Motivation: The Burning Desire

"Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire, which transcends everything." -- Napoleon Hill

One of the most important issues of this generation is that of the lack of motivation. Be it in education, career, health, social life, relationships, spiritual development, self improvement or personal development, one of the keys to accomplishing anything in life is having the will and desire to initiate something and more importantly, taking it till the end.

Nowadays, what most commonly happens is that people set out to achieve a particular task, face hardships, find it difficult to manage and before they know it, they have no motivation left to complete the task they had set out for. When they lose the motivation to achieve their desire, they start to have a feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction as they see that they are not going towards what they had hoped of achieving. This happens with almost all of us at some time or the other and those that have both short term as well as long term negative effects.

At this point, the motivation has to be regenerated so that we can bounce back and get back on track. The question is HOW and WHO? Who is responsible for generating this motivation and how is it going to be done? Will your employer generate it for you? Will your trainer or teacher inject in some motivation? Maybe your friends and family or some aliens from the unknown who are going to make you think and realize that something needs to be done and get you up and running? Unfortunately, none of the above can do anything to motivate you.

The fact of the matter is that motivation always comes from within. It is not something that others can instill in you or force you to do. One needs to have a burning desire to do and to achieve a certain goal.

An excellent quote by Chris Widener says:

"The measure of your success usually comes down to who wins the battle that rages between the two of you. The `you' who wants to stop, give up, or take it easy and the `you' who chooses to beat back that which would stand in the way of your success - complacency."Now, the issue is of having that burning desire and finding the `YOU' who chooses to beat back that which would stand in the way of your success.

Remember, motivation is something that needs to be renewed every once in a while. So there are certain actions that we need to take in order to ensure that the motivation is not lost at any point. Even if it is decreased, we can take these steps to get all the motivation we need back. Let us see some ways in how we can do that.

1. A Mission, Vision and a Strategy

Before you start working towards a goal or a purpose, you need to make sure that you have a vision, a mission, a strategy and a clear picture as to what you exactly want to achieve. It is more like a starting a business. When we start out a business we have a vision, the mission and an action plan. We have a written plan and strategy as to what we want to achieve, how we want to achieve it and by what time do we exactly plan to achieve it.

This can be applied to all areas of life. We need to create a picture in our minds of where we want to be. When we see ourselves doing something we want to achieve, it becomes closer to life and easier to accomplish. In other words, you should have a strong focus and a direction. Without a focus and a direction to move in, there is no way that you can be motivated as you will not know what you want to be motivated for.

2. Motive to act

As mentioned earlier, one should have a vision and a strategy but at the same time there should also be a concrete motive and reason for trying to get to that vision through your strategy. Why do you want to achieve what you want? There might be several different types of motives depending on your goals.

Maybe you want to achieve something because it is a dream that you always wanted to accomplish, maybe there are certain benefits associated with the purpose that would help you in life in the long term, maybe it is something that will give you inner peace and satisfaction with life or you might even have a motive of obtaining and accomplishing a particular cause so that you may avoid any unpleasant consequences as a result of that.

3. Take a break

It is important that we take a break every now and then. Going through the same routine over and over again takes out the zing out of the efforts that you are putting in. Take a couple of days off and relax, do something different and get back to it. For example, we want to go to the gym or exercise regularly but after we have been doing it continuously for some time we tend to feel de-motivated and start getting tired of it. At this moment, it is important that we slow down, relax, re-motivate ourselves and start at it again. This way you take a break, we do not completely stop doing it and start refreshed.

4. Get results and Reward yourself

The most effective way of motivating yourself is by getting good results. Once you have put in the required effort, you are bound to get good results. Seeing these results is a great motivation in itself. When you feel the pleasure of achieving something and get a feel of how things would be when you have finally achieved it all, will give you a sudden boost and you will work even harder towards your goals.

As we know that every main goal is composed of numerous small goals. The obtainment of each small goal leads to the achievement of the main goal. Therefore, at this moment another good idea is to reward yourself for each small goal and every success that you have, regardless of how small that success is. Once you start rewarding yourself, the excitement of these small rewards will help in achieving the bigger goal and hence result in increased motivation.

"Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try." -- Author Unknown

Thus, we can conclude by saying that all one needs is to know what you want and why you want it. When that is crystal clear, the burning desire to reach the goal will keep you moving forward. You only need to periodically provide wind to the burning desire.