Find the fire within.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny
matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What gets you fired up?
What gets your heart pumping and your juices flowing?
Is it success?
Money?
Accolades?
Winning?
Happiness?
Leisure?
Power?
Prestige?
Big houses, fancy cars, important titles, and a little "bling bling"
are all nice, but they don't produce the high-octane rocket fuel we
need to launch us on a path toward lasting success and happiness in life.
Why do Bill Gates and Warren Buffett continue to get up early each
morning to go to work?
Why did Michael Jordan come out of retirement not
once, but twice after he had already made his mark in the record books?
Why does Jane Goodall continue living part of
her life in the jungles of Africa when she has already contributed so much?
The reason is surprisingly simple: happiness in life is not about money,
fame, recognition, or even competition.
Successful people love what they do and feel compelled to express the best that
is within them.
They don't strive to be better than their neighbors or contemporaries—they
strive to be better than themselves.
For them, pushing the threshold of their "gifts potential" is
reward enough.
If you truly desire to be the best you can be, you must find the fire within
yourself.
It's intrinsic; it must come from within you.
It's bigger than a goal or a dream, it's expressing who you truly
are and proving to yourself—and the world—what you are capable of achieving.
I honestly don't believe there's a single unmotivated person in the
world.
What most people call unmotivated, I call uninspired.
What most people call lazy, I call bored.
And there's always hope for these uninspired,
bored people.
But there's only one way for them to find it: discover their gift,
pursue their passion, and catch a glimpse of their true potential.
The trick to realizing a dream is to get beyond wishing and hoping by
igniting a burning desire.
To start, examine your thoughts.
Are you "success conscious"?
Cognitive psychologists have shown that "outlook" governs
"outcome," and what we focus on is often what we get.
When we focus on bad things, bad things tend to happen.
When we focus on good things, good things tend to happen.
For example, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was stricken with polio at age
thirty-nine, everyone—including his family and closest friends—urged him
to retire.
"No one is going to vote for a handicapped politician," they said.
Fortunately for us and for the rest of the world, Roosevelt refused to listen.
He focused on the positive—and look how far it took him and his country.
Or take Albert Einstein.
His seventh-grade teacher's prediction that young
Albert "would never get anywhere in life" produced a burning discontent in
the boy that became the fuel for his fire.
Despite setbacks in school, he persevered, and, of course, his ideas eventually
changed the world.
A burning desire (running toward something) or a burning discontent
(running away from something) springs from friction or tension.
This tension could be anything from dissatisfaction with
where you are in life to a lust for something more.
For instance, a young boy named Joyce C. Hall was deserted by his father
at age seven.
When he was eight, young Hall was forced to take a job as a
cook and a nurse's assistant to help the family survive.
By age nine, he was already a door-to-door salesman selling cheap
perfume.
His burning discontent was hatred of his life of poverty,
but in trying to overcome it he discovered his gift: persuading people to
buy what he was selling.
Now all he needed was a product he could be passionate
about.
By age eighteen, he had found it—and today Hallmark Cards sends
warm wishes worldwide and earns more than four billion dollars a year.
Do you have a burning desire or a burning discontent?
If so, you probably know that it's buttressed by determination,
unquestioned faith and belief in your abilities, and the courage to act in
the face of fear.
To take your burning desire or burning discontent to the next level, here
are a few suggestions.
Make it precise.
State clearly what it is you're fleeing from or running toward.
Make it come alive in your imagination.
Visualize.
See yourself—in full color and exacting detail—achieving the desired
result.
Make it intense.
The more vivid you make the image, the stronger your desire
will be.
And the stronger your desire or discontent, the more determined
you'll become.
Make it inescapable.
Leave yourself no possibility of retreat—no plan B.
Failure cannot be an option.
Make it happen.
Now that you know exactly what you want and can vividly
see it, go after it!
Give life to your dreams.
I've found that many people are afraid to give life to their dreams.
Why?
Maybe because they fear that what lives invariably dies.
And if their dreams die, so does hope.
Not being able to bear the death of hope, they shy away
from stating their deepest desires.
They don't share their dreams with their friends or even with their families because
they don't want to be laughed at.
Dreams that are not openly stated are hardly dreams at all.
Proclaim your dreams to one and all, and set yourself on
a path to see them realized.
Be bold, be brave, be persistent—but also be
patient.
As Howard Schultz said, "It took years before I found my passion
in life.
Each step after that discovery was a quantum leap into something unknown,
each move riskier than the last."
The greatest tragedy of life is not death.
It's what dies within us while we're still alive.
If you could get paid to do anything you loved, what would it
be?
Among the many gifts we are blessed with is the gift of vocation—our
life's work.
True genius is created when we discover our gift and express our
passion in our profession.
I can think of no better example to highlight this
point than the man featured in our next story.
"If you pour your heart into your work, or into any worthy
enterprise, you can achieve dreams others may think
impossible."
Howart Schultz.
Style and sophistication, now Howard Schultz's trademarks, were in short
supply where he grew up.
His family of five lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn's Bayview Projects—a
cluster of high-rise apartment buildings inhabited by the working poor, who
were looked down upon by other Flatbush residents.
