Desire

I’ve been playing Tennis since I was six years old. My coach and parents often said to me: “the one who desires the victory the most will win”. This has been one of the most fundamental lessons I’ve ever been taught.

Desire is fundamental.

If we don’t desire to live, we die.
If we don’t desire to win, we lose.
If we don’t desire to succeed, we fail.
If we don’t desire anything, we get nothing.

We can only move forward if we know where we want to go, otherwise we surrender to luck and circumstances. Lack of desire is one of the major causes of failure, but it’s also one that’s most easily fixed.

I believe that having a burning, insatiable desire for something (or someone) is the most powerful force of all. It can drive anybody to the top of any ladder.

But we must be careful not to mistake wishes for desires. Wishes are empty. We all wish for happiness and yet many of us fail.

Wishes are little more than self-delusion. Jim Rohn

A devastating principle that young students often mistakenly learn from school is that success (our personal achievements) is a function of our intelligence (or how “gifted” we are).

The smartest students usually get the best marks — that’s what we see when we’re schoolboys or schoolgirls. If you’re not smart, you’re meant to stay behind, so you’d better put off your dreams. This can have dramatic consequences because when there is no dreaming, there is no desire.

The “usually” is crucial here because it highlights the fact that this isn’t a rule but merely an observation, and a bad one. The rule is this: the students most willing to learn and work hard always get the best marks. Intelligence might give you a head-start but it doesn’t work by itself. No matter how far behind you start, you can always catch up.

Our only limitations are those we set up in our own minds. Napoleon Hill

Success moves toward those who search for progress but the search isn’t as easy as Google. It’s more like a treasure hunt: hard, on a rocky road strewn with pitfalls and traps, often discouraging to the point where quitting feels like the only option. But even in these difficult moments, if the promise of the future is clear, the hunter won’t quit and the treasure will reveal itsef to him.

A common characteristic of all successful men and women is that they kept on going. How can we do that when everything that’s around us seems to work against us? By having a burning desire for being the one in our dreams, because that will make us do whatever it takes to make our dreams happen.

The moment we start believing in our dreams is the moment they come true.