personal development on Not Geting What You Want

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.

“He wanted Everest in a day; if it took two, he lost interest.”

Resentment is like a poison we carry around inside us with the hope that when we get the chance we can deposit it where it will harm another who has injured us. The fact is that we carry this poison a...

We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.

“Here’s the thing about wishes, the more you have, the more you want.”

You follow your desires wherever they take you, and you approve of yourself so long as you are not obviously hurting anyone else. You figure that if the people around you seem to like you, you must be...

Aren't you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: "May this book, idea, cou...

There are two tragedies in lie. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

[God] waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

In this excerpt, musician and author Ginny Owens shares a childhood exercise that only makes specific what all of us as human beings struggle with, the desire for wholeness: I wish you could know my ...

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

The prevailing idea seems to be, that I come to God and ask Him for something that I want, and that I expect Him to give me that which I have asked. But this is a most dishonouring and degading concep...

If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.

Waiting is not just the thing we have to do until we get what we hope for. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what we hope for.

All idols begin by offering great things for a very small price. All idols then fail, more and more consistently, to deliver on their original promises, while ratcheting up their demands, which initia...

Desire alone, divorced from the will, ruins peoples’ lives time after time. In our public life and even among leaders of our denominations or church organizations, time after time we see a desire that...

There was a little girl once who asked her father for a nickel. He reached into his pocket, but he didn’t have any change. So the father pulled out his wallet, and all he had was a twenty-dollar bill....

Let's help people get on board with what God wants to give them, but what we don't want is the process. Everyone wants the product.

You may get to the very top of the ladder, and then find it has not been leaning against the right wall.

We all go through desert seasons and have the opportunity to determine how we will respond. The cyclical frustrations I faced in regard to my desire for control, fear, and the longing to feel chosen w...

"What is it you’re looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there’ll b...

Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease t...

There is an invisible pattern in the design of deprivation: deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens it. And the more heightened the desire, the greater our satisfaction will ultimately be. It ...

Desire is something no child has to be taught. Early in the developmental process, most of a child’s desires center around physical needs being met or objects that attract interest. If a child is secu...

Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.

The more I use stuff to fill up my hungers, the more distance I put between God and myself. And as I continue to fill up my infinite hungers with finite things (when I run through the Starbucks drive-...

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.