Chapter 5: Decide What You Want and Why You Want It

Your life is a constant stream of choices about what you want

Each moment in life presents you with an opportunity to consider and move closer toward what you want. For something ever-present from the moment you reach sufficient maturity to make decisions, you might be surprised just how complicated it is. The choice present in each moment includes how much you choose to think about what you want, the time frame you are willing to consider, the options you are aware of, and what each choice is worth. Indeed, the choice is more complicated still, because every choice is connected in time to every other choice. Every choice of how you think, feel, and act now will change what options are available to you in the future.

Long-term happiness requires that you reach and maintain a state where you know what options exist, you have an accurate idea of their cost and benefit, and you choose the one that will provide you with the greatest long-term value. Across time, the joy you obtain will increase with:

1. The accuracy of the set of options you consider,
2. The consistency with which you choose what is best, and
3. The length of the time scales you optimize over.

The problem is that none of these qualities will increase automatically. First, you do not know what options exist because the available options aren’t always clear, and change in complex ways over time and across circumstances. Second, you do not have an accurate idea of their cost and benefit because they, too, change according to circumstances, and can easily be incorrectly estimated. Third, you would not presently choose what has the greatest long-term value, because it requires an immense amount of intentional learning, experimentation, and humility to learn what is valuable.

Awareness: how you know what options you have and what each is worth

Improvement consists of choosing actions that yield greater longterm value than what you would have done otherwise. In order to improve, you either need to improve the accuracy of the value you appraise in the options you already knew about, see new options beyond those you already knew about, or become better at choosing what will provide you with the greatest long-term value. Your awareness is the key to providing the information necessary to improve.

Awareness is the composite of our understanding of what was, is, and will be. It includes our beliefs about the potential of ourselves and all other things and people, the actions that would bring about that potential, and what those outcomes would be worth.

Awareness is the key to addressing the first two barriers to long-term happiness listed above, and is at least a prerequisite requirement to overcome the third. An understanding of the cost and benefit of each option reduces the problem of achieving long-term happiness to a willingness to choose what has the greatest value—a property rarely described by the word faith , but which is its actual definition.¹

Knowing what options exist requires you to know who you presently are as well as who you could be

The set of options and the cost and benefit of each are not fixed. They differ according to circumstance—circumstances that vary across people, but also for the same person depending on the choices they have made up to and in the present. The options available to you, their cost and benefit to you, and the accuracy of your perception of that cost and benefit all depend on who you are and who you will become.

Accurately understanding the cost and benefit of available options requires you to know who you presently are and who you could be. What you can do right now is a function of who you have been until now. If you do not know who you are, you cannot know what your present options are. Those with particular capacity or resources can do what those without them cannot. What you can do in the future will be determined by who you are until then. If you do not know who you could be, you cannot know what your future options are.

A sizable driver for who you are and who you will be comes from what you desire, and by how much you desire it, as these will strongly influence your decisions over time. What you want and how much you want it will actually change quite a bit as you become a better person. Your character determines what you are willing to do and why. The better you are, the more accurately you will appraise value, the more valuable the valuable things will seem, and therefore, the more you will be willing to do to obtain them. If you don’t know what you desire, and by how much, you can’t know what would give you the greatest long-term joy, and even if you were to choose that path, you would likely quit when obstacles arise.

Many outcomes in life—particularly those most valuable—tend to require long, dedicated paths. One can only follow so many of these in life, both because doing so expends limited time and resources, and because choices in life often limit the subsequent choices available in life. Desires change over time. If you are not aware of your potential and are not in the course that yields the kind of person you want to be, shifts in your desires will occur at unpredictable times and unpredictable intensities, making any long-term initiatives unlikely to succeed, and leaving less time remaining to try anything else.

To the extent you do not know both who you are and who you could be, you are less likely to undertake and endure the narrow path required to obtain your present and future potential.

Seeing what is better requires you to be as good as you know how to be

A better understanding of how awareness expands and contracts is required in order to more fully understand the damage dishonesty causes. It is impossible to retain the same degree of awareness over time, as awareness is always growing or diminishing. Awareness increases when you attend and best respond to the information available to you, and decreases when you ignore, reject, or otherwise inadequately respond to the information available to you.

Dishonesty is one of several forms of awareness-shrinking response to information. You can’t lie without decreasing your ability to calculate what is best. To seek anything but what has the most value is dishonest because it creates a disconnect between what you believe to be the most valuable and what you most desire.

