On Japanimation and motivation (and how to get what you really want)

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The Rolling Stones said, “You can’t always get what you want… but if you try, sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.”

And while I totally agree and have repeatedly talked about how need can help you get what you want, I’m nonetheless starting to have my doubts that you can’t always get what you want, too.

Maybe you can get what you want in the vast, vast majority of cases if you know what “can” means, know what “want” really means, and know the right way to go about it.

Maybe you can almost always get what you want as long as you’re willing to be patient, creative, and pay the price for it.

That’s probably what the Stones meant anyway. But as a lyric, it sucks, so I get it.

Which, as always, leads me to a story.

Beautiful Hades

My son Austin really loves Bakugan — these little Japanese anime-based toys that are, regrettably, similar in concept to Pokemon. Bakugan are plastic balls that pop open and transform into creatures when you put the magnet at their base onto something metallic. And, because the makers are equal parts smart and evil, there are hundreds of different types of Bakugan. And of course, the kids who are into them will tell you they require all of them if they are to keep living.

Every so often, I take Austin with me to the gym. And last Wednesday, he found a Bakugan in the kids’ play room there. Specifically, it was a black one called Hades.

He got all excited.

Until I informed him that the Bakugan either belonged to the gym or to a kid who left it there by mistake, and that he would have to leave it where he found it.

And then he got mopey.

Then frustrated.

Then started generally pitching a small fit.

After combating the whining (I don’t generally stand for whining), I told him he could ask for it for Christmas. But, he said, that was too long to wait. He might have been able to buy it with his own money, but he was down to one dollar, and Hades would cost ten bucks to buy at Target. And because we require that half of the money that passes through his hands goes into the bank, it would mean he’d actually need twenty.

Nineteen dollars short. On this realization, his despair returned.

I know what some of you are thinking. Perhaps this is a good life lesson — learning to accept that desire is not enough to get you what you want. You may be thinking that the correct course of action would be for me to put my foot down and declare that he had enough stuff, that he didn’t need more, that ten dollars was way too much for yet another piece of plastic, that there were kids in Africa who were starving and that he should be thankful for what he has. I’m maybe supposed to remind him, again, that he could ask for it for Christmas… and if that’s not good enough, then tough shit. I’m the dad and he’ll do what I say.

I won’t lie. That was my first impulse. But then I realized that saying any of those things would make me a big, fat hypocrite.

Now offering: Traditional dad coaching services

Let’s role play a bit.

Pretend you’re a coaching client of mine. (This will work well if you actually ARE a coaching client of mine. And if you’re not, you should be. I just reworked the entire Ninja Coaching structure and it’s ninjarific, and also (in a less ninjaish vein) generating great R.O.I. for current ninjas. Oh, and the rates are going up this weekend.)

So, got it? You’re the client.

I’ll play myself.

Now, as a coaching client of mine, let’s look at your situation, but let’s keep the Austin Bakugan drama in mind. Here’s how the playacting unfolds:

You’ve come to me with an audacious idea. You want to quit your job and start a business, or you want to expand your current business, or you want to become internet famous, or you want to make a bunch of money, or whatever.

You tell me about your idea.

And I say, “We can’t always get what we want in life. You’re going to have to learn to accept that. You have plenty of good things and you should learn to be thankful for them instead of always wanting more. Did you know that there are sweatshops in the Philippines where people can’t have office jobs as nice as yours? If you want some freedom, you can ask for it as a Christmas vacation. In this economy, you should feel lucky to have a job, so stop complaining and accept that it’s ridiculous to want to just be free all day.”

Anyone dying to hire me right now?

So you get the point. I get paid to show people how to reach audacious, ridiculous, selfish, unrealistic goals. That’s what I make my living doing — not only with the coaching, but with any of my courses and all of my blog posts, interviews, and so on.

Personally, if someone told me that I couldn’t have X, I’d consider it a personal affront and then a personal challenge. Tell me I can’t have X? Fuck you. We’ll see about that.

To tell my son that he should buckle down, be thankful what he has, and stop telling me about how he wants more would be the height of hypocrisy.

So I told Austin the truth. Of course he could have that Bakugan.

The boy must become a ninja

Slippery slope, right? I want him to be empowered, but I don’t want him to be spoiled. I want him to believe that he can have what he wants, but I’m not for one second about to just give it all to him. If we could go with the Jesus analogy (and why not? Jesus was the original ninja), I don’t want to be constantly giving him fish… but instead teach him to become one hell of a fisherman.

So I approached the situation like I would with a client. We’d define the actual desire and the actual outcome at the root of what he was feeling, and then we’d look for all of the possible ways to get at that root desire. Was the root desire the new Hades that would cost him $10 at Target? Maybe, but maybe not. Was it even a Hades Bakugan? Was it even a Bakugan? If the actual desire was flexible, so was what he’d need in order to get it. Austin was frustrated because he thought there was only one path to his goal. Because I wouldn’t let him take the Bakugan at the gym, he figured that meant buying a new one and, therefore, somehow finding nineteen dollars. But that wasn’t necessarily true.

So we decided to do some brainstorming together on possible solutions. I asked him: What were the options? And here’s what we came up with:

Option 1: Buy a new Bakugan at Target.
The challenge here was that this option cost $19 more than he currently had. So, do-able? Well, I don’t believe many things are impossible, but $19 is hard for a six-year-old to earn. If he’ll clean a room at the house (other than his own), I’ll typically give him a dollar, but we don’t live in a house with nineteen big rooms. He’s a bit too young for a job, and the odds of finding a twenty lying in the yard were small. So we kept looking.

