Wanting to do something and wanting to have done it

These feel identical from a distance and diverge sharply once you begin.

Most people who say they want to write a book want to have written a book. The two are easy to confuse because from where you stand they point in the same direction, and the difference only becomes apparent somewhere in the middle, when the work has stopped being an idea and become a series of unglamorous afternoons. Wanting to have done a thing is a want about a finished state and a changed identity. Wanting to do it is a want about the activity itself, including its dull stretches, its repetition, and the specific texture of being bad at it for a long while first.

The test is not complicated. Ask whether you would still want it if the process took twice as long and nobody ever heard about the result. Or, more directly, ask whether you enjoy the smallest unit of the work: the paragraph, the rehearsal, the hour of practice, the ordinary Tuesday version rather than the highlight. If the answer is yes, the pursuit will largely pay for itself as it goes. If the answer is no, the pursuit is a bill you are paying in advance for a state you may or may not reach, and it will need to be a state you want very much indeed.

This is not an argument against goals that require unpleasant work. Plenty of worthwhile things are reached through years of activity nobody enjoys, and people do it, and it is often the right call. It is only an argument for knowing which sort of want you have, because the two require completely different amounts of endurance, and misidentifying one as the other is how people end up three years into something they never actually wanted to be doing.