Dishonesty reduces love for the truth. Only an honest person can fully derive the value of truth, which requires living it completely. As long as you remain misaligned from the truth, you will lack the motivation to undertake the costs to obtain what is of greater value:

Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit. (Jeremiah 7:8)

We expand our awareness through perceiving more of what we sense and living up to all we perceive. As sentient beings, we are constantly exposed to information from within and without that registers across the many senses. However, what you sense is not the same as what you perceive. You can think, feel, see, hear, taste, or do something without noticing or acknowledging it. To perceive something requires you to first pay attention to it. While sensations can come to you involuntarily, your attention requires your choice. As you choose to actively attend to your senses to a greater degree than you have before, you will find yourself with much more information than you previously had.

“Living up to what you perceive” is a shorthand phrase that refers to sincerely integrating all new information available into the information you already have. Living up to your perception is about changing your thoughts, feelings, and actions as needed to align yourself with the best outcomes according to your new understanding of reality.

The strength of your preference for greater value will determine how much of it you obtain. Turning away from value harms your ability to detect value. Your ability to estimate value is dependent on what you look for. To the extent that you do not prefer what is most valuable, you will not see what is most valuable. To the extent that you do not seek what is best, you will not see what is best. Your ability to perceive the value of what is valuable will degrade according to the frequency and intensity of the lies you live.

Your efforts to obtain value will determine how much of it you obtain. What is better always comes through what you presently perceive as best. All dishonesty deviates you from the best path possible given your present understanding. To deviate from the best path presently possible is to deviate from all better paths, all of which are accessible only through the gate of the best you presently know. You can’t act against your idea of what is best without doing more damage than alignment with it would bring. When you lie, whatever you encounter will be less than the best reality has to offer for those who intentionally aim for the ideal. Dishonesty always carries a higher cost than the truth.

Though most have not heard about it, the need to attend to sensed reality is something that secular thinkers have spoken about. Less often spoken of is the need to live up to what you perceive in order to perceive more. For now, the religious domain seems to be the principle source of information about the need to live up to what you already sense in order to sense more.

What do you want?

One problem preventing many from fault correction with the same intensity as what they desire is that few people have explicitly identified what it is they want, let alone how much they want it. As you can imagine, this disconnect creates many problems, including the failure to see your faults as barriers to what you want. Without identifying what you want, you are unlikely to take the necessary steps to get it, including the character flaws that will absolutely prevent you from doing so. Without identifying how much you want it, you are unlikely to displace the many things that prevent you from having it, including those impeding character flaws.

In the wisdom literature, we are counseled to be intentional and honest about what we pursue in life:

Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. (Proverbs 4:26)

Explicitly consider what you want. What options do you have to choose from? What is the cost and benefit of each? Which option yields the greatest long-term benefit?

Consciously choose what you want. Rationally, your selection should be the option that yields the greatest long-term benefit, but if you truly desire something less, recognize and own the consequences of your suboptimal choice.

Understand what you really want

Most people spend a lifetime learning to hide from their innermost desires. Because we can’t feel guilty about what we do not know, some fall prey to the temptation to intentionally blind themselves to what they do not want to see.

In order to want better things, you first need to achieve accurate clarity on what you want now and why you want it. In scriptural parlance, the hidden nature of what you want and why you want it is described variously as excess fat or skin around your heart—the seat of your desire. For example:

69 The proud have forged a lie against me: but I will keep thy precepts with my whole heart.
70 Their heart is as fat as grease; but I delight in thy law. (Psalm 119)

The process of coming to see what you want and why you want it is described as circumcising the heart:

Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked. (Deuteronomy 10:16)

And the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live. (Deuteronomy 30:6)

Can you confidently assert that you understand the depth of your motives?

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)

The Lord can help you understand what you really believe and want, and why:

Man’s goings are of the Lord; how can a man then understand his own way? (Proverbs 20:24)

The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly. (Proverbs 20:27)

If God can reveal your desires, why hasn’t he? Maybe he has, but you just haven’t noticed. The foregoing scriptures don’t necessarily indicate God’s revelation of your real desires with overt obviousness—though he could. What is guaranteed is that he will at least reveal your true desires to you through your own intentional, honest, rational analysis of your behavior and motives.

