One thing we all definitely want in life is SUCCESS. Whatever may be our undertakings - in the direction of worldly prosperity or spiritual illumination, in spheres secular or spiritual - not one of us likes to fail. We all want to succeed. Success though we all desire, it will be noticed in various spheres of life, truly successful men are only a moderate degree of success. And many more just fail.

There will be various factors in the stories of men's successes and failures of life. but in every single case there will be one common factor involved. That is the factor of will-power. The degree of a person's success in life is commensurate with the degree of will-power he has attained.

How to develop the will power - thus turns out to be the most important fundamental issue of everyone's life. It should be the part of our education from our childhood to be trained in developing the willpower, for without it education remains largely ineffective. If unfortunately, we have not learnt how to develop willpower early in life, we should do so at any stage of life, because self-improvement is almost impossible without the voluntary or involuntary exercise of the will power. Given the will-power man makes everything out of nothing as it were. In the absence of the will-power, all his talents and qualities and endowments come to nothing.

WHY WE NEED TO DEVELOP THE WILL POWER?
Why at all need we develop the will-power when we may not be ambitious people trying to do spectacular things? Sometimes in our lives, may be in every one's life great tragedies happen. They shake us to our roots. After that tragedy we are never the same persons again. These days, we are giving away our thinking power to machines in the hope of getting more out of life.

The one way of keeping grip one life is right thinking and deep thinking. These days we all admire free-thinking. Free thinking is good. But right thinking is better. When right thinking becomes deep thinking, it is excellent.

So then, the basic tragedy of our life is:

• our inability to do the thing we know to be right as well as
• our incapacity to desist from doing what we know to be wrong.

We know it is good to use polite, decent and restrained language, in our daily dealings at home, on the street, in business, in politics, in society. But, in spite of ourselves, we use wrong language, from which arise many dissensions, small and big, at home, in society, in national and international affairs. Very often we do not remember the power of words, their capacity to break or make, wound or heal.

We know it is good to get up early in the morning. But when in the morning the alarm clock dutifully rings, we feel annoyed and silence it as though it had committed some crime, and then pull the blanket over the nose and sleep half an hour more, only to hurry and worry all day long. In the evening when we return home we are a mass of tension, and so highly inflammable that any little thing is apt to set things on fire. We do wring things unknowingly too. Many of us have no idea how much of goodness, strength and greatness cry within us for self-manifestation. We have mostly known only the weaker side of ourselves, which in fact belongs to be not-self, according to Vedanta. Therefore, it is important for every person to know how to avoid the failure of will. The only way to do it is to cultivate the WILL-POWER.

How to cultivate the Will Power?

• First let us understand what exactly is will-power. It is that positive and creative function of the mind which impels, propels and enables us to do chosen actions in a definitive way and avoid doing unchosen actions in an equally definitive way. It is that power of the mind which enables us to do what we know to be right, and not to do what we know to be wrong, under all circumstances favourable or unfavourable, known or unknown.

• Secondly, it is important to know and believe that will-power can be increased by everybody, without any exception, provided we are ready to apply ourselves to it and work for it steadily and methodically. It is never too early or too late to be good, true, pure and strong. We should get a firm hold, an unshakable faith, in this fundamental truth.

• Only when we have a firm hold on this truth we can develop a will for developing the will power. Many of us do not have even the will to develop the will-power. We should know that within ourselves is unlimited power, that we are not these puny things as we appear to be, that we are not weak reeds worthy only to be broken anytime-then we develop the mind to manifest that power in our life, by sharply cutting out all delusions and illusions to which are the contrary.

• When this mind is developed, we are ready to take the most important step in developing the will power. This step is to remove the dichotomy between the head and heart, the intellect and emotion, the thinking and feeling. Our thoughts and emotions must unite in order to enable us to do the best expected of us by ourselves.

• Two things will oppose this creative move within us:

  1. our regrets about the past, and
  2. our worry about the future. We may however, always examine our doing best and trying to find methods of even bettering our best-doing.

• To live in the living present wisely, we require the guidance of a sound sense of values. We should be able to persuade ourselves that we are not fooling around. We are gradually but surely proceeding to the fulfillment of our destiny.

• Lastly, to develop the will-power we must never take our failures seriously. We must not lose heart in the face of repeatred failures. Failures should be accepted as a part of the whole game, as steps to mount the pedestal of success.

To one who knows how to discipline oneself, his other tasks will become easy. "Do the right thing right time now" should be our day's order to the mind. That should be the principle.

On the basis of whatever we have thus learnt and determined, we should plan a simple routine for our daily life. No matter what happens, we should follow the routine. In the preliminary stage this is a very helpful method to get a firm grip on the mind. It is extremely important to remember that in developing will power the greatest help will come from the power of concentration we have already attained.