Power English

Excitement Main Text

Hi, this is AJ, welcome to our next lesson. This one is called "Excitement." We're

going to talk about excitement and I'm going to read a little section from a book called

The 4-Hour Work Week, which is a fantastic book. I love this book.

In fact, I'm going to do a few lessons based on sections of this book because I really,

really love it. I think it's just an incredible book that really has a very creative way of

looking at life and work and enjoying yourself.

The theme of the book, really, is enjoying your life. I mean that is really what the book

is all about and Tim Ferriss is the writer of the book. Again, the book's title is The 4-

Hour Work Week written by Tim Ferriss. Absolutely excellent book, I highly

recommend it. Now the section we're going to talk about today is about excitement.

So let me read what Tim has to say about excitement and then l'll talk more about it.

So here we go.

"What do you want? Well, first let's ask a better question. Most people will never

know what they want. I don't know what I want. If you ask me what I want to do in the

next five months for language learning, on the other hand, I do know. It's a matter of

specificity. What do you want is too imprecise to produce a meaningful and actionable

answer. Forget about it.

What are your goals is similarly fated for confusion and guesswork. To rephrase the

question we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Let's assume we

have 10 goals and we achieve them. What is the desired outcome that makes all the

effort worthwhile? The most common response is what I also would have suggested

five years ago, happiness. I no longer believe this is a good answer. I no longer

believe that happiness is the reason we achieve goals.

Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and the idea of happiness has become

ambiguous through overuse. There is a more precise alternative that reflects what I

believe is the actual objective for achieving goals. Bear with me. What is the opposite

of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin,

so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this

idea.