Desire is the first necessary step to attain success. In his famous book, Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill mentions how without desire it is impossible to get what we want. So, what is desire and why is it so important to have a “burning desire” as Napoleon Hill calls it.

Many people are wishful and hopeful. They say things such as I wish I could, I hope I will, hopefully, etc… However, we all know that none such statement has ever brought success to anyone mentioning them. The reason for this is that “wishing” and “hoping” have nothing to do with the strong emotion that is needed in order to succeed which is called “desire”.

What is desire?

Yes, indeed; desire has nothing to do with wishful thinking and hope. Desire is the purposeful intent of attaining a goal in your mind with added emotions. A strong desire to acquire or attain something can actually be compared to an obsession. The difference is that it is a “positive obsession” that will lead the person having and entertaining it, to get what they want.

Years before I read Napoleon Hill’s book Think And Grow Rich, before I started studying the law of attraction and how the subconscious mind works, I unknowingly attracted something I wanted through my burning desire. And when I’ll tell you what that was, you will have to admit that it wasn’t something “easy” to attract, so to speak.

A true story about desire

I was born in Lyon, France and I was raised in a small village just outside that large city. When we moved over there, there were only 250 inhabitants in that village. As a matter of fact, people there liked to say that on any given day one could see more cows passing by the main road than cars. For anyone not liking country it would have been hell, for my family and I it was paradise. We loved it. By the time I reached the age of 16 there were still only 350 inhabitants in that small village.

Why am I telling you all that? Because, considering where I grew up and what I started to desire, there was a far cry, and one might have thought that I was completely crazy.

What was the desire of that small village teenage girl? To meet the then number one most famous movie star in France who happened to live in Paris, of course. Crazy thought wasn’t it? Well, if your desire to obtain or attain a goal is strong enough, there is no such thing as a crazy thought. It can and will be achieved if you desire it strongly enough.

For five years I nurtured that desire with all my being. I thought about it every day, I visualized it, dreamt it, and breathed it on a daily basis. No matter what I was doing this desire was ALWAYS in my mind. Without knowing it, I was practicing the law of attraction the right way. I was not just wishing or hoping for what I wanted; I was obsessed with it. It was what Napoleon Hill called a “burning desire”.

Did that burning desire led anywhere in my case? Yes, it did. It took five years for this dream to come true, but when it did, it was a dream-come-true, indeed. The then 20 year old young woman who grew up in a small village met the number one most famous French male movie star that she was crazy about, backstage of a famous theater on the Champs Elysees in Paris. As a matter of fact, this was only the first time I met him. I met him another four times in Paris and one more time in New York few years later.

So, does having a strong desire is necessary in order to bring about what you really want to have in life? It most certainly does. It did for me, it did for all the successful people you may or may not know about, and it will for you too. Success doesn’t happen by accident, but by design. The reason it does is that the law of attraction is one of the law of the universe and it works always the same way for anyone, just like the law of gravity.

So, get to know what the law of attraction is all about and develop a strong desire for what you want to accomplish in life. My example above was the first time I used this terrific tool in my life, but I still use it today for every goal that I set in front of me. What about you?