I read an interesting thing recently and the long-n-short of it was that you need a "will" to do anything. Although a childish moral but I think it applies to everything from personal aspects to company aspects.
Here are my interpretations of some of the biggest economic players' wills:
Exxon and Shell: Will to make more money.
Microsoft: Will to dominate the PC market.
Sun: Will to make something better than Linux.
Apple: Will to make cool stuff.
Intel: Will to shrink the chip fabrication size.
Anyway, that's not the main point of this article. The thing is that most of the wills (like the ones above) are made up of too many small wills and in the end they boil down to personal level. You might have heard things like "self-motivation", "self-managed" and "self-learning" when applying for jobs etc. The "self" aspect actually reflects the will power of the individual. If you don't have the will to improve, you will never be a "self-improving" person and hence you will have problems managing your life. Similarly, if you don't have a will to learn, you will never "learn" anything useful.
I have met a lot of people who haven't learned any new technology for the last decade or so and are mostly stuck with their own knowledge pool. When I analyze these people I find that they have only one thing in common. They lack the "will to learn" which in my opinion is the worst thing you can be missing from your life.
Remember, if you lose any of your wills you are losing your desires. If you are losing your desires, you are losing a part of yourself and it means you are turning into someone else (i.e. a different person). You should try to judge that person sooner rather than later as you are the onle person who can decide whether it's a good or a bad change.
