SUCCESS IS ABOUT SETTING YOURSELF ON FIRE

This isn’t about flame wars on Twitter or the ‘net. This is about getting hot, so hot you are on fire. It is a metaphor for feeling an urgent need to get something done. This is usually a necessary step for attaining any level of success, although sometimes it is luck more than burning desire. However, even if luck was involved, to maintain or have even more success, you need a fire, some drive, a burning desire. That brings us to how that happens. Some people have been known to just sit there and wait for something to catch fire. However, that rarely happens. Usually, they just sit. But that’s not the path to success. You have to have a reason. Until you have that fire, success will likely be a rare thing. Once you know what your reason is, why you MUST succeed, you will have started to set yourself on fire (in a figurative sense, of course).

 
We always find time for the things we must do. Not the things someone else tells us we must do. Not the things society expects us to do. Not the things we said we’d do. The things WE decided MUST be done will be done. If it isn’t getting done, it’s not really a must, is it? By having a reason, and being on fire for that reason, by having a burning desire to get it done, you will find the time to work on it. And you will have the energy and the passion to keep doing it, even after the first few failures. And that comes from having a compelling reason. Those compelling reasons are usually something attached to a very powerful emotion. The burning desire to never be poor again. The burning desire to go to the moon (and back). The burning desire to get back to see family and friends. The burning desire to prove the doctors wrong (and walk again).

The answer is fairly simple. Where do you want success in your life, want it badly enough to get up and set yourself metaphorically on fire? We’ve all had days where things go badly for us. The difference between what we abandon and what we pick back up is our fire. If we have a fire, a compelling reason, we will find a way to try again, and do it over and over until we succeed. If we don’t, or we let the failure put out the fire, we’re done. We throw in the towel, we walk away, we quit. We give up, and that’s not the way to succeed.

When my friend was in college, he flunked out. He had become distracted and neglected his studies. Then events followed to their inevitable conclusion. He knew he had what it took to graduate, he just had to convince the school to let him back in. He equated a degree with success, and he was going to achieve it. His burning desire was to not be a failure. While he had not been a star at everything he tried, he managed to struggle out something reasonable, and walk away without having been an absolute failure. School was not going to be the first significant failure of his life!

He got a job, enrolled at the local Junior College, and proceeded to prepare for the process of getting back into school. He did well in his semester “off” grade-wise, and absolutely destroyed the re-entry tests. A quick interview to prove that he wasn’t a complete waste of their time and he was back in. He set himself on fire. If he had just waited, he would still be living in his mom’s basement. Actually, she’d have thrown him out long before now, but you get my point. He wanted it. He had a compelling reason. He took action. He had a plan. He made it happen. He achieved success, and you can as well.

What are your compelling reasons to do the things you do? We know why we eat, breathe, drink and all the usual things. But where in your life do you want to succeed? How badly do you want it? What are you willing to do to achieve it? What pain, suffering, even humiliation are you willing to put up with to achieve your goal? Make a list of the things at which you have succeeded in one column and a list of things which you have abandoned in the other. What is the difference between the two? Can you name the fire which drove each success? Can you name the fire for any of the things you abandoned?

What drives you? What is your burning desire? What is your compelling reason? If you have one, success is but a matter of iterations until it is yours. If you don’t, eventually, you won’t have the will or interest to do it again, and you will abandon it. What do you want badly enough to light yourself (metaphorically) on fire?

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