Success Advice
The 15 Success Principles You’ll Never Want To Forget

You can’t assure success, but you can increase the chances of it happening. After all, opportunity favors the prepared. With the following 15 success principles, you can dramatically increase the chances of success in your life.
Success Principles
1 – Prepare
The first success principle is preparation. It’s the foundation of success. With preparation you create your own opportunities. Once you have all the different elements lined up, it only takes a small opening to realize your goal. At the same time, taking advantage of big opportunities without enough preparation means risking your success, as you’re building without a well-laid foundation.
2 – Do something you love
You have to work very hard whatever it is you choose to do. Your work or your project will dominate much of your time and your life. Therefore, find something that you enjoy doing and do that.
3 – Get started
You have to start somewhere. Today is as good a day as any to start. Get into action today and start moving in the direction you want. Putting it off can only lead to failure, whereas if you start and see an early setback, at least you conquered that setback early on.
4 – Move in the right direction
Keep everything moving in the direction you want. It doesn’t matter if things go slowly initially. As long as the overall direction is favorable, you’ll get where you want to go eventually.
5 – Use the power of dreams and your imagination
What you dream and visualize today will become true tomorrow. You just have to work on turning it into reality. Just as your dreams can only influence your life if you let them, the cities you build in your imagination can only become real if you build them.
6 – Think big
If you set your aim a bit too high you might fall short. If you set your aim too low you might achieve your goal… and miss out on the other opportunities. By thinking bigger, the only limit is what is possible. You’re no longer limited by what you think is possible.
7 – Focus on growth
Seemingly impossible challenges are just cleverly disguised opportunities for growth. If you take those challenges and, in solving them, improve yourself, you’ll find yourself continually moving in the right direction.
8 – Maintain your determination
With enough determination, you can succeed through almost any odds. Enough determination means you’ll find a way no matter the situation.
9 – Set a clear vision
Think through where you’ll want to go. Develop a clear sense of what your final goal is, and keep this with you. By knowing the destination you want to reach, you can continually look at your current path and decide if it’s a route that will help you get where you want to go.
10 – Set goals along the way
A final goal isn’t enough. You need intermediate goals that set the path. These goals should be specific, measurable, realistic, attainable, and timely. These intermediate goals define the steps that you need to take to get to the final one.
11 – Work out plans of action for your work
For each goal, it helps to have plans to reach them. Your plan describes how you can reach each step from where you are, or where you will be. Keep in mind that the future is never certain. Things rarely work out exactly how you plan. Therefore, see these plans as showing one or more possible routes, not necessarily the route you’ll end up taking.
Still, knowing the plan means you can avoid long detours that might compromise your chances of reaching a goal on time — or at all.
12 – Commit to taking action
Once you start going, keep going. Never, never, never give up. If you find an obstacle in your way, chip away at it or go around it. The only way to really fail is to give up. If you keep going you’ll succeed. If you hit the limits of what’s possible, you can regroup and find another way.
13 – Use affirmations
Affirmations are just short, positive, and above all direct phrases in present tense. Things like “I’m getting more and more successful.” The idea is that they reinforce a positive world view. With affirmations, you are defining your own reality. By transmitting a positive world view to your mind, it adopts this view. As your mind adopts this view, it helps shape the world around you to fit it, which means it helps make the world around you one that reflects a reality of you getting more successful every day.
14 – Get rid of negative influences
Avoid harmful influences around you that might shake you from your goal. Keep people and ideas around you that support your success and your belief in yourself.
15 – Be grateful and appreciate what you have
The final success principle is to appreciate what you have already. Realize that — by sheer virtue of the fact that you can be reasonably certain you’ll live from one day to the next — you already have enough. Enjoy it! Appreciate what you’ve achieved so far, and see that what you want, where you’re going, is not what you need or what you must do. Rather, these are things and actions that will make your situation even better.
