Wishes

We might say there are three steps that desires must go through in order to become reality.

The first one is the intensity of desire.

The second one is the confident patience for the wish to come true.

The third one is the persistent and constant will directed towards the desire itself.

At the base of any desire stays its intensity, and the more difficult it is to become true, the more intensity grows together with our longing for it to become reality.

The intensity of desire is the fire that lights the fuse that will make our capabilities ignite, a fundamental element without which our potential bomb could not be triggered at all.

Such intensity will determine the degree to which we will be able to yearn for that desire.

This happens because wishes that come about as temporary whims and just fade away to leave place to other whims won’t ever become reality and will always lack the right amount intensity to translate into reality.

The intensity of desires is what pushes us to fight in order to make them become true, as this is precisely the way we should think about that intensity: as a struggle aimed at conquering what we long for.

However, this strength alone is not enough, as it inexorably wanes if you make mistakes on the second step of realization, that is, the wait for our wish to become true sooner or later, the determination not to give up upon the first hit or the first fall to the ground.

The wait is a mandatory and fundamental step.

Think about the plan to build a house, something that is born out of the desire to have a house with a particular structure.

Once I settle this, the house does not automatically become reality.

It actually needs time to be built and unexpected events might occur during the construction process, something that would affect the initial plan and lengthen the wait.

However, the builder with a steady goal in his mind will not give up against those issues and will eventually get what he longs for.

Whatever the desire is, be it something that implies being in a particular way or getting something from the outside world, the right attitude is believing that the wish will become true sooner or later precisely because we will keep wanting it to.

In other words, I won’t ever get anything if I don’t even expect I will be able to get something and if I don’t lead my inner world towards a particular destination, through desire.

All of this can easily be misunderstood because, as one might argue: “I want to be rich” – but an old proverb says “He who lives hoping…”. [1] (#ulink_b5c5039c-becd-5039-a8d3-1b1511768154)

We’re not referring here to simple hope but rather to confident wait.

I know I will get that particular thing because my desire is strong and my will is constantly directed at the achievement of my objective.

To rephrase, a desire is forcefully originated in the realm of thoughts and such desire becomes a confident wait in my feelings which, combined with my will, push towards the direction of its realization.

This is not mere mental conjecture: If we looked at anything that has been invented or to any achieved result, and so forth we would realize that it has all gone through this way.

Everything that exists couldn’t have existed at all without the presence of a desire for it to be, first of all on a mental level.

Any idea is born out of desire.

Even Archimedes in his bath tub, when he was hit by the intuition that made him utter “Eureka!”, had the wish to discover that thing, otherwise the idea would’ve simply waned and disappeared in absence of fertile soil and a mind suited to understand and put things in practice.

Self-confidence is the best quality we can master, it’s the fundamental ingredient in order to achieve success in addition to hope (in the sense of optimism), and both must go through rationality.

Without optimism, confidence or hope our energies just die out, we stop fighting and we throw in the towel.

We’re now arrived at the third necessary step, that of the will constantly directed towards achievement.

Will is an exceptional strength at our disposal and it literally enables us to turn the world upside down.

Will is powerful and unlimited in terms of availability and capability.

This means that if we want something – hence we wish for it in the first place – and if we turn steadily towards what we want we will eventually get it (here’s the concept of confident wait) exactly because we went through all these necessary steps.

However, will needs something to trigger it and that is nothing but the burning desire.

Here’s how the circle closes and opens all over again.

There’s no escape from this law: if one applies it, the goal will always be achieved, even if – as we said before – things were the other way around.

If we didn’t wish for a certain thing (which still makes it a wish), that constant thought turned into confident wait and we also acted through our force of will by wishing that particular thing not to happen at all.

Will is acting concretely in order to turn our wish into reality and it is also what turns the mechanism on.

Most of the people who think they cannot make their wishes come true think so because they long for something passively, just dreaming or imagining it.

They lack the fundamental confidence to believe that wish to be feasible and, as a consequence, they cannot draw from their will in order to act towards the wish itself.

We just need to know this and put it in practice.

If we don’t manage to do it, that is because of the presence of elements that frustrate our efforts. We’ll deal with these in the following pages.

We’ll then see what mechanisms trigger within us and sabotage one or all of the steps, preventing us to reach our goals.

[1] (#ulink_b200ba99-faa8-5a18-a418-b32af072e13b) The complete translation of the Italian proverb would be “He who lives hoping will die shitting”

CARPE DIEM

"Gather ye rosebuds when it's time, that time you know that flies

and the same flower that blooms today tomorrow will wither. "

Walt Whitman

Carpe diem, that is, seize the day.

With this concept we start analyzing what stops or limits our success, our achievements and the positive outcome of our desires.

Carpe Diem is a Latin locution from the Latin poet Horace ( Odes, 1, 11, 8), and its literal translation is “ seize the day”, often adapted in “ seize the moment”, a phrase which is now of everyday use thanks to the film Dead Poets Society. [1] (#litres_trial_promo)

To be thorough, we should quote the full sentence, which goes on like this: “ …quam minimum credula postero”, that is, “ having the least amount of confidence in tomorrow as possible”.