Schopenhauer argued that most people live inside a vast theater of wanting — always projecting themselves toward a future state where things will finally be right, finally complete. What he noticed, almost as a footnote to his pessimism, was more interesting than the pessimism itself: the self revealed in that wanting is not the self you think you are. It's the self you've been avoiding. The wanting is a kind of misdirection. For a product manager, this has a specific texture: you spend enormous cognitive energy on what to build next, what to fix, what the roadmap should become — and almost none on the character of the person doing all that deciding. Schopenhauer called the thing beneath the wanting Wille — not 'will' in the motivational-poster sense, but a blind, insistent drive that operates before reason gets there. His insight, strange and useful, is that you can observe it from the outside. When you notice yourself repeatedly drawn toward the same kind of problem, the same kind of conflict, the same kind of product bet — that pattern is not strategy. It's the self, showing up in disguise. Friday is good for this: before you close the week, don't ask what you accomplished. Ask what you kept reaching for, even when the evidence didn't support it.

Strip away what you were supposed to care about this week — the deadlines, the stakeholder asks, the metrics. What did you actually keep gravitating toward, uninvited?

Drawing from German Idealism / Voluntarist Philosophy — Arthur Schopenhauer — The World as Will and Representation (1818), particularly Volume I's analysis of the will as the underlying substrate of selfhood, prior to rational cognition