The Vague More

The fifth fear in the book is the one I promised last week, and it is the best disguised of the thirteen: "I know I want more. I just couldn't tell you exactly what."

It hides well because it photographs as virtue. Ambition without greed, drive without a spreadsheet, a healthy refusal to reduce a life to numbers. Ask the person who carries it what they are building towards and the answer arrives fluently: more revenue, more freedom, more time, a bit further on, the next level. Ask what any of that looks like on an actual Tuesday three years from now, a number, an address, a shape of the working week, and the fluency stops. I have watched that silence arrive in rooms full of people who could price a company in their sleep. They can tell you to two decimal places where the business sits today and cannot tell you within an order of magnitude where it is supposed to be going.

Here is what the vagueness is actually doing, because it is not an oversight. A specific picture can fail. Name the number and the date, and the gap between here and there becomes measurable, and measurable gaps produce verdicts. Keep it vague and you stay safe: more has no arrival date, so you can never be late; it has no shape, so you can never be short of it. The fear underneath the fog is the fear of being caught short against your own stated wish, and the fog handles it beautifully. The price is that a filter cannot run on fog. Attention, as this library has argued for a fortnight, is a filter, and the picture sets it. The operators I watched compound for two decades held pictures specific enough to make decisions against. The ones who held a direction instead of a destination noticed everything equally, which is to say nothing usefully, and their years added up sideways.

Wattles is unforgiving on this point, and chapter five of the book keeps his standard intact: you must form a clear and definite mental picture of what you want, because you cannot transmit an idea you do not have. His test is nautical and blunt: you must have it as clearly in mind as the sailor has the port toward which he is sailing the ship. It sounds so obvious that almost everyone skips it, and I would say you cannot delegate a blur to your own attention, and I have stopped minding which framing a reader prefers, because the practice is identical and so is the result.

I keep one page. It is written in the present tense, dated three years out, and it is specific to the point of mild embarrassment: where I live and work, what the working week holds and refuses, who the clients are, what the numbers are, what my health is doing, what the days feel like at their ordinary best. A private fuller version exists; the point is the discipline, not the publication. The test I hold the page to is the one I give everyone: a stranger reading it could tell, unaided, whether I arrived. Every line that fails the stranger test, every somewhat and every more, gets rewritten until it would stand up in a due diligence pack. That rewriting is the work. It usually takes three or four evenings, and people regularly report that the first evening is uncomfortable in a way no business plan ever was, because a business plan commits the company and this page commits you.

Two things happen once the page exists. The first is mechanical: decisions acquire a reference. An opportunity is no longer interesting or flattering; it is on the way to the page or off it, and the weekly noise loses most of its vote. The second is quieter. The worth question from the first fear, the permission question underneath all thirteen, gets a standing answer, because a person who has written the destination down in the present tense has already, in one important sense, granted themselves the right to head there. The fog was there to protect you from being measured, and the page replaces it with a claim. Wattles knew which one moves a life, and a century of his readers found out he was right.

So this week's practice is the page itself. Spend one evening drafting it badly and two more making it specific, and run the stranger test on every line. A direction is not a destination, and your attention has been waiting years to be given one.

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The book: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It →