I Had a Checklist and My Wife Wasn't On It
I Had a Checklist and My Wife Wasn't On It
A letter came in this week. We read the whole thing on the podcast and I want to put it here too, because if you've felt any version of this you'll recognize it in about four words.
Dear Jana and Jason,
I don't know what I want. No one can help me find what I want. I can tell you what I want today, and that changes tomorrow, and then that changes again the next day. I just don't know anything about myself anymore. I'm so lost. I'm so confused, and time is running out so fast. I have little to show for myself at age 34.
Mother of two in Arizona.
I felt that one in my chest. Not sympathetically. Recognizably.
Let's take the last part apart first, because it's the part doing the damage.
Time is not running out
That sentence shows up in almost every letter like this one, and it's the thing that gets on your back and tries to choke you out before you've started.
Nobody knows how much time they have. Not her, not me, not you. There's no schedule you're behind on, because nobody issued a schedule. There's a story about a schedule, and the story is loud, and it is not information.
Thirty-four is not late for anything. It isn't early either. It's just Tuesday.
So set that down, because you can't think clearly with something sitting on your chest.
The question is broken
Here's the real problem, and it isn't her.
She's asking what do I want? And that question, asked that way, will fail you every single time.
Jana's version of why: she walks into the laundry room and stands there. Why did I come in here. She walks into the pantry. Same thing. Standing in a small room asking herself what she wants and getting nothing back. If the question doesn't work for socks, it's not going to work for your whole life.
What happens instead is you reach for something you can picture. A number. A title. A thing. Logic goes looking for a hard outcome, because hard outcomes are the only thing logic can get its hands on. So you pick one today. Tomorrow you can picture a different one. By Thursday you've changed your mind twice and decided the problem is that something's wrong with you.
Nothing's wrong with you. You're running the wrong query.
My checkboxes
I had a list.
Not metaphorically. An actual set of criteria for who I was looking for, and a matching set of things I wasn't going to put up with. And here's what that list actually did for me: it trained me to go find the disqualifying thing in every person I met. I got good at it. I could spot the thing on the "no" list faster than I could notice anything on the "yes" list.
I'd also decided I didn't want to get married. Period. That one wasn't a preference, it was a conclusion.
And I had never pictured myself married to somebody with a disability. I hadn't ruled it out on purpose. It had simply never entered the frame, which is its own kind of ruling out.
Jana was not on that list. She was not findable from that list. The list would have walked me right past her.
The restaurant, and Ruth
Jana and I talked on the phone for three months before we ever met in person. I knew she used a wheelchair. It was not news, it was not a reveal, it was a thing I knew about her the way I knew where she grew up.
Then we met at a restaurant for the first time.
Before I got there, she asked our waitress, Ruth, to take her wheelchair and hide it somewhere.
Three months of conversation. A man who already knew. And she still asked a stranger to make it disappear before I walked in.
That's the part I think about. Because while I was out here running a checklist against the world, she was running the opposite program and it was no better: editing herself down to what she thought would be acceptable. I was asking what do I want. She was asking what will they want. Neither of us was asking anything useful. We were both working from a list, and neither list had the other person on it.
The Rolex I didn't buy
Here's mine, the cleanest example I've got.
For years I wanted a Rolex. It was on my vision board. And I was specific about it. A particular watch, pictured, posted where I'd see it.
Ask me why and I would have said something about craftsmanship. That wasn't it. In my head, men who wore those watches were important. Valuable. Worth taking seriously. I had decided that the watch was evidence of a thing, and I wanted the evidence, because I did not believe I had the thing.
I got all the way to the edge of buying it. Ready. And before I did, I made myself sit with the why. Not the surface why. The actual one.
What I found when I got there was that I already had it. The importance, the value, the knowing. All of it was already there and had been for a while. I'd been about to spend a great deal of money on proof of something that was no longer in question.
So I didn't buy it.
That was the day I stopped proving.
Mostly. It still sneaks back in. Every time I level up, the proving instinct shows up again looking for something to buy. New room, new stage, new level of what I'm trying to be. It's quieter now and I recognize it faster. It has not gone away and I don't expect it to.
The point isn't that symbols are bad. The point is the symbol was never the thing I wanted. It was the receipt I thought I needed for a feeling I could have just had.
Ask it as a feeling
So here's the swap, and it's the whole episode in one line.
Stop asking what do I want.
Ask what do I want to feel.
Free. Important. Useful. Calm. Proud. Trusted. Awake.
Those don't flip on you every day, because they're not inventory. The Rolex changes. "I want to feel like what I do matters" has been the same answer my entire adult life.
And once you have the feeling named, you can test everything against it, including the thing you were about to buy.
This is also, and this isn't a coincidence, why our first formula question is worded the way it is. It isn't what do I want to get. It's what do I want to experience? That word is in there on purpose. It aims you at the feeling before your logical mind can hand you a shopping list.
Living Lucky® Practice
The Four Clues Audit
You've been leaving yourself evidence for years. This is where you read it back. Don't think hard. Write what actually comes up, including the answers that seem irrelevant.
01 What do I blurt out?
The "I should…" sentences that leave your mouth before you can stop them. List every one you can remember.
02 What do I look up when nobody's watching?
The late-night rabbit holes. The topics you keep going back to with no practical reason.
03 Where does time disappear?
The last time you looked up and hours were gone. What were you doing? When did it last happen?
04 Who am I jealous of, and of what exactly?
Name the person, then name the specific thing they were doing when you felt it. The second part is the useful part.
05 What do all four have in common?
Read the four boxes back. Something repeats. Name it, then name the feeling it's pointing at.
06 One small step, this week.
Toward the thing in box five. Small enough that failing at it would be funny rather than devastating.
