The First Principle: DESIRE

The First Principle: DESIRE

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Napoleon Hill liked numbers. He had his “Seventeen Principles of Success” but Think and Grow Rich focused on “Thirteen Principles”, each expressed in a meaty chapter.

The first is “Desire: The Starting Point of All Achievement.”

It’s also the starting point for any story. Your lead character wants something. Something stands in their way, whether it be external (a storm) or internal (childhood phobia). In order to function, they must attempt to resolve the issue. It might well be said that until your character decides what they want, and commits to achieving it, your story has not begun.

The same thing is true for the human being WRITING the story. What do you want? What do you need? If you have a hard time figuring this out, please allow me to make a couple of suggestions, or offer a few thoughts.

Desire is both focus upon a specific thing (“I want”) and the emotions DRIVING that focus: (“I REALLY want.”)

It is, therefore both the target and the energy that can drive you to the target.

If you don’t know what you want, work backwards from this: you want to be happy. All living things seek to move away from pain, toward pleasure. Apparent exceptions are just evidence of kinks in the wiring, tangled beliefs and perceptions, or lack of conviction that your actions will lead to anything positive. “Why bother? I’ll just lose again. Might as well have the…