If you’ve ever read any books on goal achievement, or read any articles on the subject, I’m sure that you’ve heard the oft repeated phrase of “burning desire” or “white hot desire” or some other description. The idea being that you need to make sure that when you create a goal, it’s not some half baked wish that you kind of sort of hope might maybe come true someday, if everything goes ok, and as long as you don’t get in trouble. You need to charge your visualized picture of your realized goal with such strength of desire your brain will work on making it come true, even when you are not paying attention.
The problem is, few people have the discipline and the willpower to even create a visualization of a realized goal, let alone charge it several times a day with white hot burning desire. There are several reasons for this that I’d like to explore, and to come up with ways to help you create a goal, and charge it with sufficient desire in order to make it a reality, instead of some pie in the sky wish.
Imagine what it was like back in the old days. No, I don’t mean the old days before the Internet, I mean the really old days before agriculture. Many scientists believe that mankind lived in our present physical and mental state under the conditions prior to agriculture for at least a hundred thousand years. Living in groups of fifty to two hundred, life was tough. There wasn’t a consistent source of food, so we had to wander, and follow whatever we could to eat. Because humans are generally considered omnivores, meaning that we can eat pretty much anything, we generally took whatever we could find. Plants, animals, roots, each other.
In each group of hunter-gatherers, there was generally one “Alpha” male. Several studies done on chimps show that the alpha male gets most of the food, and most of the sex. The rest of us hacks had to fight for ours. Imagine what it was like living in this state. Always hungry. Living with desire as a constant companion, reminding us to always search and creatively think of ways to get our basic needs met.
Fast forward to today. When we’re hungry, we just stumble over to the fridge and shove food in our mouths. When we are thirsty, we drink. When we want sex, well, there’s always the Internet, if you catch my drift. We have come to think of any desire as a temporary inconvenience that needs to be quickly gotten rid of in the quickest way possible.
Is it any wonder so many people today are overweight, and underpaid? It is any wonder that so many of us drift through a life of mediocrity, never summoning the courage to demand from life what we really want?
The first step then, is to make friends with desire. Focus on the feeling of desire itself, instead of any frustration that comes up when it can’t be immediately pacified. Learn to live with desire. Hunger is your friend. It keeps you motivated to shun short-term sugary fixes, and focus your energies and creativity on more worthy, long-term goals.
The first step, of course, is to follow any good procedure to create well-formed goals. You can google “well formed goals” or search this site for ways to do this. When you have a well formed goal, the next step is to create three or four rich visualizations of what you will see, hear, feel, smell and taste when the goal is realized. Driving your new car, enjoying your new house, seeing and feeling the new paycheck. Choose three or four rich, descriptive, fully associated pictures of your goal. Once you have a few pictures, you need to charge them.
Whenever you feel a desire, pause for a few moments before rushing to fulfill it. Breathe in the desire and experience the feelings in the now. Let go of any thoughts about the future, or imaginations about the past. Fully feel your desire. Now while you are still feeling the emotional now feeling of your desire, focus on one of your visualizations. Focus on your visualization until the physical/emotional feeling of the desire subsides.
Experiment with putting off the short-term satisfaction of your desires. If you desire is for food, wait a few moments before eating. Realize that your feeling of hunger can be tapped to power your desire of your goal. If your desire is for water, pause, and imagine the desire as your goal. When you eat or drink, imagine your desire as being fulfilled. Practice as well with your breath. Exhale completely, and wait until you feel a real desire to breath. Before inhaling, experience your visualization. As you inhale and feel the sweet breath fill your lungs, see your goal being achieved as well. There’s a reason those who have achieved greatness describe their success and “eating drinking and breathing their goal.”
If you want to really turbo charge your desires, experiment with your sexual desires. Feel the sexual desire, release any imaginations and feel only the physical feeling. Then while feeling and appreciating that feeling and desire, visualize your goals. The more often you can do this, and the longer you can charge your goals each time, the better. Napoleon Hill devoted a whole chapter to this in “Think and Grow Rich.” You an google this as well and read the entire chapter, or even the book, online for free. I would recommend keeping your own copy handy to refer to when you are waiting in the dentists office or at Starbucks.
Desire can be a source of fantastic power, or daily frustration, all depending on how you use it in conjunction with your mind and imagination. Many people throughout history have known this, but few have been able to truly tap this power for incredible success. There is no reason why you can’t start now to create the life of your dreams.