Napoleon Hill said that they key to manifesting your dreams is to “Define your dream and get a burning desire for it’s achievement.”
He didn’t just randomly write this down as a theoretical concept that popped into his head one day.
He spent over 20 years researching some of the richest people on the planet at the turn of the century and after spending thousands of hours interviewing, researching, distilling and testing the success principles he learned from them he realized that one of the most powerful keys to success boils down to two things:
- Define Your Dream
- Get a Burning Desire for It’s Achievement
The first thing we have to do is get absolutely clear on what our “Dream” is in life.
What’s most important to you? What is your mission? What do you want from your life?
I’m not going to go too much into depth on that concept because in this post I want to focus on the second part a bit more.
The second thing Napoleon Hill said we needed was a “burning desire for it’s achievement.”
He didn’t say “Define your dream and have a mild preference for achieving it…” and he didn’t say “Define your dream and get a don’t really care if you achieve it or not.”
He didn’t even say “Define your dream and get a desire for it’s achievement.”
He said “Define your dream and get a BURNING DESIRE for it’s achievement.”
But Isn’t Desire Bad?
One concept that is sometimes taught in certain spiritual circles is the concept that desire is bad.
The roots of this teaching come from Buddhism. Buddha observed that “life is suffering” and he discovered that the cause of suffering in life comes from “desire” and “ignorance”.
I have absolutely nothing against the teachings of Buddha, he sounds like a cool dude and I’d love to hang out with him and discuss life and spirituality, but then again another one of his teachings is that “if you meet the Buddha, kill him” so I’m not really sure how that would work out. 🙂
Here’s my point though related to desire.
Buddha’s teachings were about enlightenment, which essentially means the process of letting go of this life as a human being and ascending to a spiritual realm.
His statement “life IS suffering” means that being here, as a spiritual being in human form, you are in a state of “suffering”.
Why would he say that? Well, because compared to the eternal bliss of being a fully enlightened “spirit” with no Ego – ie. God / Universe / etc. – compared to THAT, our life here on earth in these human bodies IS suffering.
We have these human bodies, and these bodies have desires and we are not “All knowing” which means that compared to God/Universe we are “ignorant”, and so we “suffer”.
BUT here’s the thing…
… YOU’RE HERE right now… in a human body, aren’t you?
You’re not “Enlightened” (yet)…
… therefore, compared to God/Universe you ARE ignorant, and you DO have desires.
That is just how we are made – as human beings.
I don’t think that trying to PRETEND like we don’t have desires is going to help us in life.
As a spiritual being inside a human body, you DO have desires.
When you get hungry, you have a desire to EAT.
When you get thirsty, you have a desire to DRINK.
When you’re lonely, you have a desire for companionship.
When you’re bored, you have a desire for excitement.
When you’re stressed out and tired, you have a desire to rest.
There is NOTHING wrong with having these desires!
And there is NOTHING wrong with the desire to want to be RICH or to MAKE MORE MONEY!
Unless of course your Dream in life is to be a Buddhist Monk!
IF that is your Desire…. to become a Buddhist Monk or a Christian Monk for that matter, and to take a vow of poverty, then that’s awesome and I’m very happy for you…
… but I can’t really help you, and neither can Napoleon Hill, because we are NOT here to teach people how to be monks.
Napoleon Hill didn’t write a book called “Stop Having Desires and Become a Monk”.
He wrote a book called “Think and Grow Rich” as well as another book called “The Laws of Success in 16 Lessons”.
What you have to DECIDE right now is this…
Do You Want to Be Rich, or Do You Want to Be a Monk?
Ask yourself… is YOUR dream in life to become a monk?
If so, stop reading, join a Monastery or a Church and pursue that path with all the passion you have for it.
But if that is NOT your dream, then STOP allowing people to fill your head with beliefs that in any way, shape or form say that desire is bad.
Desire is NOT bad (unless you want to be a monk).
IF you want to be successful in life, you have to learn to CREATE BURNING DESIRE.
But you’re not going to do that if in the back of your mind you’ve been programmed to think that desire is bad or “undesirable”. 🙂
If you want to be FINANCIALLY FREE in life or if you want to manifesting something like a new car or a passive income stream, or if you want to lose weight or meet the love of your life, you MUST learn to CREATE and EMBRACE DESIRE.
As Napoleon Hill said…“Define your dream and GET A BURNING DESIRE for it’s achievement.”
In future blog posts I’m going to dive more in depth into the concept of creating desire and how to create BURNING desire and how it differs from regular desire.
In this post though I just wanted to bring to your attention that there are different paths for different people out there.
If you want to achieve things in your life, if you have dreams that you’d like to manifest, then you have to become very aware and careful NOT to allow people to program your mind with this concept of desire somehow being a “bad” thing.
It’s not a bad thing. It’s a GREAT thing.
All great human achievements have started with DESIRE.
Desire is one of the most powerful things that a human being can learn to create inside themselves.
Napoleon Hill discovered this “secret” and was completely blown away at how powerful a human being can be IF they learn to understand what desire is, how to create it, and how to create what he called BURNING DESIRE.
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