While few understand it, the spirit of God is the mechanism of our rational understanding. Rational internal conversations are facilitated by the spirit of God, and so can accurately be described as a dialogue with God:

5 Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out.
6 Most men will proclaim every one his own goodness: but a faithful man who can find?
7 The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him. (Proverbs 20)

The more you treat rational analyses as conversations with God, and the more you treat their results as his word, the more your wisdom will expand, and the better you and your life will be.

Here is the process for analyzing past decisions. Consider past actions. Ask yourself what you did, why you did it, what other things you could have done, why you didn’t choose them, and whether what you did was the best way to do what you intended to do. Consider what would have benefited the most, what you can do to change your decision if necessary, and what you can do to make better decisions in general in the future.

God knows what we feel and what we think, and he can help restore our vision from the natural blindness we experience through a lifetime of occasionally turning away from what we perceived but did not want to acknowledge.

Why do you want what you want?

Your motive is why you want what you do. Motive is the key not only to what you seek, but how you will seek it: the mode in which you will pursue it, with what intensity, at what cost, and against what odds. With a strong enough motive, you can obtain and endure anything.

It is foolish to tread through life without carefully considering and committing to a good motive. Most people bumble through life without intentionally choosing and aiming for what they want:

A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left. (Ecclesiastes 10:2)

While it may be uncommon for an individual to have explicitly calculated their motive, it is still absolutely vital to a happy and successful life. As with many things, the popularity of a choice does not indicate its merit.

With a defined motive, you can check whether what you desire is worth the cost. Almost no worthwhile goal will cost as little as you initially estimate. As you proceed toward what you seek, you will invariably encounter a greater cost than you expected. If you know the worth of what you seek, you can easily calculate whether continuing is worthwhile, or whether you should seek a lesser (or at least less expensive) outcome.

Why do you do what you do? Is it the best way to get what you intend?

Why do you do what you do? Is there a better way of achieving your objective?

The benefits of understanding why you do what you do simply cannot be experienced in any other way. Honesty and all its benefits require the introspection of thinking about what you do and why you do it.² Furthermore, to the extent that you possess evidence that suggests that what you are seeking will result from the path you are taking to obtain it, you will be empowered to endure actions that might otherwise be too difficult.

By inspecting whether your present path is the best way to what you seek, you will frequently discover a better way. Often you'll find through introspection that the present path is not the best path because it won't deliver what you expected or because there is an alternative path that leads to your goals more quickly.

As you sincerely consider your motives, you may notice that there are much better ways of getting what you say you want, but your ability to notice this or make a change will depend on your honesty. There are often hidden constraints that make both less likely. A common hidden constraint consists of an unwillingness to recognize any option that will intersect, expose, or accentuate a flaw in your character. For example, you might say that you care about a loved one, but withhold something they need to hear because you are afraid they will withdraw from your or punish you if you do. These situations give you the opportunity to reconsider and demonstrate the priority order of what is important to you. In the example given, do you care more about what you provide to your loved one, or more about what you receive from them?

You will find that achieving what you say you want will frequently reveal a new fault or reveal a higher cost to one you already know you have.³ In the previous example, actually minimizing the suffering of your loved one requires you to turn your cowardice into courage and your selfish desire to maintain what you get out of the relationship into a selfless desire to help them, even if they hate you for it.

Asking why you do what you do and whether it is the best way to arrive at what you seek can generate extensive feedback on improvements you can make to more directly or effectively pursue what you desire.

How much do you want what you want?

Prioritization is essential to living an aligned life. Prioritization is an extremely effective way to better use the resources you presently have for greater meaning than you presently have. While you can make changes to increase the resources available to you, these changes typically require time to bear fruit. Changes to how you use the resources you have can be made immediately.

You can’t have everything, but prioritization ensures that whatever you have is the best you can get. Everything you seek has a price denominated in what you go without in order to do so. Whatever you want will require the sacrifice of other things—either what you already have, what you could have instead, or both. Prioritize what you want, and ensure that what you prioritize as the highest carries over to the short- and long-term decisions you make. Sacrifice all lesser things to all greater things and give your best effort to what is most important.

The greatest things carry the greatest cost. The greatest things in life can only be obtained by those who seek them with their full heart, mind, and strength. Anything that can be obtained with less than full purpose of heart will necessarily be less than the best available to you. In order to obtain the greatest things in life, you’ll have to decide that you want them more than anything else.⁴ You will have to prioritize everything that has value, and decide what you want the most.