Option 2: After waiting a week for any possible owner of the Bakugan who lost it to show up and claim it, he could ask the gym’s owner if he could have it.
But that hardly seemed a fair exchange for the gym’s owner, so what seemed more likely to work was:

Option 3: After a week, ask to buy the Bakugan at the gym for a few bucks.
Getting closer. A few bucks was a lot easier to come up with than $19, but he’d still need to figure out how to come up with extra money. So what about:

Option 4: Offer to trade with the gym.
Austin has a bunch of toys he never plays with anymore, and frankly, they’re cluttering up our living room. The kids’ room at the gym is likely just as well-served by that stuff as by a single Bakugan, so this might be a win-win. But of course, the above options fall apart if the old owner claims his Bakugan, so we kept going. How could he get his own? Was Target the only option? So we thought of:

Option 5: Buy a used Hades on eBay.
But wait! Once we’d thought of this, we realized he could also:

Option 6: Sell some of his old toys on eBay.
The cool thing about this one was that it might work in conjunction with most of the other options so far. He might sell only a few dollars’ worth of his stuff and be able to buy a used Bakugan somewhere, but he might also sell $19 of his stuff and be able to buy a new one.

And of course, to round things out, there’s also the fallback:

Option 7: Ask for it for Christmas.
He’d have to wait six weeks, but still an option. And because we might as well be comprehensive and honest about the way things work, there is technically another option that I put the kibosh on as soon as I thought of it (nothing like a bit of morality to go with your empowerment lesson):

Option 8: Steal one.
Because we were discussing the pros and cons of each option, I made it clear that this wouldn’t be the right choice. But if we’re to get all Dickensian, this is a valid option re: a loaf of bread if you think your only other option is to die of starvation.

So, quite an enriched buffet of options, right? Better than having only the one seemingly-impossible option? We figured could probably keep going, but we decided to stop here to see how things were looking.

At this point, with seven valid options to choose from, Austin felt much better, much less a victim, and much more empowered. We hopped on eBay first, to see if we could find a used Hades for a buck. And this is where magical option #9 showed up. See, I’d forgotten that Austin is a kid, and that kids chronically suffer from “shiny object syndrome.”

On the first page, there was no Hades. But there was a Ventus Falcon Fly Trap (don’t ask) auction ending in literally 2 minutes with zero bids that could be had for a dollar. Which meant there was actually:

Option 9: Buy a totally different Bakugan.
Remember the bit about deciding the root desire? Turns out he didn’t want Hades. He wanted something new. Hades would have worked, but so would this. (So, for that matter, might have a pack of stickers.)

We had a brief caucus, and decided to buy the Falcon thing for a buck, plus another dollar for shipping. Once we factored in the half-to-the-bank policy, he owed me four dollars. During the caucus, we had worked out a barter: one dollar now, plus he’d clean three rooms for a dollar apiece. He paid me his dollar and got to cleaning, then began five days of pestering me about when his new prize would arrive in the mail.

And lo and behold, he’d gotten what he wanted, without me having to give it to him OR to deny him.

Turns out that not only was “You can’t get what you want” destructive advice, but also total bullshit.

It’s the principle that matters

You’ve probably noticed that when I write blog posts, I like to tell you what you’re probably thinking. I’ve already done it once in this post, so let’s go for two:

Right now, I’m assuming that at least a few of you are thinking that I’m teaching my boy to be materialistic and to submit to consumer culture.

But that’s not it at all. I’m teaching him that he can have what he wants if he thinks creatively, and that advice need not apply to “things” only. I’m teaching him that instead of saying, “I can’t have it,” to ask, “How can I have it?” Or, possibly, to ask, “Do I actually want it badly enough to go after it?”

Other lessons come along for the ride: “Everything has a price, be it a monetary price or a less tangible one.” “Every option has its own set of pros and cons.” “What you’re seeking may not give you what you think you really want.” All quite important. All very fatherly morals to impart.

Not just consumerism.

If he’d said he wanted to become a Tibetan monk (an unusual request at six, but hey), I’d have given him the same advice: What would running off to become a monk actually mean? You’d have to give up living with us and watching TV and eating Kid Cuisine microwave meals… is that okay? In other words: What’s the price, do you want to pay it, and is there another way to go after what you really want?

And let’s be real. If he actually wanted to move away from us and go to Tibet, and if my guided questions didn’t dissuade him, I’m afraid I’d have to drop the hammer on that one. I’m still the dad, and if need be, I’m going to say No. But I try, when I can, to work around it… and I don’t believe that “can’t” is usually “am not able.” Usually when people say they can’t do something, it means that they’re unable to find the way to make it happen, or they’re not willing to pay the price. It usually means they’re choosing the alternative, even if they don’t think it’s a choice.

Austin’s Bakugan Falcon Fly will probably come in the mail today.

I’m so proud. The kid is a ninja.

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IMPORTANT NOTE: Since we’re talking about ninjas and coaching and Ninja Coaching, please check out the new and improved Ninja Coaching structure. If you would like to work with me (and you should; I’m awesome), now’s the time. I’m raising all of my coaching prices on Saturday.