Young Howard played sports, worshipped Mickey Mantle, and started
earning money at age twelve to help out with the family's tight finances.
His dad, a World War II veteran, held a series
of blue-collar jobs but never found himself, never had a plan for his life.
Howard didn't have much of a plan either, except to escape the struggle
his parents lived with every day: he had to get out of the projects.
Fortunately, quarterbacking for his high school football team won him a scholarship to Northern
Michigan University, a thousand miles—and light-years—away.
His college pigskin career didn't amount to much, but thanks to loans and
part-time jobs, four years later he became his family's first college graduate.
Though he still had no direction, getting out of Brooklyn had given him the
courage to keep dreaming.
After college, he stayed in Michigan and worked at a ski lodge.
He took time to think about his future, but no inspiration came.
After a year, he went back to New York and landed a job as a salesperson for
Xerox.
"I sold a lot of machines and outperformed many of my peers," he
recalls.
"But I can't say I ever developed a passion for word processors."
He moved on to Hammarplast, a Swedish housewares firm, and became
vice president in charge of U.S. operations.
Now only six years out of college, he earned a substantial salary, owned
an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and rented a summer house
in the Hamptons.
"So no one— especially my parents—could understand why
I was getting antsy.
But I sensed something was missing.
I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny."
In 1981, while still working for the Swedish firm, Howard noticed that one
of his customers, a small retailer in Seattle, was doing brisk business in a
particular line of drip coffee machines.
He flew out to investigate and fell hopelessly in love with what he saw: a narrow
storefront with a violinist playing Mozart at the entrance.
"The minute the door opened, a heady aroma of coffee reached out and drew me in.
I stepped inside and saw what looked like a temple for the worship of coffee."
Behind a worn counter stood bins of coffee beans from Sumatra, Kenya, Costa Rica—all
over the world—"at a time when most people thought coffee came
from a can, not a bean."
Immediately, Schultz knew that this store and this town were his mecca.
This was where he wanted to be and what he wanted
to do for the rest of his life.
And the rest, as they say, is entrepreneurial history—though it was hardly
smooth sailing at first.
Despite Schultz's enthusiasm, the firm didn't want to hire him.
The owners thought his New Yorkish style and his big
plans would clash with the smallis- beautiful culture they worked so hard to maintain.
But in what would later turn out to be a major turning point in Schultz's
life, he refused to accept no for an answer.
Though rebuffed, he went back again and finally persuaded the owners to
change their minds and hire him as their marketing director.
"Life is a series of near misses," he reflected in his book
Pour Your Heart into It.
"But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at
all.
It's seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future.
It's seeing what other people don't see and
pursuing that vision, no matter who tells you not to."
So he gave up his fancy New York lifestyle—the comfortable salary,
prestige, company car, and fancy apartment—and went to work for a small
Seattle company that operated four coffee stores.
Not long after he took the job, while attending a business convention
in Milan, Italy, he stumbled across an espresso bar and again was swept away.
Except this time it wasn't just the coffees or the store itself, but the family-like
community that gathered there and created an atmosphere pulsating with energy,
music, and camaraderie.
He immediately knew he could—he must—bring
the concept of Italian café life back to America.
"It was an emotional experience.
I believed intuitively we could do it.
I felt it in my bones."
At first, the firm's owners resisted, but eventually Schultz's persistence
won out.
They sold him the company, and it became—have you already
guessed?—Starbucks, now with more than ten thousand locations around the
world and over six billion dollars in annual sales.
Through Schultz's leadership, Starbucks has become more than
just a phenomenally successful business venture; it is an icon embodying
all that is good in corporate America—honesty, integrity, and a deep compassion
for its customers and its "partners" (employees).
"Success," he argues, "should not be measured in
dollars; it's about how you conduct the journey and how big your heart is at
the end of it."
For instance, when three Starbucks employees were murdered
in a botched robbery in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, Schultz chartered
a plane and arrived the next morning to work with police, console the
victims' families, and attend the funerals.
He also decreed that all future profits from that store would be donated to
organizations working for victims' rights and violence protection.
Now that Schultz, a reputed billionaire and lead owner of the Seattle
Supersonics pro basketball team, has come out of the projects to run one of
the world's most respected companies, he wants to "inspire people to pursue
their dreams.
I come from common roots, with no silver spoon, no pedigree,
no early mentors.
I dared to dream big dreams, and then I willed them to
happen.
I'm convinced most people can achieve their dreams and beyond if
they have the determination to keep trying."
Wishing upon a star won't get you very far Schultz knew the difference between a hope
or wish and a burning desire to make a dream come true.
Yet when most people are asked about their future,
they say something like, "I hope to be able to retire early."
Or "I wish I could find a more enjoyable job that pays well."
They don't realize that "hoping" and "wishing" are as futile as dreaming
without acting.
These are probably the same people who throw down a buck and
hope to win a million in the lottery, or would like their marriage to improve,
or wish they would lose weight, but don't take steps to make it
happen.
To hope or wish is to expect something without earning it.
It just doesn't work.
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