On Writing The Second Draft of The Book

Have I mentioned that I wrote a book about figuring out what you want? Maybe once or twice, right?

Forgive me, but it was my main focus from early 2021 through May 2023. The majority of the last draft was written after I was laid off from a crypto company when Bitcoin crashed, and I spent several months with my parents in South Carolina. What I could not do during the pandemic because of my anxiety I did instead during that unemployed down time.

The manuscript is about fifty thousand words long and is missing a final conclusion chapter because I didn’t know the right way to wrap it all up, because I did not know exactly what my main point was. The question I kept asking was what did all my research mean?

The instructions were all there; the exercises made sense. The writing is rough but is clear and concise and has great bones, if I do say so myself. But I could not, no matter what I tried, figure out exactly what I was trying to say. 

I’ve had a bit of free time at work lately and have been reading longform articles to fill the time. One of my favorites is Arthur C. Brooks’s column “How to Build a Life” in The Atlantic. Brooks is a professor at Harvard and has done extensive research on happiness. I spent a lot of time with his work when I was researching my book, because what are we after in figuring out what we want if not, at least in part, more happiness?

Brooks’s piece on October 24 this year focused on Plato and Aristotle and their differing philosophies on the state of the self (bear with me, it’s not as intense as it sounds). Plato believed, at our core, we are born with a soul-like piece that defines our existence and never changes. Aristotle, on the other hand, argued that we are instead in a constant state of becoming based on our actions and that we can only be defined by what we are in the moment.

Basically, Plato thought that a person does kind things because they are born with a core of kindness or mean things because they are born with a core of meanness. Meanwhile, Aristotle believed that a person cannot be kind until they have done kind things, and every act defines a person only in the moment of action, so a person must continually act on kindness to stay a kind person.

I realized in the way Brooks described the schools of thought that the point I had been driving at in my own writing was a combination of both of these ideas. As I was reading the article the vagueness of my own core philosophy formed into a solid, describable thesis. What I already had, simply put, is that what you want is who you are, not unlike Plato's conclusion. I don’t believe in a purely static state, however, so Aristotle’s argument gave me the piece I needed to complete the idea.

See, I do believe there is a center of each person that is unalterable. It is the thing that makes an artist create art, drives philosophers to argue the meaning of existence, gives people their sense of purpose. With that said, I fully believe in free will. An artist is not an artist if they do not create any art, even if the desire is within them. The person you have created at the end of your life is based on your choices and actions, but a person can be guided by that center into the actions that will create the life they want to live. 

We can also consciously choose not to be guided by this center. Sociopaths and various other flavors of bad people do exist and should not be encouraged to follow their dreams if they are harmful to others. Thus, a person can set a new path for themselves despite the core self.

To sum up: what you want is who you are, but who you are is mostly determined by the choices you make and the actions you take. You can also change the things you want, even if your inherent center has a different idea for your life, thereby changing who you are with the choices you make to pursue those new desires.

It’s a little circular, I know, but I think it finally sums up what I’ve been trying to get at. Now I have a slightly new framework to write the second draft and clarify the ideas to myself as well as (hopefully) to readers. It’s made me so excited to start working on it again after feeling stuck for more than a year.

My plan for this blog in 2025 is to write the second draft one post at a time. I'll work through the ideas out in the open where everyone can read them and tweak them as I go. I don't doubt that it will be a terrifying undertaking, but it will keep me accountable to the project if others can see when I am clearly not putting effort into the work. And hopefully my work will go out into the world and help someone else work through their own wants and needs and make progress toward the life they actually want to live.

That's my New Year's wish, anyway.