As you improve your prioritization of what is most important, you will experience drastic increases in the quality of outcomes you experience in life, their duration, and the meaning you experience along the way. Surprisingly, this rarely if ever requires radical differences in what you do. As you more intentionally prioritize your life, you will find that most things experiencing a downgrade in priority still get done, and those that don’t are always replaced by much more important things that more than make up for their loss.

A substantial treatment of prioritization, including practical strategies for organizing your short and long-term plans based on what is most important, can be found in the author’s book Joy on Purpose.

How will you get what you want?

Too many people pursue what they want through behavior they have every reason to believe cannot provide it.⁵ It’s important to differentiate between desires and wishes. The difference is found in your actions. You can wish for something without doing what you believe necessary to get it, but you can’t really desire a thing without actually working for it to the best of your knowledge. For example, it is easy to say that you want to go to heaven, but very few people live like they want to go to heaven, as evidenced by how few people follow the example of Jesus Christ.⁶

Wishes without an intent to act require the severing of the link between cause and effect. You will never experience anything that doesn’t have a cause, and you will never permanently obtain anything for which the price has not been paid. Fulfillment of desires requires finding the set of causes that produce the desired effect.

How will you obtain what you want? If you do not have and live a plan toward getting it, you don’t really want it—you just wish you had it. The more valuable what you desire, the more likely a careful and correct plan will be required in order to obtain it.

Don’t desire what you aren’t willing to pay for

We are all free to interpret our desires as we wish, choosing what actions we believe will lead to their fulfillment. A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering comes from people who dishonestly desire outcomes that are either not available to them, or for which they are unwilling to pay, or which they would absolutely not find joy in obtaining or possessing.

In life, you can’t have everything you want. The span of possible outcomes is finite, limited not just in absolute availability, but further constrained by the capacity and willingness of each individual. Reality is governed by laws of cause and effect defined before the creation of the world.⁷ These laws enumerate all possible outcomes. Every outcome has a prescribed path.⁸ All possible outcomes are not open to all people, and even those that are typically require a greater price than most are willing to pay. You can only have the things that are available to you and which you are willing to pay for.

When you choose to desire possibilities that are not available to you, you are living in a manner contrary to reality, and this is as dishonest as it is guaranteed to cause misery.

It’s also dishonest to dissociate the outcome sought from the path to it—desiring only the outcome, and not everything required to obtain it. For example, those who don’t want to be responsible for the maintenance of a home nor the fiscal discretion needed to save for the same don’t actually want a home, and a single person not willing to pay to find and keep a spouse worth marrying doesn’t actually want to get married, even if they say they do. Most suffering comes from people thinking that they’re choosing what they want when actually they’re choosing how they want to get it. You can’t usually obtain what you want if you are only willing to do what you want in order to get it. If you are only willing to do what you find pleasant, you will probably never get what you want. Those who pursue what they are not willing to pay the price for will either be miserable because they never get it or miserable when they do.

Cease desiring mutually exclusive outcomes

Very frequently, you will have to choose between mutually exclusive desires. So often, we seek two or more things at the same time with conflicting costs. In every such case, you will have to choose which you want the most, because pursuing both will guarantee you obtain neither.

Only pursue lesser things to the extent that: 1) you have already apportioned all helpful resources to your primary objective, and 2) you have high confidence that any other pursuit doesn’t detract from the first, as effects can be hidden. Attempting to pursue mutually exclusive ends will never succeed and will often result in obtaining exactly none of the intended aims. Whenever there are conflicts, you need to know which of the competing things you seek is most important to you.

How can you know if you are pursuing mutually exclusive desires? Look at how well aligned your actions are with what you say you want. Do you act in ways that don’t lead to what you say you want?⁹ Is there a better way to obtain what you say you want? How do you use your time and money? If an AI bot analyzed your texts, email, and social media, would it correctly guess the desires you claim to have, or would that content point to something else?¹⁰

Don’t over- or understate the value of things

Appraisal of the value of something will vary from one individual to the next depending on the extent of their understanding of reality. However, all of us have the instant capacity to reconcile to the value we see in things based on our present understanding. Few do.

Instead, most people “call evil good, and good evil,”¹¹ putting “darkness for light, and light for darkness...bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” by desiring “that which is of no worth”¹² and “which cannot satisfy.” These value inversions are not limited to religious contexts.

