In equilibrium with your desires

Socrates once said "If you want knowledge as much as you want air to breathe, you will get knowledge". It is easy to be glib about this and carry on with our lives. However, if you pause for a second and let this thought be alive in you, let it consume you completely, it will reveal incidents in your life when this was true. Essentially, it means that you can achieve anything you desire if you have a proportionate amount of desire to achieve it. Is achieving anything in this world worth it is questionable but it is a discussion for a different post.This is a post for all us deeply conditioned human beings who have aspirations and desires and we spend our lives chasing those.


Why do we fail in many of our desires? Is it bad luck? Is it wrong timing ? Is it competence? It could be a combination of all the three and a multitude of other reasons. However, I believe the underpinnings of all of these factors is usually the intensity of the desire to achieve it. Each of us would like to achieve that dream position or that dream house. However, we often laugh the thought away since we treat it just as a dream. The number of conceivable challenges are so insurmountable that they don't seem worth fighting against. However, what is happening under the covers is that although you have the desire for that object, the intensity of the desire is not enough to overcome those challenges. It is like a seesaw with the obstacles on one end and your desire on the other. The seesaw itself represents the odds of you achieving that desire. If your desire is not strong enough, you cannot tilt the seesaw in your favor. Let's say that you want to quit your job and start your own venture. As soon as the thought comes in, your brain immediately fills you with why it is not possible and what the obstacles are to taking that step. You do have the desire. However, is it passionate enough? Do you think about it day in and day out? Is your desire deep enough to take you out of your comfort zone?  Are you ready to go out on a limb to achieve this desire ?  If you are passionate about it thus leading to a very intense desire, it will subdue the thoughts of failure and provide the necessary impetus for action. This differentiates entrepreneurs versus those you only engage in the thought of entrepreneurship. This is also precisely the reason why if given four weeks to complete a difficult project, our productivity dramatically increases in the days leading up to the deadline. Our desire to have it completed meets or exceeds the complexities of the project causing us to leap into action. All the rags-to-riches story that we like to so often talk about also exhibit this same pattern.


 So, what causes the desire to be intense in some and not so intense in the other? Is that something in our control? Can we manipulate the intensity of desire? I believe that we do not have any control on it. All of us are intense about certain things but not about others. The distribution of this intensity is so cunningly orchestrated  that life on earth is made possible. Imagine if everyone could increase their desire enough to take the step to start a new venture. That would leave no one to work for the venture which is definitely not a sustainable model :-) "What about competence?", you may ask. Competence is something which will come with the right amount of desire. Not all factory workers will rise through the ranks and enter the C-suite. However, a few, without any volition, will have that deep desire  to achieve that position and they will automatically develop the necessary competence to climb up the corporate ladder. In retrospect, it may seem that competence was the driving factor but I believe it is the other way around. A portion of the other workers will want to climb up the ranks but the law of distribution of desire will make sure that their desires are not intense enough and so they'll continue doing what they are doing  and the other portion of workers will have no desire at all and they'll be happy with their jobs.


To sum it up, when you question why you are where you are in life, check the level of desire that you have to be anything else. You will find that you are exactly in equilibrium with the intensity of your desires.