Finding or Fulfilling Your Need

A need is a thing which is needed for an organism to survive. However, needs are different from desires. In the case of a desire, a lack of it causes an apparent bad outcome: disease or death. However, in the case of needs, there is no obvious need which could be satisfied.

One example of needs could be found by contrasting the need to eat with the desire to eat. If you want to eat something, you will have to search and discover what is available to satisfy your hunger. If you were given only cans of food, you could search until you found a can with the correct nutrition for your body. If you were given nothing at all, you would have to find some other thing to satisfy your hunger. This process takes time and it could be tedious.

On the other hand, if you desire to eat something, the hunger pangs are already known and you can find something which satisfies your need. It’s easy to locate. The difficulty comes in defining precisely what you need. You may desire to wear a particular dress, to eat healthy food, to write a letter, or to go to Europe. Yet, at the moment you don’t really need anything which would satisfy those needs.

So how do we define need and desire? The answer lies in psychology. In psychology, you need something which satisfies a need that you are failing to satisfy by using your imagination or your will power. If you are short of imagination, you will be inclined to use money to satisfy your need.

Conversely, a person who has enough imaginations will tend to use his will power to satisfy a need which he (or she) isn’t able to satisfy by thinking about it. A person with great imaginations, as the dictionary definition suggests, is “a person who has vast imaginations”. These people can do things that would seem impossible. For example: a person can conceive of an apple in his mind, and he can buy one in reality. It doesn’t really matter if the apple wasn’t available in real life – what matters is that the person made up his mind to buy it, in his imagination.

There is no way to predict exactly what you need. If you don’t know what you need, then you can’t satisfy it. Therefore, you must first determine your need and then use your imagination to find something which will satisfy that need. The most successful entrepreneurs, the people who have succeeded against all odds to satisfy need, have generally used their imagination to find or invent something that would satisfy that need.