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Setting goals at the start of the year means you will know exactly what you need to do throughout the year to be successful. By setting goals, it forces you to build a plan about how you intend to achieve those goals. By having a plan in place, you will wake up every morning with a clear idea of what it is you need to do each day. Just by writing down your goals, there is a 42% greater chance you will achieve those goals than if they just stayed in your head. It may seem like a small thing but actually creating goals every year and then writing them down significantly improves your chances of success. (more…)
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Adversity is an inevitable part of our lives, and it is an important and defining factor of our personal story. The stories we build for ourselves in the face of adversity will either empower or discourage us emotionally, help us move forward or remain stuck in the past, allow us to grow or to decline. (more…)
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Even if you produce amazing results at your job or in other areas of your life, others may still not see you as being competent if you lack the confidence to back it up. If you are good at your job, exuding confidence will ensure others also recognize your competence in your area of expertise. And research backs this up. (more…)
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Ali usman .m
Mar 17, 2015 at 6:59 am
Comment:It’s a nice principle especially affir mation.i really improve on it,ok continue keep up.
robinson
Jul 4, 2014 at 11:43 am
Wow, awesome indeed. Great lecture for success. Loved it
thelma
Dec 27, 2013 at 7:16 am
goood i will improve on the places am lacking
excel john
Oct 11, 2013 at 7:25 pm
Nice one I will keep reading to increase my understanding
Josh Mason
Aug 27, 2013 at 9:04 pm
Great stuff here Joel! Especially setting a clear intention, using affirmations and the power of gratitude. Those 3 have really helped me grow as a person in my business and in life in general.
Thanks for sharing!
Joel
Aug 27, 2013 at 9:22 pm
Nice to hear Josh! Great to see you have been implementing these points into your daily routine.
The Kiss Provider
Jun 23, 2013 at 9:08 pm
Just AWESOME….I REALLY LIKE THOSE QUOTES!!!
Rob Douglas
Jun 23, 2013 at 7:29 pm
You’ve gotta love it!
Riccardo COva
Jun 4, 2013 at 12:27 pm
nice
SEVAN M
May 28, 2013 at 8:57 am
great and superb quote .
Nelton
Apr 7, 2013 at 1:34 pm
Great article!
Fiona Scrymgeour
May 20, 2013 at 10:09 am
Great article Joel, self belief is the key to me, we all have that little voice of self doubt chatting in the background of our mind which can derail us!
yasmeen
Mar 28, 2013 at 8:10 am
reading this makes me feel energized 🙂
Iuly Iuliana
Mar 25, 2013 at 6:17 pm
Beautiful 15 points..
sum1
Mar 21, 2013 at 5:49 am
b gr8ful n appreciate wat u hve !
very nice.
tx 4 ur 15 points 🙂
Mlle Parker
Mar 13, 2013 at 6:48 am
Thank You for this article. It is a great reminder….To me #14 Get rid of negative influences so important. No matter what you do, if you are not surrounded by positive and motivated people might end up in a rut.
Darren
Mar 12, 2013 at 11:37 pm
Great list, would also add, to BE PRESENT and enjoy the scenery on the journey to success + there’s no failure, only feedback and learning, give yourself permission not to get it perfect 1st time…
Andi Oparaku
Mar 12, 2013 at 8:54 pm
Great article of all things to remember as you take on your goals..love the site.
Refugio Arriozola
Mar 12, 2013 at 5:51 pm
May I have your permission to translate this post to spanish to publish it in my blog??
Thanks in advance
Joel
Mar 12, 2013 at 11:35 pm
Hi Refugio,
No problems that will be fine, please have a link back to this article on your post. Thank you for asking sir.
Kumar Gauraw
Mar 12, 2013 at 3:31 pm
Hi James,
I enjoyed this post. The blog is also awesome. I liked all the 15 points. On a side note, I would have preferred to have 15th point as the 1st point because I believe that a lot of things fall in place when we have an attitude of gratitude. Just a personal thought… 🙂
Thank you for sharing.
Strong By Choice
Mar 12, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Always good to review the basics and more importantly DO them!
Linda Harding-Bond
Mar 12, 2013 at 3:16 pm
Excellent article. I want to add a # 16-Allow yourself to rest. As one who is striving to reach certain goals I find that the tendency to work to exhaustion is common and I have noticed this in other entrepreneurs as well. Resting and just taking the time to “be still” is so important in maintaining physical emotional and mental balance. I have had to learn the hard way that if you don’t give your body “me” time, it will take it without your permission.