The Will to Win
“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
Notice there is a door one must open if that person is to reach their full potential. There are keys that are necessary to open this door. It isn’t simply one key, but a minimum of 3 keys that must be used to open the locks on this door.
First, one must have The Will to Win.
This can be summed up in a poem by Burton Bradley, called The Will to Win. It goes as follows:
If you want a thing bad enough
To go out and fight for it,
Work day and night for it,
Give up your time, peace, and sleep for it
If only desire of it
Makes you quite mad enough
Never to tire of it,
Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it
If life seems empty and useless without it,
And all you scheme and dream is about it
If gladly you’ll sweat for it,
Fret for it,
Plan for it,
Lose all your terror of God or man for it
If you’ll simply go after what you want
With all your capacity,
Strength and sagacity,
Faith, hope, confidence, and stern pertinacity
If neither cold poverty, famished gaunt,
Nor sickness nor pain,
Of body or brain,
Can turn you away from the thing you want
If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it,
You will get it
One more example: A minister I listened to many years ago talked about the will to win and succeed. He put it this way: If someone was to hold your head under water
Second, one must have The Desire to Succeed.
We all desire many things and it is these many desires from which many of our problems start. We have so many desires and yet we have no articulate and specific plan on how to achieve even one of them. Desire is the starting point but we must go further than having a desire. We must turn that desire into a plan in the same manner an architect turns the design in his/her head into a drawing on paper or computer. Unless you have a plan it is difficult to know where to start. You will not know what materials to purchase. It isn’t as if you can’t build a home without a plan, for you can, but the person with a plan will complete his home faster, cheaper, better, and with less stress than the person without a plan. Both have a desire for a home, but only one took the time to come up with a plan or at the very least to come up with a concept from which a budget and timeline for building could be obtained. That person counted the cost and has figured out what it is going to take to make that plan become a reality. The other person may get started but a quarter, half, or three quarters through the process, that same person may run out of money, energy, or time to fulfill their desire. Having counted the cost, the other person winds up completing it on time and in budget and winds up enjoying their desire of a beautiful home.
Your desire can be for anything whether that is a different or better job, a successful writer, singer, musician, speaker, or whatever it is you desire. The key is you need to develop a desire. Some people say they don’t have any desire to be more, which means they don’t set goals or make specific plans to achieve. That is fine, but in my more than six decades of living, I have never spoken to anyone that didn’t desire to have something not currently in their possession. To me this means they have set aside having desires because they don’t want to fail due in many cases to what others may think or say of them if they did. I say this over and over, but it bears repeating, if a child did thought this way they would never learn to walk. That is why Jesus said, “Unless you become as a child…” It takes childlike faith to propel us to achievement. Childlike faith is what will keep us pushing forward without concern of what others think or say. Childlike faith is what you must have IF you are to grow that seed of desire that has been in you all your life.
Third, one must have The Urge to Reach One’s Full Potential.
As a noun, urge means to desire, but we already have a desire. As a verb however, it means to strongly encourage. This is what we want. We must strongly encourage ourselves to keep moving forward when we don’t feel like moving forward. We must encourage ourselves to stay the course even when the road is rough and the turns treacherous. We must Urge ourselves to reach our full potential. This is as necessary as eating. It is as necessary as sleep. It is as necessary as breathing. More often than not we are the ONLY ONES encouraging ourselves to move forward when everything and in some cases everyone around us is seemingly against us.
Best of LUCK as you
Labor Under Correct Knowledge…
Respectfully,
Rick Cox