What Do You Really Desire?

As a writer, I also read a lot.  In fact I read about a book a week.  The iPad has made that much easier since I can take that thing just about anywhere.

Many of the books I read are in the self help or self improvement areas.  Others are classified as literary and a few even as religion.  One of the underlying principles of just about every one of these books is the requirement that you know what you want.  After all, the chances of getting somewhere without knowing where you are going are pretty slim.

There really is a whole lot more, and in simple terms it looks more like this.  First you must define success for you.  You must know what a "successful" life is.  When cornered with this question, most people can't answer it.  I would venture a guess those are the same 85% of the workforce that aren't happy at work.

If you can't define success you can't achieve it.

The next step is to know what parts of that definition of success are important to you.  If you define success as "being a billionaire" and then only want to be a "millionaire", chances are you will do neither.

The most important aspect of living a fulfilled and "successful" life stems from desire.  Simple "needs" and "wants" won't get you there.  Most of us would say we want a Rolls Royce when standing in front of one, but how many desire it enough to get one?

There is a big difference between wants and desires.  Desire is that deep down drive that keeps you up writing at 2 am.  It is that deep down drive that lets you ride the bus to work to save enough for a downpayment on your first house.  It is that drive that gets you up at 4 am or keeps you working all night to make it to the next step.  Desire keeps you moving towards your own success.  Unless you let people tell you that you won't make it and you believe them.  If you let that happen, you bury your desire so deep you forget it even existed.

Sadly, most people have buried their desire so deep, they probably won't remember them during their adult life.  Remember the Monster.com commercial with kids saying things like "I want to get lost in a middle management job"?  That commercial rang true with a lot of people and for good reason.  Most people forgot what they wanted to do when they grow up so they never did it either.

As a child I remember that I wanted to "be rich" and "fly jets".  Well I have definitely done the latter.  I was lucky in that I could  define "fly jets" to the point that I made it into and graduated from Air Force Pilot Training, and was blessed with a great 20 year run in the Air Force, Air Force Reserves and Air National Guard.  My desire was only to "fly jets".  It wasn't a specific jet or even type of jet, and the outcome of my military life showed exactly that desire.  I flew jets, lots of jets, and still do.

If I had wanted to "fly fighters", or better yet "fly an F-16", my military career might have been very different.  Instead I only made the sacrifice and efforts required to "fly jets".  In pilot training it was easy to see who "wanted to fly jets" and who had a "desire to fly jets".   Luckily I had desire so I made it through.  The guys and gals I knew that didn't, had the brains and the skills, they simply lacked desire.

On the "get rich" front, I did even worse.  I didn't define "rich" as a "billionaire" or even a "millionaire".  I defined "rich" as having enough money to drive a new car and eat out as much as I wanted.

Since that was how I defined it,  that was exactly how I lived.  This system eventually failed though because I was running up all kinds of debt.  There is nothing worse than getting called into the commanders office because you spent more than you made so you could "be rich".   The Air Force gave me some financial counseling which was all the more embarrassing since I had a business degree.  I still wasn't "rich" I just stopped being "young and fabulous" as Suze Orman might call it.

The truth is I was having so much fun flying jets, in my world, I was rich, just not in the traditional financial sense of the rest of the world  Because of how much fun I was having,  I had no desire to make more money.  The problem was I couldn't deposit fun into the bank to cover dinner.  I got lucky here and there, but the overall truth is my efforts weren't sustainable by any means.

When my wife was diagnosed with cancer (she is healthy and cancer free now), my outlook changed dramatically.  I finally started to get a clear picture of how desire works.  That was exactly the problem I was having financially, I didn't have a clear picture.

If you ever find yourself wondering about doing something, look deep at your desires.  Does whatever you want to do help you achieve your desires or not.  If not, don't do it.  Eventually one of two things will happen.  You will decide you really just wanted something and it wasn't really a desire, so you'll give up on it.  Or you will achieve it because you really did desire it more than you wanted something else and you didn't let anything get in your way.

Dig deep for your desires, get a clear picture of them and go get them.  Don't let anything hold you back, you only live this life one time, make it the best you can.