the morning.

Where’s the integrity in either of those decisions? We are defined by what we do when no one is watching, so why not always choose the need instead of the want?

What if you instead of taking a nap like you wanted, you took your kids to the park because they needed to be with you? Don’t you think making you children feel loved and important is far more valuable than a nap?

Needs always outweigh wants. Take some time to re-focus today and be honest with yourself. Do you regularly put your wants first? Or are you really focusing on meeting needs?

 

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P.S. I won’t be able to respond to comments this week as I am getting married today and will then be away from the world for a while. I’ll try and catch up when I get back! Thanks for reading!