How do you measure success? Do you measure it by standards set by your parents, peers, teachers, coworkers, bosses or your spouse? Do you let others tell you that what you’re doing will count for nothing in the long run, even though they have no idea what your long term vision or intent is?

Do you measure it to your own standards? If it’s a business goal, do you compare to this time last year? If it’s a personal goal, have you improved over the last self-assessment that you did on this subject? If it’s a health goal, are you moving toward your target? Only you can truly answer these questions. Let the evidence of your efforts be your guide. You’ll know if and how much harder you’ll need to work in order to attain that number that you’ve selected, whether it be reps, pounds, cholesterol levels or a target weight.

Does the fact that we’re all trying to survive, let alone get ahead in the midst of the greatest economic recession in human history stand in the way of your plans for the future or are you unflinchingly pursuing them without heed to criticism or prejudgment?

Don’t be dissuaded by naysayers ad ne’er -do-wells that have given up on their own dreams and given out on their own ability to see past their failures. Use these as examples of what to avoid on your way to your own personal achievements.

Would we have light, let alone these computers we’re using to read and write this article if it weren’t for Edison’s countless failures on his way to successfully creating that first incandescent bulb? Would we have the theory of relativity if Einstein had listened to his teachers early in his education that told him that he had a problem with mathematics?

The list goes on and on of some of the greatest minds in human history only having succeeded after what most would consider catastrophic or debilitating circumstantial failures.

Success is a measure of human spirit. It can not be quantified or measured by electronic or other equipment. It can, in fact only be speculated upon by the criticism of others. True success is only measured in the eye, heart and soul of the individual who set out to and attained that goal.

Be that go-getter. Be the Goal-Getter! Take your hopes, dreams and aspirations and work them down into manageable tasks that, when put together, will surpass your hopes. Done properly, the end can in fact be much more than the sum of its parts. The “You Factor” is what makes the difference. It is why YOU are the only one that can truly measure the level of your success.

Success = Synchronistic Unexpected Culmination Combining Essential Strategic Strategies

©2010~JMelanson

Setting up goals is one aspect of success that had been overlooked by many people most of the time. Usually, other aspects are played up and goal-setting simply become one of the many steps in achieving success.

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Many self-help experts outline some of the keys that make goal-setting successful. The following are some of those key points:

Goal setting is a skill and a discipline

They don’t teach goal-setting in schools but it should have been done because it has to be mastered. You need to find out as much as possible about the techniques of goal-setting and master them.

Another important aspect is the need of discipline in the process. Working on goal-setting can transform your life.

Goals must be in writing

This has been repeated over and over again by experts and gurus. The reason is that commitment documented in writing becomes embedded in the subconscious mind. Keeping your written goals where you can see them every day is a great way to keep them in both your conscious and subconscious minds.

The act of writing it down brings a better chance of success because the subconscious is helping in the process, drawing you toward your goal.

Clarity

One of the many qualities found in successful people is the clarity of their desires and wants in life. From your end, you need to be clear as well in your commitments, in your wants and needs. It sometimes takes a re-assessment or inventory of your own goals to gain the necessary clarity to move forward.

It had been proven in the past that clarity does have a big influence on the realization of your wants.

Being specific

This key aspect is also very important. Next to being clear on what you need, you also have to be specific.

The anecdote involving the comic Jim Carrey comes to mind. When he was starting out and was living in his car (he was broke), Jim wrote a check to himself for $7 million dollars. Shortly thereafter, he bagged the lead role in the movie “Pet Detective” and was paid exactly $7 million dollars. This is a perfect example of manifesting a specific goal.

Overestimate/underestimate

Most people, when writing how much they would like to be earning usually overestimate what they might achieve in a year. On the other hand, they’re dramatic in their under-estimation of what they can earn in five or ten  years time with the right goal setting structure in place.

Being more realistic with your earning capability and your time estimates will result in achieving more consistent successes.

Why

In achieving your goals, it is far more important to have compelling reasons why you must achieve them than it is to know how you are going to do it.  If you focus on your why, much of the rest of the task will fall into place naturally.
How

Frankly, you need not know how. Many people put off starting their goals because they do not know how to achieve them from the start. The key is simply…get started!

The more momentum you can develop in setting off toward your goals, the faster the ” how” will be revealed to you. The key is to take action. NOW!

Using these critical goal-setting keys can help you focus on the goals that you want to achieve. You can test it yourself and see what happens in the next 90 days. The success of these goal-setting keys depends largely on you and the intensity of your commitment.

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If you’ve read any of the spiritual best sellers in print today, you’ll notice a familiar thread amongst them. They all ask us to look inside for our answers. This flies in the face of most organized religion which have exclusionary creeds and tenets which chastise us more than edify us.

Through introspection, so these books imply, we can find our purpose on the planet and begin to move toward creating a world where everyone knows and has their part and all take responsibility for it and themselves. A place where there is actually peace on earth and good will toward men. Is it a fantasy or is this not only possible but attainable in your lifetime?

