The Success Principles summary

What if you’re not sure what personal success would look like for you? Relax – you’re not alone.

Slow down and take some time to contemplate. One of the first steps toward personal success is to examine your reason for being: why are you here on earth? The life purpose exercise can help you discover this.

How do you push beyond your comfort zone toward achieving your vision? Two practices – affirmation and visualization – can help you.

Affirmation starts when you state your goal as if it has already been realized, in a complete sentence. The most effective affirmations are in the first person, are positive and to the point.

Now that you’re well on your way to achieving ultimate success, you’ll need to prepare yourself for potential obstacles and, if you depend on others, possible rejection.

Rejection is just a speedbump on the road to success. If someone says “no,” just keep trying until someone says “yes,” while keeping in mind your next step.

Now that we’ve explored the fundamentals of success, let’s focus on some work you need to finish before you can really achieve your dreams.

First, you need to address unfinished business. Do you have any projects you’ve abandoned or left half-done? Do you need to clean your closet,or finish last year’s taxes? These small things can take valuable energy from achieving your larger goals.

Once you’ve taken care of unfinished business, you’ll hopefully feel like you’re already making significant progress toward your goals. Now, let’s make sure that your thoughts are in order, too.

Face it: you’re often your own biggest enemy. Most of us harbor negative thoughts about ourselves, so-called limiting beliefs, where we fixate on the things we think we can’t do. This mentality can be very damaging, as this one example shows.

Having personal resolve is crucial on your path to success, but you can’t walk that path on your own. Highly successful people always have others to inspire or mentor them along the way.

One thing you can do is to create a support group. You can do this by gathering a so-called mastermind group, a supportive circle of people with whom you can share ideas and challenges.

To get the most benefit out of your support network, you must first lay a solid foundation of honesty and appreciation to build meaningful relationships.

Telling the truth can be scary. But we must tell the truth if we are to create and foster our connections with others.

Do you agree that “money is the root of all evil?”

If so, you need to redefine what wealth means to you. Most of us think that wealth is only about money, our assets or possessions. However, it’s much more than that: wealth also contains intellectual, human and civic facets.