Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it ~ Maya Angelou

I am big on teaching principles, not techniques. There are two reasons for that:

1. Principles are timeless – techniques are not. Would you rather I give you a fish, or teach you to catch your own?
2. Because I have not made a million bucks in blogging (yet), it would be extremely arrogant of me to offer you techniques to succeed with your online business. However, I have experienced success in other areas, and can pass on what I have learnt. I could write an article about how to achieve a 20%+ return on property investments year on year, but that wouldn’t be much use to you as an internet marketer. Whilst techniques can only be utilized locally, principles can be taught globally.

In this article, I do not intend to demonstrate how you can carry out action (a) to produce result (b). I want to give you something far more powerful – the correct mindset with which you can experience long term success. I strongly believe that if you correctly apply the principles in this article, you can hit any reasonable target you set for yourself.

Before we get into the meat of the article, I want us to all be on the same page as to what success actually means. The primary definition of success in the Oxford Online Dictionary is “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”. Success, without context, is completely subjective.

For instance, my current aims in life are to work for myself, no longer worry about money, and become location independent. If I achieve one, two, or all three of those goals, I will consider myself a success. For you, it could be something else entirely. However, what I am going to discuss in this article applies to all possible success scenarios.

So, without further ado, let’s explore the four things everybody should know about success.

1. Success Is A Process

Whenever you consider setting out to succeed in anything, there is no point in doing so until you understand these three key points:

1. Success is possible
2. You can succeed
3. It is a process

There seems to be a prevailing attitude amongst many people that those who have achieved success in their lives either got lucky, or are extremely physically or mentally blessed. That attitude is ignorant of the three facts above, and is one of the key barriers to achieving success.

If you believe that you can succeed and understand that you just have to follow a process, then there are only two things that can stop you: setting too ambitious a target, or realizing that the work is not worth the reward.

You do not have to be a genius to succeed. Nor do you have to have a ground-breaking idea. If you persist in your efforts, then you will eventually gain momentum. Once you have started moving, you will begin to understand the concept that success is just a process (if you haven’t already).

It is easy to give up when you don’t understand that success is a process. Furthermore, I believe that the most effective killer of potential success is giving up. If you eliminate that one enemy, your chances of succeeding increase exponentially.

2. Target-Based Motivation Is The Key Driver Of Success

My point here is twofold:

1. You need ample motivation to succeed
2. In order to rationalize that motivation, you need to set targets

Target-based motivation is made up of (a) knowing what motivates you and (b) setting incremental targets that add up to what I call your Endgame.

Your Endgame should be a definable ultimate goal. For instance, my current Endgame is to serve notice on my job by 23^rd May 2012. Very specific I know – it should be. My motivation to achieve this is strong, and I have set targets so that I can see the path I need to follow in order to achieve success.

Your particular path to success, if you could look into the future and see it, will likely be tough. It may be tougher than your motivation allows, in which case, you will fail to succeed. This is an unfortunate fact. Under such circumstances, you may wish to reevaluate your motivation to succeed.

You may discover that you have a lot more to gain from succeeding than you originally thought, in which case you will be able to boost your motivation to previously unknown levels and continue on your path. Alternatively, you may learn that where you are in life is actually a pretty good fit for you, in which case you can adjust your goals accordingly.

3. Failure Is The Best Teacher Of Success

I challenge you to find me someone who has never failed at anything. Assuming that you can’t, we can come to the conclusion that success is possible in spite of failure. In fact, I would go further and say that success is possible because of failure.

I can think of numerous occasions in my life where failure has taught me a vital lesson. Lessons that, if I had not learned at that time, might have had much larger repercussions further down the line. The sooner you recognize failure as a valuable learning tool that is part of the process, the better placed you will be to succeed. Embrace failure, and you will embrace success.

4. The Time Is Now

This is the only point of the four that applies specifically to internet marketing, but with good reason. I honestly believe that we live in a time where self-employment and ‘lifestyle design’ is at its most accessible. In the past, if you were to set up a business, you would generally need to make a considerable upfront capital investment. Nowadays, you can literally work your way up from $0.

It is not the purpose of this article to discuss how you can start making money online. But it is possible, and compared to say 20 years ago (dare I say it), easy. No, not easy to make $30,000 a month, but easy to get started, to start making say a dollar a day. Once you’ve done that, the sky is the limit.

The time for excuses is over. The time for action is now. Learn and understand the above principles, then execute them.

Photo courtesy of Simply CVR