In your search for the secret to successful personal development you begin to study the people you come in contact with.
You hope to learn from successful people how they achieved their success.
You soon discover that the majority of people are simply drifting through life without giving a thought to where they are heading.
It is obvious that personal development is not even a remote priority for them.
Upon further investigation, you find that these people suffer from a feeling of hopelessness.
They sense that they are stuck in a rut while others around them seem to have goals they are aiming for.
A big difference between the aimless crowd and those striving for their goals is that the goal oriented know where they are going and they have a plan to get there.
Then there are a lucky few, who in addition to a plan, also have a burning desire to achieve something that will be a life changing experience for them.
Few people take the time to identify their strongest driving force, their burning desire.
This is an internal force that tells them they must achieve a certain goal above all else.
Personal development is a built in quality they posses.
Do you believe that you have a burning desire? Perhaps you never thought of it this way, so you don't know what your burning desire is.
But everyone has such a desire, whether they are aware of it or not.
The trick is to do some soul searching, to use personal development as a process to uncover the one thing you would rather do, and seek to achieve above all else.
Regardless of your age, young or old, you owe it to yourself to sit down and ponder what really makes you tick; to identify the activity you would like to do above all else.
When you discover it, you will have identified your burning desire.
It is never to early or too late to work on your personal development.
Once you identify your burning desire, you will have at your disposal a tremendous force for personal development and personal achievement.
You can become one of those few people that truly know where they are going, and who have the deep conviction that they will achieve their goal.
The most important contribution you can make to the world is to achieve your grand objective, and to show others by your example, that such achievements are possible.
All you need is to identify and nurture that deep desire, that driving force inside of you that recognizes no obstacles in your path.
There are few things in life more inspiring than to watch a person with the unstoppable drive that comes from a burning desire.
You don't even have to know someone like that personally.
You can read about such a person and experience deep motivation from learning about their experience and achievements.
So how do you discover and nurture this internal drive that knows no obstacles? Some people are fortunate to discover their inner burning desire when they are very young.
It's as if they always knew what they wanted to do with their lives, what they wanted to achieve above all else.
But most of us discover this inner drive by self examination, or by being fortunate enough to personally know someone with a single-minded drive to achieve a goal.
Sometimes it turns out that deep inside yourself, you discover a deep desire for a similar goal.
Or it may be that observing such a person makes you realize that there is something inside you that you never bothered to express, perhaps because you thought it was a crazy dream.
But when you see someone passionately committed to a great end, you realize that your crazy dream was not that crazy after all.
You realize that you have just as much right and reason to your lofty goal as another person has to theirs.
This is personal development at its best.
As you begin to examine and explore the implications of your deep, previously unspoken desire, you begin to see what you should do to get your dream into action...
a goal emerges, then a plan begins to form in your mind.
Next you feel compelled to put it in writing, and finally you outline your first action plan.
But that burning desire is taking a life of its own.
It begins to appear in your mind at unexpected times.
Before you know it, this desire starts visiting your mind frequently, along with mental images of how you will accomplish your goal, and next you see clear images of the benefits of what you will achieve.
Suppose that your burning desire was for a trip around the word, or perhaps to own a top of the line Italian sports car.
Now you not only see how you will go about getting the sports car, but you will see the car in your mind in vivid detail, down to the shape of the car, the driver's controls, the power of the engine, the sound of the engine, the performance on the road, and even on a race track.
At this point, this is no longer a vague dream that you had buried in your subconscious mind for years.
This is, at least in your minds eye, a reality.
You see yourself getting into your new sports car, and being conscious of the new car smell.
You start the engine, you rev it up, and you're thrilled by the smooth, whining roar of the engine, the spinning of the tires as you quickly shift through the gears.
You are in another world, but in your mind it's a real world.
From this point on, your one time daydream has taken on the form of a burning desire, and has then progressed to an obsession that you can't keep out of your thoughts.
It invades your mind to the point that you finally can hardly think about anything else.
One day, you find yourself on the way to the exclusive car dealership to pick up you new sports car.
When you first see the bright, shinny red machine, you experience a strange sensation of total unbelief, coupled with a feeling of familiarity with the object that has occupied your thoughts in every waking moment for so long, for over two years to be precise.
This author has lived through such an experience, and at a very young age.
The desire did not involve a fancy sports car, but it involved something just as impossible at that time and place.
If anyone reading these lines thinks this is utter nonsense because life is harsh, and things like this cannot happen to ordinary people, I have this message for them.
If you have a specific desire, and it becomes a strong desire that grows in your conscious and subconscious mind till it takes a force of it's own.
Your desire continues to grow until it dominates your mind, until it becomes an obsession.
The day will soon come, when you least expect it, that you will see your desire as a reality in front of your eyes.
The experience described here will happen in anyone's life who can consciously or unconsciously replicate the steps and stages of a desire that becomes so strong and persistent that it can only be described as an all consuming obsession.
If you examine the lives of people of great accomplishments, whether past or present, you will find examples of such a burning desire that became an obsession to be eventually realized.
When similar experiences are described in current literature, a big point is made for the need to take action to make the desire come true.
This is true with one qualification, when your burning desire becomes as strong as described above, you do not need to worry about taking action.
Why? Because the individual experiencing such a strong desire will not be able to keep from taking action.
Unexplained incidents, "coincidences," happy ones, will take place that he will not be able to explain where they came from.
The answer is that the individual will have stumbled upon cosmic forces that he can neither explain nor control.
They just work in his favor.
It all starts with a burning desire that seeks expression, and it can be your burning desire.