Knowing the differences between needs and wants is super important!
For everyone who wants to be fully in control of consumption choices in life, recognizing differences between what a human being needs to survive and what you desire to have is an important task to start with. Without this ability, you may foolishly think that you need more than you really do to stay alive doing just fine.
Imagine that you are going on a short family trip. Let’s say you bring your children out camping into the forest in Yellowstone Park.
You are going to set up your camping spot by the lake.
Your plan is to camp for seven days.
Both you and two of your children can only carry one backpack each, so you have three backpacks altogether with limited space.
Decide now what you are going to pack in order to survive out there in the dark forest, so you can come back home safely to your wife, the mother of your children.
NEEDS
Everything that you squeeze in the limited space of your backpack will be what you really need. Let me guess, it is going to be some nutritious food, a few bottles of water, warm clothes and a tent as shelter. Human needs boil down to goods that we must have in order to stay alive. These are the basic necessities we need to sustain life.
If we do not wear clothes in cold weather in dark forest, we will freeze to death. If we do not drink for a few days while camping, we will only survive for approximately three to five days.
What you need in life: basic food like grains, vegetables, fruits and meat, pure water, enough sleep, clothes and shelter for protection.
WANTS
Anything else that we add into our backpacks, after we pack the essential things, will be wants that make our trip more comfortable. We will desire the things that are nice to have because they will make our life more pleasant. We can easily live and survive for the whole life without all the things that we want.
We do not need a nice car to drive to the forest because we can walk – we just want to get there faster by driving a car. We do not need to pack a smart watch, but we may want to check time, call our wife who might be worried or stay up to date with the weather forecast.
What you want in life: a new sports car, a 4-bedroom house with beautiful garden, a new sailing boat, a golden watch, a king-size bed, a box of tasty cookies, (…).
At this point you should be able to easily differentiate between needs and wants, so you can be more mindful about what is necessary to have. While people in different countries may have different wants, human needs are exactly the same for all of us.
Another difference is that needs are limited to just a few items, but wants are unlimited. No matter how much money you have to buy all of your wants today, you will for sure have new wants tomorrow. You will end up wanting faster cars, bigger houses, more shiny diamond rings, etc.
And the cycle never ends!
That is why, it is so important to understand what we really need in our life and that anything else we want in addition will never be fully satisfied. If our consumption choices are not under control, our wants can easily get out of control.
What wants does SuperBusinessManager.com fulfill?
You do not need to read Super Business Manager in order to survive!
But you may want to visit often to read new stories about how to gain business knowledge and improve managerial skills.
My online business can only survive and grow, if I meet wants of my readers. Therefore, I focus so much these days on producing high-quality stories full of useful advice on business management and life improvements. And what my readers want is obviously to live better than yesterday, and manage their businesses better.
Because there is nothing wrong with wanting to make our current and future life more comfortable, more reasonable and better-managed.