The majority of people existing on this earth today, never begin to understand why they are here and what they should be doing with their lives. They continue to trade their time for money, and never receive anywhere near what their true worth is.

The answer lies in being able to determine or divine your true purpose in life. The key to finding your true purpose lies in your passions. By looking at the things in your life that you’re most passionate about, you can gain a good insight into what you life’s work might be.

Being successful is virtually guaranteed if you love what you’re doing. Long hours and grueling conditions seem to hold no significance to you if you’re completely focused on your goal and achieving it in the shortest time possible.

Look inside yourself  for your answers. You have all of the tools that you’ll ever need to be successful right within you. Take the time to get to know yourself better than you ever have and you’ll gain even more insight as to your life’s calling. Whether you love kids, teaching, fishing or collecting stamps; you can both earn money and enjoy what you’re doing at the same time.

People like Jack Canfield, Dr. Joe Rubino, Tony Robbins and many others can tell you the same thing. It’s as simple as making a choice and following through with it. When you condition yourself properly, you make winning and success a habit.

Once you realize the awesome rewards that come with successfully completing projects on time and under budget you’ll see that there’s no other way to do things and you fall into a winning, successful and profitable habit. These types of habits positively reinforce themselves thereby perpetuating the reward and gain from the effort put forth.

The Law of Attraction is very important and affects all of us everyday of our lives. The idea behind the Law of Attraction is that you draw into your life the things that your thoughts and emotions are focused on whether that be something you want in your life or something negative you don’t want.

The Law of No Assertion is an idea associated with the Law of Attraction. This law says that there is no way any outside influences can bring something into our lives if it is not in our thoughts and emotions. This means that God, fate, the stars, your friends, your family and all other influences are unable to change your life in a way we are not focused on already.

You can also look at this through the Law of Alternate Realities which puts a physics sort of spin on the idea. The Law of Alternate Realities says that we are responsible for creating our reality by our thoughts and emotions. The three laws are all related and all are trying to get the same point across. It is just a matter of how you want to look at it.

You need to really understand the idea of attracting things both unwanted and wanted into your life.

All of us experience a variety of emotions and feelings in our lives. We can be very happy or very sad. When you have negative emotions you are sending negative vibrations out and will get things that you do not want in your life. Positive emotions like happy, grateful, appreciative, joyful and elated bring good things into your life while negative ones like sadness, fear, anger and depression bring negative things.

The Universe responds to the vibrations we send out in the positive no matter what so even if you are thinking about something you do not want, if it is your focus the Universe will bring it to you. We all need to learn to focus our thoughts on the positive and that way we can attract the things we truly want into our lives. We need to change our emotions in the following way:

Fear to Hope to Optimism to Confidence to Belief

The farther we get to the positive side of the emotional scale the more we will be able to get the things we want in a timely manner.

It is important to note that how you think about the things you want is as important as what you think about. Everything we focus on has a point of attraction that resonates. Consider your feelings about something important in your life – how you feel is where your are resonating to.

Think about something that is frequently on your mind. Maybe it is money. Maybe your first thought is that you do not have the money you need or want. You see things you want to buy but you then think to yourself how you can not afford them. Or maybe you think about how fun it would be to be able to buy it and how much you would enjoy the item.

If you want to experience the power of the Law of Attraction, download Subliminal Flash program. It imprints positive affirmations into your subconscious mind, so you become a magnet, attracting success, love and abundance. After 4-7 uses of Subliminal Flash you will notice that you become more attractive for the opposite sex, more healthy and much more successful.

You have to take action for the Law of Attraction to work. Think of it like this – consider the idea of the Be-Do-Have philosophy.

Many of us grew up understanding how important it is to take action to get the things you want in life. We learned early on that our actions are what will help us achieve our goals along with a little luck now and then. The Law of Attraction says that luck does not exist and has no effect on what you bring into your life. You need to rely on your actions to some extent but you need more than action to achieve your goals.

The Universe is what sends us good and bad things in our lives based on our thoughts and emotions and it presents opportunities for us if we are open to them. You need to turn that philosophy you grew up with around and live by the idea of Be-Do-Have.

When you are open to the idea that you can BE where you want in life then you will DO what you need to do to HAVE the things in life that you dream of. We’ll talk more about the Be-Do-Have idea later on.

Many people with very successful lives have gotten there by believing in and working the Law of Attraction. You can tell when people are living through this law and focusing on the good things in their life. Living according to the Law of Attraction can bring you success and you can see that in people around you. There is a lot of talk and a lot of information about the Law of Attraction and how to apply it in your own life out there, you just need to look for it. The main idea is to focus on the things you want and they will come to you in time.

Start manifesting your future now

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Well, it’s been a full year since The Rising Path first showed its face on the internet. The new year will bring some major changes in the blog too. I’ve gotten away from my initial intent and focus for this site and will be getting back on track in short order.