They also numerously occur in normal life situations in situations great and small. You invert value when:

• You pretend that easy things are hard, and that hard things are easy.
• You pretend that you help your adult children by removing them from the demands of life.
• You pretend that valuable things are easy, and that difficult things aren’t valuable.
• You pretend that fat people are healthy, and that ugly people are beautiful.
• You pretend that single mothers provide an equally valuable environment to children as married mothers, and that single mothers raise children better than single fathers.
• You pretend that mothers who work outside the home are at least as beneficial as mothers who dedicate their time to their families in their homes.
• You pretend that a man who supports his family sufficiently for his wife to remain at home is of equal value to a man who does not.
• You pretend that a homosexual couple is capable of the same experiences as a heterosexual couple.
• You pretend that a woman who has had many sexual partners is the same as a woman who does not have sex until marriage.
• You pretend that a dating pair who share a dog is the same as a married couple raising kids.

A related dishonest practice is that of refusing to honor the good and call out the evil. Again, this is not limited to religious contexts, and occurs on a regular basis any time you refrain from commending what is worthy of commendation or criticizing what could be better. To be honest is to reflect reality as it stands, and inflating the value of anything beyond its actual value is as much “calling evil good” as denigrating the value of something beyond its value is “calling good evil.”

Choosing something of lesser value over something of greater value

To act according to the truth requires you to seek what is best, as far as you understand it. To align completely with what is best is to choose and obtain the greatest outcomes possible for yourself. What could be better? Anything less is “more or less than this,” and is “the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning.” (D&C 92:25)

Lying isn’t just a case of devaluing the truth as a whole, but in every case consists of specific examples of valuing something lesser more than something greater. Dishonesty requires you to intentionally devalue what you perceive to be more valuable.

It is dishonest to aim anywhere except the ideal as understood. Dishonesty is the degree to which you think, feel, or act differently from the best you know. It is dishonest to think, feel, or act against your understanding of what is best. It is dishonest to choose something you perceive to be of lesser value over something of greater value. It is dishonest to embrace something of lesser value when something of greater value manifests. Honesty requires you to choose what has the greatest net benefit, and it requires you to actually enjoy doing so. Anything different indicates that you are in rebellion against the truth, and prefer something above it.

When you live in a way that is less than the best you know, or you do things whose costs outweigh the benefits, you are engaging in something contrary to your best interests, and this is dishonest. These infractions can happen on matters large and small. For example, all addictions are instances of the lie of preferring what has less value over what has more value, but so is every form of procrastination.

Own the outcomes that come with refusing the options that lead to something different

As you become more honest, you will find that every choice you make is the selection of one option from many possible alternatives. Among the available options will typically be those you will not consider. It is important to distinguish between problems that have no solution and problems with no solution you are willing to accept. If you treat the latter like the former, you will be unnecessarily miserable. If you truly value avoiding options you refuse out of hand more than you would a solution to the problem, avoiding the options you do not like should make you happy. If not, you are showing yourself dishonest, as you clearly care more about solving your problem than you do avoiding the option at hand. But it never happens this way. Instead of seeing yourself as intentionally avoiding the best option, you will perceive yourself as having no option or waiting for a better one to materialize. It rarely if ever does, and hoping for one to materialize without a sufficient reason to believe it will is dishonest. Refusing the best available option will cause unnecessary misery in at least two ways: 1) You will agonize as you go without what you desire, and 2) your misery will increase as you realize with time that you have missed out on the opportunity to obtain what you want, as the originally available options dissolve with the passage of time without the appearance of anything better.

Here is a simple test to determine if you suffer from the dishonesty of dismissing options out of hand: Imagine for a moment that you could have anything you desire. What would you choose? Now, would you be willing to do anything to get it? If not, consider the possibility that you don’t actually want what you say you want. Remember, in this scenario, you were asked what you wanted more than anything. If there is anything you aren’t willing to do to get it, then you either have to admit that you are either a dishonest person or you want something else more (in this case, not doing whatever you aren’t willing to do to get it).

Determine what improvements are required to obtain what you desire

Define what you must become in order to obtain what you desire. In order to obtain what you seek, you must plot a course of character changes from who you are now to who you must be in order to obtain what you desire. All journeys begin with where you presently stand. Until you know where you are, you can’t navigate towards where you would like to be. You can’t plot a course to your intended destination without first knowing where you are on the map. In order to become the person you must be in order to obtain what you want, you first must figure out who you are right now.

