178: Wanting: How to Declutter Our Desires To Pursue What We Truly Want, with Luke Burgis

“We don’t generate or manufacture our desires from thin air. We’re social creatures, and from the minute that we’re born we come out of the womb really looking to our mothers for cues about what’s important.” - Luke Burgis

Mimetic desire -- the act of desiring simply what others desire - imitating what other people want instead of developing our own intentional, conscious wanting - is a powerful force in our development, our world and in our everyday lives. Today’s Finding Brave guest shares his expertise about this concept of desire and why it’s critically important to identify and pursue your own unique and personalized desires with more intention and clarity, and to ground yourself in the values that matter most to you personally -- those “thick desires” and relationships -- that will endure and truly enrich your life.

Luke Burgis is the Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship and a professor of business at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He co-teaches a popular class for all incoming students there called “The Vocation of Business,” an anthropological investigation into the purpose and meaning of business itself.

Luke has been the founder and CEO of multiple social impact companies. He was named one of the “Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25” by BusinessWeek after the early success of one of his first companies, Healthy Vending, which revolutionized the vending industry in 2005. His other ventures have all tried to contribute to what Luke calls a healthy “human ecology.” He is currently the Founder & Managing Partner of an organization called Fourth Wall Ventures that invests in, incubates, and advises companies that do the same.

Luke’s first book, Unrepeatable, explored how people can discover and live out their unique purpose in the world, and help others do the same. His latest book, Wanting, is about human desire itself—why people come to want the things that they want, and how we can build a better future by understanding the process through which desires are generated and shaped.

In this episode, Luke reveals why people that have the happiest, most meaningful, fulfilling and productive lives are not the ones that pursue someone else’s idea of what we should be producing. Also, if we can help others flourish for who they really are, it will lead to a much different and better world for everyone.

To learn more about today's guest, visit: https://lukeburgis.com/