Verified by 
Eleanor Roosevelt gave the following advice in a 1941 letter to a friend:
"Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are and then make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself." [emphasis added]
My favorite class to teach is creative thinking, and one of the most important aspects of creative thinking and creative problem-solving is learning to ask different questions, to look at our problems sideways, what Edward de Bono calls lateral thinking. De Bono explains lateral thinking as follows: "You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper," meaning "that trying harder in the same direction may not be as useful as changing direction."
When we are unhappy because we don't get what we want, perhaps we are asking the wrong question. A better question than "What do I want?" may be "What do I want to be?"
So much of what we think will make us happy, simply doesn't. Psychologist and best-selling author Dan Gilbert writes and speaks about how trying too hard to get what we think we want often doesn't work because happiness is something we synthesize or create, not something we find outside ourselves:
"From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness."
You can watch the rest of his explanation from his TED2004 talk here:
Of course, the idea that happiness comes from within is nothing new. Two thousand years ago Seneca cautioned that though you may "cross vast spaces of sea" in an attempt to escape the stresses of your life, you will fail to find peace or happiness there because "your faults will follow you withersoever you travel" as "you flee along with yourself."
In other words, we make ourselves unhappy by our very company, and spending more time creating a better traveling companion for ourselves will make nearly any journey more pleasant and meangingful.
Looking at the problem sideways--asking what we want to be rather than what we want--has one drawback: it's a long-term commitment. Unlike the instant (albeit temporary) satisfaction of buying or chasing what we want, being what we want involves the daily challenge of facing the gap between where we are now and where we want to be, not a choice for which Amazon reviews offer much guidance. Psychologist and psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski described the struggle as one of constantly deciding to choose our best or true self from the other selves at our disposal (1964).
For example, if I decide that I want to be more generous and less judgmental in my responses to others' struggles, not only because I might think it is the right thing to do but because I know it will bring me more internal peace and freedom and be closer to my true self, I first have to face the chasm between my current ungenerosity, where I am now, and where I am not. I can't pretend the gap does not exist or try to wish or numb it away if I ever want to get closer to the other side.
The payoff, however, as Dabrowskian scholar Cheryl Ackerman explains, is a special kind of autonomy, which is "nearly synonymous with freedom but not freedom to do anything at any time under any condition." Rather, it is "freedom from low-level internal and environmental influences" (2009). Or, as T. S. Eliot wrote in "Burnt Norton" (Four Quartets):
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion...
It is then that what we think we might want or what other people expect no longer has control over us. We can take ourselves along wherever we go.
References
Ackerman, C. M. (2009). The essential elements of Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration and how they are connected. Roeper Review, 31(2), 81-95.
Dabrowski, K. (1964). Positive disintegration. Boston: Little, Brown, & Company.
Wigal, D. (Ed.). (2003). The wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt. NewYork: Kensington Press.
