How would you feel if I were to tell you the secret of success? 

This is something that our most successful people such as Richard Branson, Anita Roddick, Mother Teresa, Thomas Edison, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and Bill Gates, to name just a few, use or used and made into a habit throughout their day to day lives. Doing this made these people strong and powerful and enabled them to achieve the seemingly ‘impossible’ dream. This is a thing that made them hungry and after putting it into practice, made them even more successful. It differentiates a winner from a loser. In actual fact, it is so important that if you would not use it or have it at all, you could become heavily depressed. Most people talk about it and do not put it into practice. You already have it in you, however the intensity level may vary from individual to individual. YOU however, can change the level of this thing within your life as you so choose.

Before I reveal the secret, may I ask you a question? What would your answer be (there is no right or wrong answer) if I would personally introduce you to a friend who has a ten-bed roomed house overlooking the sea with 1,000 acres of land attached to it and a swimming pool and a tennis court? Inside, the house has been decorated by a famous designer, the carpets are all real Persian and some of the original Van Gogh paintings are hanging on the walls. This friend drives the latest Ferrari convertible and a Mercedes limousine. His wife is a beautiful model; his estate is estimated at more than £ 1 Billion. He works out on a daily basis and his body is just great looking.

What are your immediate thoughts? Are they a) what a show-off. I would never be able to afford that or b) How does he do it? What can I do to be as successful as him?

Whatever your answer is, just stop for a minute and think. If you went for answer a), what were your thoughts? Wasn’t your brain focusing more on the “never”? Weren’t some of your thoughts also related to jealousy?

If your answer came close to b), what were your thoughts here? Did you come up with lots of answers as to “how” you could be like this man?

(I am interested in your outcome and would be pleased for you to share it with me).

The reason I asked you to do this exercise was to make you think and to make you aware that everything starts with a single thought. More importantly, this exercise is to make you more conscious of how you think. The reason why you are the way you are, (apart from your environment and your friends and family) is down to what thoughts you have had so far in your life. There is a famous quote by Talmud that explains exactly what I mean.

“Pay attention to your thoughts, for they become your words, pay attention to your words, for they become your acts, pay attention to your acts, for they become your habits, pay attention to your habits, for they become your character, pay attention to your character, for it becomes your fate.”

Research shows that we human beings each have around 50,000 thoughts a day. The vast majority of those thoughts are not new. They are the same things we thought about yesterday, months, or even years before. Our mind focuses on the same things again and again. The thoughts are not new, they are recycled materials that keep on appearing again and again in our minds.

Now, just think about what happens to you if your thought process is mainly negative. That is the equivalent of a junk food diet that continues year in, year out. It clogs up your system; it poisons it, just like the diet would.

Now, you may say “You can not stop “bad” things from happening” and this is very true my friend, however, you can re-set your focus. Let me give you an example.

A beautiful baby girl was born on 27th June 1880 to Captain Arthur H. and Kate Adams Keller of Tuscumbia. The baby developed an illness at the young age of only 19 months, which left her totally deaf and blind. However the girl was so determined, by the age of seven, she had mastered the fingertip alphabet and shortly afterwards, how to write. By the time she was 10, she had learnt Braille as well as the manual alphabet and how to type. By the age of 16, she could speak well enough to go to preparatory school and to college. In 1904 she was graduated “cum laude” from Radcliffe College. This little girl became one of history’s most remarkable women. She dedicated her life to the blind and the deaf people throughout the world, lecturing in more than 25 countries worldwide and is well known throughout the world. Her name was Helen Keller.

Now, do you think she could have mastered all of this if she had had a negative attitude, if she’d said to herself “Oh, what a pity, what have I done to deserve this? Poor me. I feel really sorry for myself, why did this happen to me? I must be really bad, poor me, poor me. Instead, she chose the opposite, she took positive action for herself and took life in her own hands and wrote:

They took away what should have been my eyes (But I remembered Milton's Paradise). They took away what should have been my ears, (Beethoven came and wiped away my tears). They took away what should have been my tongue, (But I had talked with God when I was young). He would not let them take away my soul - Possessing that, I still possess the whole.

Just like the other famous people I referred to at the beginning of this article, Helen Keller used the power of positive thought and positive thinking to achieve great things with her life.

It is true that who you are right now is the total of what you thought about up to this moment.

If you are not totally satisfied with who you are right now, the good news is that who you will be from now on is entirely up to you.

YOU have the power to change. Just Do It, Do it NOW.

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