Four clues you've already left yourself
The feeling gives you direction. These give you the terrain. You don't have to work any of this out from scratch, because you've been leaving yourself evidence for years.
One: what comes out of your mouth before you can stop it.
Jana will be mid-conversation and hear herself say I should write a book about that. Or that would make a good art piece,back when she wasn't making art. Things that arrive without permission, before the internal editor gets there.
Those are flickers. You can fan one into a flame or you can let the noise put it out, and the most common way we put it out is by saying not right now and quietly moving it to a calendar that doesn't exist.
Two: what you look up when nobody's watching.
Your search history at eleven at night is the most honest document in your life. Nobody's performing for an audience in there. Whatever you keep falling down a hole about is real curiosity, unedited, repeatedly confirmed.
Jana brought this up on the recording and I made a joke about forgetting to clear my browser history. For the record, my rabbit holes are embarrassing in a much more boring direction than that.
Three: where time disappears.
A couple of years back we flew out to Kansas for Jana's dad's 80th birthday. A lot of her family came in, and the Republic County Fair was running the same week, so the whole thing turned into a week of family and fairgrounds.
I was on my laptop for most of it.
I'm in the photos. I was at the party. I'd surface for conversations and pictures and then go straight back down. I barely slept all week. Jana would ask me something and get an answer so unrelated she started asking me to repeat the question back to her.
I was finishing The Quiet Space, and taking notes for the one after it. Two weeks later a box showed up at the house and Jana asked what it was. I told her it was the new book. She had not known I'd finished it.
Now, I'm not holding that up as a model husband story. It's a flow state, and flow states have a cost, and the cost that week was paid by people who were glad to see me. But the signal is real: find the thing you lose a week to without noticing, and you've found something.
Four: who you're jealous of.
This is the one most people throw away, because we've all been taught envy is a defect.
It isn't. It's a direct reading.
In 2020 Jana went to a big leadership conference. The keynote had the room. Stories, laughing, Jana in tears one minute and laughing the next, completely won over. And alongside all that admiration, a sharp little flash of I should be doing that.
Her first reaction was to feel bad about having the reaction.
Then she looked at it properly. She wasn't envious of the woman. She was envious of the stage. That's an entirely different piece of information, and it's actionable.
She went backstage, found the empty stage, stood on it, and recorded a video of herself saying this is my stage.
So when envy hits you, run it like data. Don't judge it, locate it. What exactly is the person doing? Not who they are. What are they doing in the moment you felt it? That's the pointer. Then take one small step toward that specific thing this week.
Play, because you're going to fall
One more input, and it's the one adults quit first.
Play.
When you declare a purpose, you tend to believe every step has to land right. Sure footing, correct choices, no mess. Then you trip, and the trip means you were wrong about everything.
Playgrounds don't work that way. On a playground you fall down, you skin a knee, you get up. Nobody concludes anything from it. You go play some more.
That's what play gives you that goal-setting can't: advance forgiveness for failing. And it's where you stumble into the stuff you're unusually good at, because you weren't guarding your performance while you did it.
Jana's play has always been movement and making. Music, art, dance, color, sewing, choreography. Mine is puzzling things together and study, which is why I can lose a week to a manuscript at a county fair.
Pay attention to what kind of play you drift back to across years. It's been telling you something the whole time.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: For one week, write down every spontaneous I should... that leaves your mouth. Don't evaluate them. Collect them. Look at the list on day seven and see what repeats.
Reflection question: When was the last time I lost track of time, and what was I doing?
Journal prompt: What am I trying to feel through the thing I say I want?
Action: Name one person you've felt a flash of envy toward. Write down the specific thing they were doing, not who they are. Take one step toward that exact thing this week. Small is the point.
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't asking "What do I want?" produce clarity?
Because the logical mind answers it with external, visible outcomes like objects, titles and milestones, rather than the emotional state underneath them. Those outcomes shift day to day, so the answer shifts day to day, and the shifting feels like a personal failing when it's really a flaw in the question.
What's the better question?
"What do I want to feel?" Feelings like freedom, importance, peace or usefulness stay stable over years, and once you've named one you can evaluate any opportunity against it instead of against someone else's highlight reel.
What are the four clues to your authentic direction?
Unscripted blurts: what slips out before you can censor it. Private search histories: what you research when nobody's watching. Flow states: where you lose track of time. Targeted jealousy: envy toward someone doing a specific thing you secretly want to do.
How can jealousy be a useful signal?
Envy points at a desire you haven't admitted to. Instead of suppressing it, isolate the specific action or setting that triggered it (public speaking, writing, building something) and treat it as a direction rather than a character flaw.
Is it too late to start over at 34, or 44, or 64?
There is no universal timeline. "Time is running out" is a belief, not a measurement, and it mostly functions to stop you before you begin. Nobody knows how much time they have, which is an argument for starting now, not for giving up.
Why does play help you find your direction?
Play removes the penalty for failing. Without that penalty you'll try things you'd never risk under the banner of purpose, and the things you naturally return to across years are reliable evidence about what you're built for.
To the mother of two in Arizona: you're not lost. You're using a compass that was never built for this.
Put down what do I want. Pick up what do I want to feel. Then go read your own evidence. The blurts, the searches, the week that vanished, the person you can't help being a little jealous of. It's all already there. You collected it without meaning to.
And the fun part was never the arrival anyway. Ask anybody about a road trip. Half the stories are from the car.
We Create Our Luck®.
Hear the full conversation on the Living Lucky® Podcast with Jason and Jana Shelfer, Season 11, Episode 43: "I Don't Know What I Want: How to Find Clarity When You're Lost." Listen to the audio, watch the video broadcast, and tell us one clue your subconscious has been leaving for you lately.
