Creativity Quote by Cat Stevens

A Cat Stevens line like this lands with the quiet force of a chord change: simple on the surface, but it rearranges the room once you sit with it. "To be what you want to be" frames desire as an active project, not a daydream. Then comes the hard trade: "you must give up being what you are". The sting is in the grammar. It doesn't say you should add something, or improve yourself. It says you have to relinquish something - identity as baggage, selfhood as a habit.

Stevens was never just writing about self-help ambition. His work and public arc orbit the tension between worldly success and inward clarity. Read in that light, the line sounds less like hustle culture and more like renunciation: growth as subtraction, not accumulation. "What you are" isn't necessarily your essence; it's the version of you shaped by routines, appetites, other people's expectations, the roles you learned to perform because they were rewarded. Wanting becomes a kind of spiritual pressure that exposes how much of the self is scaffolding.

The subtext is bracingly anti-comfort. It suggests that transformation isn't primarily about willpower; it's about grief. You don't merely upgrade your life - you mourn the old one, including the familiar defenses that kept you intact. Coming from a musician whose career threaded fame, introspection, and a widely discussed turn toward faith and a different public identity, the line reads as a lived thesis: reinvention costs, and the bill is paid in the currency of the self you thought you couldn't survive without.