The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.

The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence. – Confucius

Do you want to learn to read Greek so you can read the classics untranslated? What do you want to do? What is your desire? What is your full potential?

What does that mean?
To me, he is saying that excellence comes from your desires.  The desire to win, to succeed, to extend yourself to reach your full potential.  These are the beneficial side of desire, the motivation to excel and move beyond your present level of ability.  Personal excellence, what does that mean to you?

Certainly to improve beyond where you are, you may very well be good, but are you excellent?  At how many things?  Where will you go from here, what is your next personal achievement?  As an exercise for the reader, look up what the root meaning of the word “desire” is, it will help you understand how it can motivate you.

Why is desire important?
Remembering that there are both beneficial and harmful desires.  The desire to win is beneficial, up to the point where you are wiling to cheat in order to win.  I think most of us can see the difference between them, and recognize roughly where the line should be drawn.  In other instances, the line is a little less clear, but most of the time we will agree on the broader values and general location of the lines dividing the beneficial from the harmful desires.

Desire can be a powerful motivator.  The desire to get a date with that special person, to get that last piece of cake, or a part in the school play.  The desire to learn and improve yourself are also powerful motivational tools, if you choose to use them.  Most of us will continue to desire to learn or improve ourselves, whether it’s exercising, knitting or learning a sport.  These are the path to personal excellence.

Where can I apply this in my life?
What do you desire?  How serious are you about attaining that which you desire?  How ethical will you be in your pursuit of it?  Without ethics, you may be able to achieve, to be good (or even outstanding), but excellence will be lacking.

List four or five things that you would like to improve about yourself.  They could be skills to learn, mental abilities to enhance or take up, sports to try, or even a new way to approach problems.  They might have to do with your home life, personal life or business life.  This is an open-field problem, so don’t fret too much about it, come up with some to start with, and then come back later on, when a big idea hits you.

For each of the improvements you are interested in, what reasons are behind your wanting to do this?  If you decided you wanted to improve yourself by learning a new language (or dusting off the one you took back in High School), was it because you want to travel to that country?  Do some of your clients speak it, and it would be an opportunity for your business?  Is there some literature you want to read in the original language?  Come up with a reason or three for each of your improvements.

For each of the reasons you listed, what desire (or desires) drive it?  Using a foreign language as an example, is your desire to learn it because it is the language of your ancestors?  Were you too fidgety to focus when you first experienced the language, and now desire to finish what you started?

Is the desire to challenge yourself to learn to read the language, so you can read Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in French, Homer’s Iliad in Greek or Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in Chinese?  Is there a desire to visit somewhere and be able to blend in, to take more than a superficial week-long whirlwind tour?

Is there a desire to improve relations with a client, or land a new one, if only you could develop better rapport with them?  Perhaps you’re a polyglot (look it up) and your desire is to add to your vast stores of knowledge, another horse to the stable as it were.

Now examine your desires.  Do you see any pattern in them?  Do you see some that might not be as beneficial as others?  Is there integrity in all of them?  Take a little time to tweak the ones of which you might not be proud.  There may be more than one theme within your desires, as most of us are fairly complex creatures.

But look to see if you can see some common threads.  Do you have a central motivation, a core desire?  That could be a powerful tool to use for motivation, both to keep moving in the desired direction, and to avoid moving in the less beneficial directions.

Go back to the list of things you’d like to do to make yourself more excellent than you already are.  Which one stands out?  What are the desires that will help you move forward and achieve this result?  How can you use that as a carrot to help pull you forward?  Remember, as with all things, there will be good days, and days when you want to throw in the towel.

The good days are self-motivating, you will be enjoying it and want to keep doing it.  The other days, those are the days where you need some motivation.  This is where your desire comes in.  And you desire has to be stronger than the de-motivation that a rough day (or stretch of days) creates.  Perseverance is easier when you have a reason, a desire, to reach the end.

For each desire you listed on this one improvement, come up with a way to motivate yourself.  If your desire was to “go native” and spend some time in another country, perhaps an image of you standing in front of the Mona Lisa, speaking to the guide in French would work. If you desired to visit the homeland of an ancestor, perhaps the feeling of visiting the town or city an ancestor came from and speaking to some of the neighbors or the local historian in their native tongue.

If your desire was about the personal challenge of learning the language, perhaps it’s just the feeling of accomplishment, of overcoming the challenge.  If your desire was to make business contacts or help grow the client list, perhaps it’s the feeling of passion for what you do, or the warm feeling you get by fulfilling the need of another.

Take a moment now, and reconsider the list and what you thought it would take to accomplish the tasks.  Does it feel like it might just be a little easier, that you just might be able to make it happen?  You have just forged the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.  All you have left to do is to walk through it.

Are you ready for the new you?  Go out and become even more excellent!

From: Twitter, undocumented feed (my bad)
confirmed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/confucius119275.html
Photo by nyello8