Plato Was Asked Two Questions

The Real Story Behind Plato's Two Questions

You've probably seen the image circulating online: a stone doorway with the words "Know Thyself" and "Nothing in Excess" carved above it, supposedly from the entrance to Plato's Academy. There's also a third inscription often added in these reproductions, which reads something like "Plato was asked two questions: Who are you? What do you want?" This whole thing is mostly a modern fabrication, but the underlying idea has some actual depth to it if you strip away the Instagram wallpaper version. The fragmentary attribution to Plato is almost certainly not authentic. The "Know Thyself" inscription (gnothi seauton) is genuinely ancient and is associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, not Plato's Academy. The "Nothing in Excess" (mede agan) is also Delphic. Someone in the late 20th or early 21st century apparently combined these with two fabricated questions and attributed the whole thing to Plato, and it just stuck because it sounds profound and fits neatly into self-help frameworks. That said, the two questions themselves aren't terrible. "Who are you?" and "What do you want?" map reasonably well onto actual Platonic concerns. In the Republic, Plato spends a massive amount of time trying to define what justice is — essentially asking "what is it?" about abstract concepts. The theory of Forms is basically an extended exercise in answering "who or what are you?" for things like Goodness, Beauty, and Justice. And Plato's entire ethical framework revolves around understanding what the soul actually wants, which is closer to the second question than people sometimes realize.

How to Actually Use These Questions

The way most people approach this is entirely wrong. They read the two questions once, feel vaguely motivated, and then move on. That's not how you get anything out of them. Here's what actually happens when you sit down with these properly. For "Who are you?" you need to go deeper than the standard identity labels. You know your name, your job title, maybe your hobbies. That's surface stuff. The question is asking you to identify what's actually driving your behavior. In my experience working with people on decision-making frameworks, the version that works looks like this: you write down every role you play — partner, employee, friend, citizen, whatever — and then for each one you identify the principle you're actually operating from. Not the principle you think you should be operating from. The principle that shows up when you're tired, stressed, or making split-second decisions. That's the real answer to "who are you?" The second question, "What do you want?" is where things get uncomfortable. Most people confuse their wants with their obligations or their borrowed desires. I had a client last year — senior engineer, three kids, making good money — who went through this exercise and realized he had spent twelve years climbing a ladder that was leaning against the wrong building. He wasn't actually interested in management. He liked building things. The title and the pay were just what he thought he wanted because that's what his environment told him. We spent about forty-five minutes just unpacking that one, and it changed the trajectory of his next two years more than any career counseling session ever had.

The Practical Method

Here's how you actually run through this. I use a modified version of this with clients and it takes about twenty to thirty minutes if you're doing it right. First, take a physical notebook. Not your phone. The act of writing by hand slows your thinking down enough that you actually encounter thoughts you'd otherwise filter out. Write "Who am I?" at the top of a page. Then write every answer that comes to mind for thirty seconds without stopping. Don't edit. Don't judge. Just fill the page. When you run out of obvious answers, go deeper. Ask yourself what value you provide, what you refuse to compromise on, what patterns show up across different areas of your life. Those patterns are your actual identity. Everything else is costume. Flip the page. Write "What do I want?" Same exercise. Thirty seconds. No filtering. Then go through that list and cross out everything that isn't actually yours. If you're crossing something out because someone else would be disappointed if you didn't want it, that's not your want. That's obligation dressed up as desire. Keep going until the remaining items are things you'd pursue even if nobody knew about them.

When This Doesn't Work

I should be straight about the limitations. This exercise assumes you have enough mental clarity and emotional stability to actually look at yourself honestly. People going through active crisis — severe depression, acute grief, financial emergency — will get very little out of this and might even make things worse by confronting gaps between who they are and who they want to be while they're already struggling. In those cases, stabilization comes first. The questions are still valid, but the timing is wrong. Another common failure mode is treating this as a one-time thing. It's not. The answers change. I've watched people redo this exercise quarterly and get completely different results each time, which is exactly what should happen. If your answers to "who are you" and "what do you want" stay the same for more than a year, you're probably lying to yourself on one of them. The biggest practical issue I see is that people conflate the two questions. "Who am I?" and "What do I want?" are separate. Your identity is descriptive. Your desires are directional. Mixing them up leads to justifications like "I'm the kind of person who wants X" when really you're using your self-concept as a shield against examining whether you actually want it. Keep them apart. Answer them separately. Compare the answers afterward to see if there's alignment.