2. Define Your Desire
A burning desire lights your fire to change and achieve what you want from life and, maintaining your faith with the feeling of the desire achieved delivers the outcome.
The secret to a life well lived is a combination of pursuing your burning desire at each stage of your life, finding purpose as you explore life and achieving a place where you feel worthy of that burning desire.
First, you must DECIDE if you want more and if you want to start the journey to find what you desire and why you don’t already have that which you desire. A major part of the journey is the examination of your internal world, as your internal world reflects into your external world, and you need to work out what needs changing in your internal world to achieve your new desires.
Daydreaming is wishing without action, imagining without feeling. It might be because the daydream is too far from your current reality.
Well, now the interesting part. The research all concludes that we are born as magnificent humans who can achieve whatever we believe we can achieve. Our only limits are the limits we place on ourselves, those paradigms which stop the mind from believing it can achieve what it can imagine.
A massive insight for me was that whatever my current circumstances might be, they do not limit my future prosperity.
That insight came when I learned and accepted two important concepts:
the importance of the power of imagination when combined with emotion, faith and inspired action
that your external world reflects your internal world, not the other way round
A big call you might say given some of the situations people are in, however, when you fully comprehend the above two points, you will be able to access your power to change.
This mindset shift, to “what I can imagine I can achieve”, can happen at any time of life and some people find this shift, this decision to change their mindset, arrives in times of crisis. A crisis may be the trigger because the pain of the effort to change is less than the pain of staying in the current situation.
A well quoted poem attributed to Jessie Belle Rittenhouse is:
”I bargained with Life for a penny, and Life would pay no more.
However I begged at the evening when I counted my scanty store.
For Life is a just employer, he gives you what you ask.
But once you have set the wages, why, you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial's hire, only to learn, dismayed, that any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have willingly paid.”
The poem discusses bargaining for a wage for employment, but take that insight to ask from life anything you want. An opulent life is not all about money, but money helps you live an opulent life. I recall a quote by Richard Branson although not sure if these are his exact words:
“People think I am happy because I am rich but that is not correct. I am rich because I am happy.”
The definition of an opulent life is best captured in a passage in Thomas Troward’s book, The Hidden Power (my changes in italics):
“If you have realised the spirit of opulence you cannot help drawing to yourself material good as well as that higher value of wealth which is not measurable by a money standard; and because you truly understand the spirit of opulence you will neither affect to despise this form of good, nor will you attribute to it a value that does not belong to it; instead you will coordinate it with your other interior forms of wealth (joy, peace, grace, ease, calm, empathy, serving) so as to make it the material instrument smoothing the way (flow, circulation) for their more perfect expression (as my soul is here to express itself and live large).”
Providing more detail,
Napoleon Hill captures the 12 Riches of Life as follows and please note that money is last:
Positive Mental Attitude (which has 12 individual riches, including connection with nature)
Sound Physical Health
Harmony in Human Relationships
Freedom from Fear
Hope of Achievement
Capacity of Faith
Willingness to Share One’s Blessings
Labour of Love of Your Choice
Open Mind on All Subjects
Self-discipline
Capacity to Understand People
Financial Security
