The Key to Success by Brian Tracy

Every great achievement begins with a vision, a dream of something exciting or different, a feeling that inspires and motivates you to aim higher and beyond anything that you have ever achieved before.

What is your vision for your life?

Imagine for a moment that you have no limitations on what you can be or do.

Imagine that you have all the time and all the money, all the knowledge and experience, all the skills and resources, all the friends and contacts.

If you could have anything in your life, what would it be?

Project forward five years and imagine that your life is now perfect in every way.

What does it look like? What are you doing? Who is there with you? Who is no longer there?

Describe your ideal future as if it was perfect in every respect.

Take a breath. Gave you something to think about, didn’t I? Now, onto the key to success…

After years of searching, I met a wise and wealthy man who sat medown and told me the key to success. He also explained the reasons for failure and under-achievement in life.

As he spoke, I immediately recognized the truth in what he said. And his discovery about success was quite simple, as all great truths seem to be.

What he told me was this:

“The key to success is for you to set one big, challenging goal and then to pay any price, overcome any obstacle, and persist through any difficulty until you finally achieve it.”

By achieving one important goal, you create a pattern, a template for success in your subconscious mind. Forever after you will be automatically directed and driven toward repeating that success in other things that you attempt.

By overcoming adversity and achieving one great goal in any area, you will program yourself for success in other areas as well.

In other words, you learn to succeed by succeeding. The more you achieve, the more you can achieve.

Each success, especially the first one, builds your confidence and belief that you will be successful next time.

The fact is that you can accomplish almost any goal that you set for yourself if you persist long enough and work hard enough.

The only one who can stop you is yourself.

And you learn to persist by persisting in the face of great adversity when everyone around you is quitting and every fiber of your being screams at you to quit as well.

For example…

When you subject certain chemicals to intense heat, the chemicals will crystallize and form a completely new substance, a new composition in which the crystallization process is irreversible.

A lump of coal, for example, becomes a diamond under intense prolonged heat and pressure.

In the same way, you become a person of great strength by persevering in the crucible of intense difficulty until you finally succeed.

Each time you force yourself to persevere, rather than giving up, your character “crystallizes” at a new, higher level. Eventually, you reach the point where you become unstoppable…

… but no one starts out as a diamond.

It’s the early process of motivating yourself to set and achieve that FIRST goal that moves you one step closer to becoming a diamond and one step further from a lump of coal.

Taken from: Bryan Tracy Newsletter