GETTING WHAT YOU WANT

Nothing is more easy - apart from situations in which it is difficult.
The first option is simply to want what you got already. The second option is to want what you are about to get. The third option is to want something you haven't got. The fourth option is always wanting what you haven't got. The fifth option is to want what you surely can't get.
The fourth option is a no, the fifth option is a no-no. The fourth option is for neurotic people, the fifth for obsessed people. Fortunately, those people don't read my blog.
Seriously now, before listing what you want and setting about to get it: Are you sure you realize what you have got already and what you are about to get? If the grass is greener at the other side of the hill, all your plans and actions will never lead to satisfaction, let alone happiness. It is a common scene in both tragedies and comedies that two people find out that they have been envious of one another.
So, make your Wanted list, but start with your Having list. Make your Wanted list as 'sexy' as possible, formulating your wants as attractive and as precise as possible. Than select. Find out which items would give you real satisfaction. Meaning they would give either real pleasure or would be really meaningful. Or both. This is your light list.
Now make a dark list: anything that spoils your pleasure or empties meaningfulness. You might have to work on this list before you can work on the light list. Sorry. But you can never get what you want, if sources of dissatisfaction will spoil whatever you reach, whatever you get.
Now you are ready for the real thing. And remember, whatever your goal, during the way toward your goal, your goal may change. Mary Parker Follett explained this already 80 years ago, talking about business goals:
What we possess always creates the possibilities of fresh satisfactions. The need comes as need only when the possible satisfaction of need is already there.  … The automobile does not satisfy wants only, it creates wants .  … The purpose in front will always mislead us. … When we carry out a policy, it begins to change. When we have to form specific regulations and provisions to see that that policy is carried out, often we find a  purpose developing that differs from that on which the policy was founded. Activity does more than embody purpose, it evolves purpose.
Activity does more than embody purpose, it evolves purpose. (For what purpose I am writing these blogs, anyway?)

Good Government

In a workshop on creative thinking participants were asked to assume that magic was really possible. What kind of magic would be the most desirable? In the end we concluded: good government.
Good government is managing a community, a province,  a state or a federation well. How to find out what good government is? By identifying what bad government is. Really bad government is unjust, cruel, arbitrary, corrupt. Unfortunately, even reasonably decent and reasonably intelligent people without ill-will can make a mess out of things. How?
Within the frame of a blog, we have to keep things simple. Looking around me, I see four things:

1. Policy not aligned to practical execution.
2. Execution not aligned to results.
3. Results not aligned to clients.
4. Results not evaluated or evaluations ignored or rejected.

Always the same measures are proposed: new laws and regulations, new budgets and either reorganizations or new institutions. Critical evaluation of proposals are routinely ignored. The results of measures are hardly evaluated, if ever. Managers are appointed that have no knowledge of, experienxe with or interest in the processes they are supposed to manage. If knowledgeable chiefs have mysteriously survived so far, they are eradicated and supplanted by 'professional' managers. Management is on numbers and PR-effects. Fortunately, both numbers and PR can be managed themselves.
If by any chance bad results can't be polished away, no one takes responsibility. Bringers of bad news are branded as suspicious, ill-informed outsiders. And if all else fails, the 'victims' are entitled to ample compensation for their stroke of bad luck and undeserved bad publicity. There is no correction, no learning, but excuses and accusations galore.
Policy-making is the preferred activity. Policy is vague and full of good intentions and positively looking for the future. It has more prestige, is better paid and much safer than practical execution. If 90% of policy-makers in the public domain would perish by a miraculous disease, and any policy function is only an episode in a career that is mainly in execution, the world would become an unrecognizably better place.
Strategy should be made by special meetings of practical managers and specialists, with one or two consultants (at most) and a few staffers who prepare those meetings - and know they may end up implementing their own recommendations.
Mancur Olson would know the recipe to get there: first a destructive totalitarian regime and than losing a great war bigtime. Are there other recipes? Not many. Almost all really successful periods of government were of societies just having been on the brink of disaster: Rome after Hannibal, the Netherlands after almost losing to the Spaniards, France right after the revolution. Wise, enlightened, forceful times without that are scarce. Maybe Prussia under Fredrick the Great qualifies and Britain, right after the Napoleonic wars. By the way, what is the first sign of good government? Fiscal prudence. No loans. No loans at all.