The Purple Porsche and the Difference Between Wanting and Knowing

I was nine years old in the back seat of my dad's car when a purple Porsche 911 pulled up beside us at a red light. I didn't know what kind of car it was. I didn't know what it cost or what it represented. But something inside me said, clear as anything I'd ever heard: I want that.

Not someday. Not when I grow up. Not if I work hard enough.

Just: I want that.

There was no negotiation in it. No performance. It wasn't a wish I was making to the universe or a goal I was setting for my future self. It was quieter than that. Simpler. It felt like recognition, not aspiration.

I didn't tell anyone. I didn't write it down or put it on a vision board. I just knew it the way you know your own name. And then the light turned green and we drove on.

I've thought about that moment a lot over the years. Not because I ended up with a purple Porsche—though I did, eventually, drive cars I would have pointed at as a kid. But because that moment taught me something I didn't have language for until much later: there is a difference between wanting something and knowing something.

Wanting vs Knowing

Wanting lives in the future. It's aspirational. It carries hope and effort and a little bit of doubt. Wanting says: if I do this, then maybe I'll get that. It's transactional. Conditional. There's distance built into it.

Knowing lives in the present. It doesn't hope or negotiate. It doesn't perform or convince. Knowing is calm. Sourceless. It doesn't need evidence because it is the evidence. When you genuinely know something—not believe it, not want it, but know it—the universe doesn't argue. It organizes around you.

David Cameron Gikandi calls this wealth consciousness. Not the accumulation of things, but the awareness that what you are seeking already exists. Not out there. In here. The purple Porsche wasn't something I had to earn my way toward. It was something I recognized as mine before I had any business thinking that way.

That's the part we get wrong. We think the work is to convince ourselves. To build belief. To stack evidence until we finally feel worthy of claiming what we want. But belief is still negotiating. Knowing doesn't negotiate.

The soul doesn't speak in future tense. It doesn't say maybe or someday or if you work hard enough. It says: that's yours. And then it waits for you to stop arguing.

I write about this tension every week in the Win The Day dispatch—the space between what the soul knows and what the mind is still trying to prove. It's where most of the pressure lives. And it's where most of the power is.

So here's what I'm sitting with: What would change if you stopped treating your deepest knowing like a wish you have to earn your way toward, and started treating it like a memory of something that's already true?