You make excellent points. Perhaps some of those burning desires arose from once smoldering embers?!

I struggled with SMART goal setting as a useful process for the longest time – mainly because of the sterility that they are promoted with in the corporate world down at the cube farm level.

But I believe it’s a different matter up in the C-level suites and boardrooms where wealth-driven goals are raging furnaces of desire for some of those folks. And I have seen them in action and felt their heat rays myself lol!)

From the tone of your post (which I enjoyed btw), I recommend you to read Robert Fritz’s book “The Path of Least Resistance”. He’s withering in his contempt for what’s loosely labeled as ‘self-help’ and the culture of dependency and addiction it encourages (with a burning passion, no doubt). Anyway, a good read imho.

There’s a Brian Tracy quote that goes: “Success equals goals and all else is commentary”.

Replace the word “goal” with “burning desire” and I think the meanings (and probable outcomes) are the same.

regards
mark

As they say: there are many roads to Rome. Desire helps. And external expectations helps too.

But desire is something over which you have very little control. Where as you can channel external expectations.

I tend to look at artists for inspiration in getting things done. And if you study the lives of great artists, you’ll find that many of them would have been unknowns without external expectation.

Da Vinci. Genius without a doubt. But didn’t finish many of his inventions. If only he had some one to nudge him to finish what he started, we would have had the helicopter 300 years earlier.

Asimov. Had an affliction that made him write constantly – 8 hours a day. But he wrote a lot of non-fiction that no one liked to read. Without his editor forcing him, we would never have had the later books of the Foundation series (Foundation is his best series of books imho).

Both of them – Da Vince and Asimov – had burning desires. But it takes external expectation to get things done that one may not particularly like to do.

There is nothing like peer pressure to get you do things you wouldn’t necessarily do.

The whole success of AA stands on External Expectation. Very few alcoholics would be disciplined enough to stop drinking without a peer group – no matter how burning their desire is to stop drinking.

I can go on and on (and I’m sure you can too – on the topic of burning desires). In summary: a burning desire is a good thing to have. But I prefer external expectation because it can be channeled better.

In the case of the Williams sisters, I certainly hope they love tennis, but their success could because they had a desire to please their parents when they were very young. The Williams sisters did not choose their parents and I doubt they chose their tennis coaches and trainers at first.

When I am doing work for a client, I am very concerned about meeting their expectations, but my desire to do the work in way they find remarkable and valuable precedes that. Desire doesn’t come from expectations, expectations come from desire. Desire is the fire in which expectations are forged.

Desire does not come from society, it comes from within an individual, from the heart. My family expects me to make money and support them. I could easily be a failure and disappoint them, but I feel very strongly about my role as a co-provider for my family. This has nothing to do with their expectations of me, but it has everything to do with my expectations of myself. There are plenty of unfortunate families whose fathers and mothers are failing them everyday because they lack the desire to achieve despite expectations placed on them.

Millions of Comcast and Verizon customers expect decent customer service, and they never get it, because the people running those companies have no desire to provide it.

A powerful combination occurs when both the desires and the expectations of people match. I think the amazing championship yeas of the Chicago Bulls is a wonderful example of this. There was amazing synergy between coach Jackson, Jordan, Pippin, and the rest of the team.

If your heart is not in something, and you merely create a goal because it is expected of you, you are very likely to fail. Every person who is in debt says they have a goal to get out of debt, and yet they remain in debt for years until their hand is forced. Why? Because they didn’t have any real desire to get out of debt, even though there is a lot of expectation to do so by society, credit reporting companies, collections agencies, and so forth.

If I have a burning desire to accomplish something, I don’t need to use other people as a psychological crutch to do it. I will have allies in those with similar desires, however, and that, I think, would be quite a “mastermind” group.

Thanks again for contributing your thoughts and ideas!

To take you one step ahead: Its not desire, but expectation that moves the world.

Why did the Williams sisters become tennis pros? Why did the Polgar sisters become chess grandmasters?

Where did their burning desires come from?

Their burning desire came from external expectation.

You could call it “dragging people into a psychological game” – but it works in creating burning desires. It helps people get important but un-likeable things done.

That is why masters like Edison had mastermind groups (Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs and Luther Burbank created the “vagabond” mastermind group.)