I opened up my Oblique Strategy application today, and the randomly assigned strategy was “Abandon Desire”.

I love the sideways thinking this forces into strategizing your goals. Like Christopher Walken’s preferred acting choices, one must almost go 180 degrees from the obvious goal and dig deeper.

What does abandoning desire mean? It means you may have to focus on the needs vs wants, on the necessity versus the vanity. You get the point: make it relevant!

The desire to lose weight may be obscured by vanity instead of health needs. The anxiety of losing weight and getting smaller sometimes detracts one from losing additional weight if one never was thinner. Wanting to write that book may be distracting if one wants to add too many great ideas into it. Designing your new revolutionary widget has to have a purpose to be useful on the market rather than aiming to develop it for profit only (I’m thinking Shake Weight for instance…)

How do you see abandoning desire to move forward?