How to Increase your Desire and Hunger for Life
Do you feel as if your life is tasteless? You feel as if you have no desire and hunger for life. You see others working to achieve their goals and improve themselves and wonder what drives them?
The people that achieve a lot and live happy lives indeed have a desire and hunger for life. You can increase your desire and hunger for life too to achieve greatness and live a full life. How can you do this?
In Napoleon Hill’s classic book Think and Grow Rich, the author states that desire is the first step towards achievement. To get something, you must first want it. You must desire it so much to decide to start working to get it.
When you have no desire and hunger for life, you have no reason to wake up in the morning. You have no drive or intrinsic motivation. You have no persistence since why persist on something that you are not sure you want to get?
Lack of hunger and desire for life can be what is holding you back. Further, the lack of desire and hunger for life can drive you into depression. When you feel stagnated and that you have nothing to live for, you are likely to fall into depression as you continually wonder what the meaning of life is.
So, how can you increase tour desire and hunger for life?
Find meaning in life
Give your life meaning. Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote in his book, Man’s search for meaning that when you have a meaning in life, you can go through anything.
You can find meaning in life by loving others and finding a purpose higher than yourself. I have explained how you can find meaning in life here based on Erich Fromm’s teachings.
Your love for others can give you meaning. If a parent, for example, loves their children very much, they find their meaning in life and get the desire and hunger for life to be there for their children.
To get more desire out of your life, try to find out what your purpose in life is. What are you here for? Who are the people that mean much to you and how do they count on you?
Be specific on what you want (but allow for flexibility)
Being specific on what you want helps you to channel your energy towards one thing. If your interest is always fleeting from one thing to another, chances are you are not passionate about one thing. You are lukewarm about a lot of things and this doesn’t drive you in any way.
Increase your desire and hunger for life by finding something you love and being specific on it. I know there is conflicting advice on whether you should follow your passion or not. Finding a passion does not mean you have to make a career out of it. Your passion could be parenting, writing, playing a certain sport, helping others, all of which you can do while working a job and earning a living.
In her book, The Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert advises that you can still do what you love while still working your job. Living your passion and giving in to creating does not mean you have to put your life aside and focus on it.
She describes a woman who picked up figure skating in her 40s and does it every week-morning before going to her job. She loves and looks forward to her figure skating sessions and this increases the flavor in her life.
When you are specific on what you want, you channel your desires to it and this gives you some form of purpose.
All the same, allow yourself some flexibility. Being too fixed on one goal and refusing to change even when the goal is not working can affect your mental health. Allow yourself to be adaptable and flexible if need be.
Determine the price you are willing to pay
It’s common to easily give up when you have not committed to something. Sometimes you need to put in your two feet into something. When you know that you cannot go back, that you have committed, you are driven to get things done.
There is a story that goes about a group of soldiers that wanted to capture new lands. They needed to know that they are getting into the new land and that there was no chance of going back.
They burned their ships so that they would give the battle everything they had knowing that going back was not an option. (I have read this story in Think and Grow Rich and David and Goliath).
This is the form of commitment that is needed. When you have burned your ship, you sure must have the desire and hunger for life to win since you know that there is no going back. Determine the price that you are willing to pay and be prepared to pay that price.
Develop an independent and authentic self
When you are often driven and influenced by others, chances are you have no internal drive. You do what others want. You follow and when they don’t show you where to go, you don’t know what to do with yourself.
To increase your desire and hunger for life, you have to be independent and authentic. You need to find out what drives you without the influence of others. You need to be intrinsically motivated.
When you embrace your uniqueness, you are not afraid to rely on your ideas and abilities. You get the confidence to set your own path and be driven by what makes you a unique individual. You learn how to make yourself a fully functional individual.
Being an independent individual and making your own choices gives you the power to determine your destiny. Since you set what you desire for yourself, you become hungry for life and love working towards improving yourself.
Reparent yourself
If you grew up being told certain things, you tend to believe them. If your parents, for example, told you that, ‘good things don’t happen to people like us’, you grow up believing so. Sometimes, we have to let go of the beliefs and thoughts that hold us back.
How can we change the narratives we were given and create our own paths? Through reparenting ourselves. This calls for correcting the errors of the parents and the society and healing from the damages they have caused in our lives.
The book The Four Agreements talks about how we can discard the agreements that the societies make for us and create our own fresh agreements. Reparenting and changing these agreements help us to start living on our terms.
As a result, our desire and hunger for life increase the more we change our lives to the terms we want and start enjoying the life that we feel we deserve.
Change your mindset
Changing your mindset calls growing from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. It calls shifting from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset.
Someone with a fixed mindset believes that they were born without some abilities or with limited talents and there is nothing they can do to change their position. If you find yourself thinking, ‘I am not so smart, no need to bother becoming good at this’, you have a fixed mindset.
By changing your mindset, you believe that it’s your hard work that gets rewarded and not your abilities. You believe that you can become better by working on yourself. Knowing this, your desire and hunger for life increase as you can’t wait to become better than you were yesterday. You are excited to keep growing and learning.
On the same note, a scarcity mindset thinks that there is no sufficient wealth, joy or happiness for everyone in the world. You say, ‘well, not everyone can be wealthy, happy, content’. Your desire for life is diminished the more you think that there is nothing out there for you.
An abundance mindset, on the other hand, makes you believe that you can be happy, wealthy, loved. You believe there is sufficient goodness out there for everyone. You are driven to get the kind of happiness you want since you believe you have a portion of this piece of cake.
Loving others
Loving others can help you find meaning in life and increase your desire for life. The right kind of relationship brings us satisfaction and happiness. Humans were created with a need to belong.
Relationships are important in our lives and when we are loved right, our lives develop flavor. Loving others and being loves will increase your desire and joy in life and drive you to make a great life.
Stop trying to please others
As I mentioned earlier, when you focus so much on what others think of you, you hardly have time to create a life that you love. You are so busy trying to conform and willing for others to like you. When you are alone, you hate your life since you are living to make others happy and not yourself.
To give more meaning, fun, joy, and love in your life, stop trying to please others and live on your terms. You desire in life will be higher when you are driven by your own desires and not those of others.
Comments
I like especially where you talk about ‘ determine the price you are willing to pay’ . most of us love our joys and achievements, and are more interest in the end than in the means. We all have to choose what battles we are willing to fight so as to enjoy the victories. There isn’t anything sustainable in a borrowed victory. And life is much more fulfilling when you have shed a few tears and broke bones.
True. Commitment comes with paying a price, you have to determine the price and be ready to pay it.