Desire is the gateway that incentivizes all improvement. Who you would like to be is driven by what you want to get. Getting requires growth. Your ability to obtain what you want will depend on your willingness to become who you need to be to obtain it. As you become a better person, you will be able to afford better outcomes. The better you are, the more resources you will have to obtain what you want.

Your actual motives are hidden

Almost all people hold subconscious motives that drive how they think, feel, and act.¹³ These motives almost always work contrary to what they think they desire and why,¹⁴ and constantly rob them of the peace and effectiveness they might otherwise have in life. As such, it is vitally important to discover and improve your own motives.

We would like to assume that our motives are as plain as our works. Self-styled Christians like to think that you can judge a person by their fidelity to the short list of outward works they feel are important to practice or avoid.

It’s just not that simple. While Jesus did, in fact, instruct us to judge others by their fruits,¹⁵ he did not teach to do it in the way so many supposed Christians do. External works are not good or evil of themselves¹⁶ and can’t be judged without discovering the doer’s motive and understanding. For example, Jesus pointed out how the religious leaders during his life did things that seemed righteous but had evil motives,¹⁷ and how he did things that the religious people thought were evil, and yet had the purest of motives in doing so.¹⁸ The accuracy of self-judgment falls at least as short as judgment of others.

A person’s motives can only be refined inasmuch as they are plainly manifest, but when we hide our true beliefs and intent, we cut ourselves off from the corrective influence of reality and the improved outcomes improved aims would bring.

Lying about your motive

Motives are extremely important to accurately identify and honestly upgrade because they play such an early role in chains of downstream thoughts, feelings, and actions. Our motives are the strongest source of meaning and value in life, and when they are corrupted, they are the strongest source of emptiness and suffering.

Lies about motive are easier to tell yourself and others because they are completely internal and often hidden under layers of complexity. Human nature will ascribe motives other than our real ones to justify decisions that are more in line with our actual but less-thanhonorable desires. We ascribe good motives to poor decisions in an attempt to pursue baser motives without the guilt that should accompany them. A hallmark of such decisions is that those who make them will ignore pieces of information that suggest an ulterior motive or better option.

Often, we pretend to some benevolent motive when we are actually being selfish, or a rational motive when we are being emotional, or long term preference when we are preferring the present, and so on. One rule of thumb that can expose a dishonest motive is to identify and cross examine it. For example, if you think you are being rational, ask whether the path you’ve chosen is emotionally easier than the alternative? If so, you may want to reconsider what your actual motive may be.

Inconsistency of motive is dishonest

How consistently do you live your motive? Motive is an all-ornothing affair. When you only apply your motive at certain times or certain situations in your life, you will find yourself actively fighting against what you say you want, rather than boosting it.

A constant motive is referred to as “making your eye single” in the scriptures: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22) When your desire becomes unified in all times and in all places, you will experience a shocking increment of productivity, power, and meaning in your life.

The alternative to a unified motive is to be “double-minded”:

21 You will desire what you most value.
22 What you seek determines the amount of light you receive. If your motive is clear, honest, and united, light will flow into and fill you without impediment.
23 But if you seek multiple motives at once, or are besieged by hidden motives, you will be filled with darkness. If what is meant to be your source of light becomes a source of darkness, you will be in great darkness, indeed. (Matthew 6, Author’s Reflection)

Double-mindedness is so serious that it is described as a heinous sin. Consider how James describes it as the opposite of purifying your heart, which literally means to adopt a focal desire:

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. (James 4:8)

Double-minded people are volatile.¹⁹ They are inconsistent and unprincipled. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8) Their fragility stems from the fact that in order to maintain mutually exclusive desires, they must live in a state of constant denial of reality. Because any person, information, or situation that calls attention to what they really want causes a cascading collapse of every part of their delusional life, they live in a state of self-imposed blindness to rationality. They live by every fleeting emotion, passive subjects to their physical body’s response to their environment. They are “like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.” (James 1:6) You can’t predict their actions or rely on their character, other than to assume it will be bad. Because a double-minded person reacts to rational invitations for improvement with emotional responses, they can never move forward until they become honest about what they desire, and reprioritize the truth over feeling good. One who is in an emotional state literally can’t reason until or unless they calm down and stop interpreting the truth as a personal attack.²⁰ Their counterarguments, which almost always involve deflecting arguments against the person who dared to try to help them, are almost never valid, relevant, or true.

