Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

One approach I recommend for uncovering thick desires—the one I’ll focus on here—involves taking the time to listen to the most deeply fulfilling experiences of your colleagues’ (or partners’, or friends’, or classmates’) lives, and sharing your own with them.

I decided to take a three-month hiatus from the start-up world so that I could reorient myself—primarily, reorient my desires—before deciding what to do next. Those were the first three months of the rest of my far less mimetic life.

In the beginning, when I quit my job in finance to start a company, I wanted a lifestyle with clear boundaries and balance. I wanted to read for an hour every night, to take long walks with my dog, to spend more time with my friends, to be in a loving relationship. But as CEO of my start-up, I found myself working eighty-hour weeks and disregarding

Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, noted, “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” The deathbed is where unfulfilling desires are exposed. Transport yourself there now rather than waiting until later, when it might be too late.

There was a clear object of desire: Wall Street. So I fought for it, and I got what I thought I wanted. And that’s when I began my miserable fifteen-month career in Advanced Excel and PowerPoint.

The Pharisees railed against violence and followed the law meticulously. They claimed that if they had been living in the days of their ancestors, they would not have killed the prophets.41 And then they collaborated in killing Jesus.

Girard urged everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof), to pay attention to what happened at the crucifixion of Jesus. Girard read this story primarily as an anthropologist. What he found was human behavior operating differently than he had seen anywhere else in his reading of history.

Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist, put it this way: “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”