Dare to Create a List of 100 Things You Want

Then do this with it

Kim Witten, PhD
6 min readJul 17, 2022
Purple and pink background with faded stars and dollar bills. A dalmation holding an empty dog bowl is licking its chops. Text reads: What do you want?
Dalmation photo by BilevichOlga on Getty Images. Designed by author in Canva Pro.

Here’s what happened when I challenged myself one Saturday to come up with a list of 100 things I want.

The inspiration

I was intrigued by the idea to make the ‘100 wants list’ from a podcast episode by Rich Litvin. He apparently has all his new clients do it. As a coach myself, I wanted to understand why.

What new insights could this bring?

Making the list

To be honest, coming up with a list of 100 wants took much longer than I anticipated. I’d get stuck, take a break, new wants would pop up, and I added them to the list. I also enlisted the help of friends to remind me of things I’d mentioned in the past.

There were many repeats and wants that turned out to be parts of other things —a luxury bathtub or hardwood floors are both things that are part of my definition of ‘a small, gorgeous detached house’. I counted these as three separate things. Even so, my final list was closer to 90.

It was easy to come up with the first twenty or so wants. The middle sixty stretched my brain. And the final twenty was when the real challenge began.

The insightful part was what happened next.

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Kim Witten, PhD

Helping overwhelmed creatives and small business owners make sense of things. Get unstuck every Thursday with Hold That Thought at www.witten.kim/subscribe