As you flicker between motives from moment to moment, you are actually practicing a form of dishonesty, and while doing so, will open yourself to all the negative effects of doing so.

Be honest with yourself about what you really want

Be honest with yourself about what you really want. Don’t lie about what you want or why you want it. There is no point pretending that you want something other than what you do.

What do you want the most? Do you prioritize it above all else? If you prioritize something other than what you want the most, you will get something other than what you want the most. Any effort outside of your prioritized desires will necessarily lead to less than what you want the most, guaranteeing disappointment. While you pretend you want something other than what you truly want, the best you will get is what you are pretending to want. It is more likely that you will obtain neither, since many outcomes require full focus that a divided desire cannot provide.

Be honest with others about what you really want

Be honest with others about what you really want. If you feel like you need to hide what you really want, you should consider the possibility that your shame is suggesting you should want something better—something you would not be afraid to reveal to others. If you are not proud of what you really want, the way to fix that is not through pretending you want something else. Instead, seek what you truly want with your full focus, and you will quickly either find reasons to want something else more, or you will find reasons to be more confident in publicly admitting what you truly wanted all along.

If what you desire is good, the best way to obtain it is to be honest with other people. Those who desire to obtain what is best can only do so through emulating how God is, and he is honest. Sometimes, our reluctance to say what we really want isn’t so much because we think it is worse than what others will tolerate, but because we know it is better than they will tolerate.²¹ We should still be open with others about our desires even when we are ridiculed for them, especially if that ridicule come precisely because they are righteous.²² How else will the desires of others improve except through the beacon of your example?²³ Those who hide their desires don’t realize how easy it is for others to see their true motives. Those whose desires are revealed to be something other than what they pretended are always thought less of by those who find out. When those hidden desires are evil, this is obvious, but it is as true when the hidden desires are good,²⁴ in which case the discoverer will see you as a coward who didn’t love God or their neighbor enough to live true to the good they knew of and could have done.

It’s rare for anyone to be willing to take external criticism of their motives

The easiest and fastest way to see your own motives beyond any limits in your perception or honesty is through another person who sees enough about you to correctly describe them. It is indeed possible for someone to see you better than you see yourself. The scriptures are full of accounts of when Jesus and his servants knew more about other people than the people knew about themselves. Consider the following Psalm, where a discerning observer describes the hidden qualities of a generic wicked man:

1 The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, that there is no fear of God before his eyes.
2 For he flattereth himself in his own eyes, until his iniquity be found to be hateful.
3 The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit: he hath left off to be wise, and to do good.
4 He deviseth mischief upon his bed; he setteth himself in a way that is not good; he abhorreth not evil. (Psalm 36)

One reason so few people see so little of the motives of themselves and others is because awareness of motive, like all awareness, only grows with continuous honesty, and fades away with repeated deceit.

The fact that it is possible for someone else to see more about you than you see about yourself does not make it probable that you would listen, no matter how true their perspective was or how much evidence they presented.²⁵ In the event you find someone with the wisdom necessary to see beyond what you do, it is highly likely that you will strongly disagree with what they describe about you because it will be so much worse than how you see yourself. How would you feel if someone told you that you flatter yourself so much in your own eyes that you are constantly bringing upon yourself terrible but fully avoidable suffering? What if they said that everything you say and do is a lie? What if they said you are not nearly as wise as you could be, and you don’t do as much good as you could? What if they said you are constantly scheming about how to get more than you deserve, that you incorrectly think you are better than everyone else, and that you love to sin?

Do you know anyone who would take such a chain of criticism well? Do you know anyone who would believe such criticisms, no matter who made them? Would they believe it, even if told by Jesus Christ himself ? How much less if told this by one of his servants? How much less if told this by an otherwise normal person who happened to be right?

Be honest with God about what you really want

Only ask God for what you truly want. Hiding your desires from God will only make it that much harder for him to bless you. The Lord said his ability to help us is limited by our willingness to be honest about what we really want:

6 For behold, God hath said...if [a man] offereth a gift, or prayeth unto God, except he shall do it with real intent it profiteth him nothing.
9 [It is] counted evil unto a man, if he shall pray and not with real intent of heart; yea, and it profiteth him nothing, for God receiveth none such. (Moroni 7)

Pretending you desire something better than you do shows contempt for God,²⁶ who sees all things, and shows an immense lack of trust in him.