What you can expect is more content that speaks to success in life and business, the laws of attraction and abundance as well as other subject matter designed to help you develop yourself into all that you were meant to be.

This last day of 2008 is a good time for reflection and introspection. It is also a time to look forward to the new year.

In retrospect (remember, hindsight is always 20/20) I can see how and where I lost focus with this blog. The crashing economy had a bit to do with it. The necessity of providing overpowered the true intent and spirit of The Rising Path. The integrity of the vision for this site must take precedence over fear and worry. I apologize to all of my readers for ever straying in the first place.

In January you will see the transformation of this site into something that resembles the original vision. There is a forum that never got off the ground, it will be active in January. It will be free for at least the first 3 months of the year, at which point we’ll look at making it a membership forum.

The focus of the forum will be the principles put forth by Napoleon Hill and Wallace Wattles and some of the other pioneers of the Law Of Attraction. It will also be a venue for aspiring Internet Marketers to learn how to apply those success principles to their own businesses.

Joint Venture partners are welcomed to contact me at john{@}therisingpath.com

Product ideas and offerings are welcome.

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There’s a dark cloud looming on the horizon. It’s gathering in energy and getting bigger as we speak. It’s as destructive as a tornado and just as indiscriminate.

What I’m talking about is the next G-Slap; be ready for big changes from the monster of search engines around the first of the year. They’ve already been tinkering with the algorithms and are definitely trending away from current PR and content rich based results.

Early next year, though you may have noticed it already if you’re sharp enough, the big G will display rankings based on the intent of the searcher.

This means that your content will be less relevant if you’re not:

1. Geo-targeting (G is doing this already based on users IP whether the user is signed in or not)
2. Relevance – generically speaking, if a room full of searchers were to type java into the query box, some would be looking for software, some would be looking for drinks and yet others would be looking for travel sites.
3. Using video on your site
4. Preparing for the changes NOW.

(Video Courtesy of http://videos.webpronews.com/2008/11/17/pubcon-bruce-clay-ranking-is-dead/)

Getting prepared for the next ominous  G-slap is an adventure in speculation. One line of thought says that if you concentrate your marketing on single keywords you may want to offer content for the other possible synonymous uses of your keywords.

It means a shift in methodology, but for the studious and adaptive marketers out there that can make the necessary changes and move ahead of the trend it can be the difference between having top ranking for you kw’s today and being off the chart completely overnight or keeping your top listings by adapting and overcoming.

The proliferation of “scraper sites” and “spam sites” that steal the top rankings by virtually scraping the content from its competitors and republishing it, most times without proper credit to the original authors, has prompted the change. They have managed to skew the results based on current trends at G and the other major search engines.

When you think about it, this change will mean even more success for the marketer that is savvy enough to ride the wave. It’s kind of like the analogy for marketing to baby-boomers; the bowling ball in the garden hose.

Baby-boomers make up the vast majority of the demographic of buyers that Internet Marketers target. When those boomers pick up on a new trend it’s like a bowling ball in a garden hose, thus the .com millionaire boom of the 90′s. Get in at the upswing of the trend and you’ll ride a very profitable and somewhat predictable course.

Transfer that thought over to this looming change and you can see how the change SHOULD actually bring even MORE targeted traffic, intent on BUYING your products.

As the video describes; in a room full of people searching the term java some would want software, some would want information on coffee and yet others would want travel information. Wouldn’t you rather have the searcher that was looking for your new java software product be the first at your site?

This change will ultimately alter the way that Internet Marketers promote products. The question is whether or not we should do anything at all. This new way of presenting search results only make a difference by weeding out those less targeted results for a particular searcher based on their search and usage histories. I think it will be a win/win/win situation.

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8 Secrets To Success | Richard St.John @ TED

Success means many different things to different people.  Ultimately, success means being satisfied with your result.  Using this attitude and breaking your task down into smaller tasks can make a large job seem so much easier to handle, and assure your own sense of success.

The secret really is, to begin with your goal in mind and think backwards from there.  As an example, if my goal is to earn $250,000 this year, it may seem daunting at first, but once you break it down into bite sized little chunks it’s actually quite digestible.  In order to earn $250,000 a year, I’ll need to earn just under $21,000 per month which again breaks down to about $5,200 per week.  If we break that down even further, and base it on a 40 hour work week we need to charge an hourly rate of $130 to reach our goal of $250,000 this year.

If we translate this idea from a monetary one to one of gaining subscribers perhaps, just decide how many subscribers you would like to have on your list this year, break that goal down, backwards into bite size chunks as well.  Once you have a traffic system in place that will guarantee you visitors you can grow a list of 100,000 subscribers by breaking them down into only about 12 subscribers per hour for the whole year.  While 100,000 subscribers seems like an unreachable goal, if you look at it as trying to get to the point of 10 to 12 subscribers per hour it doesn’t seem quite so impossible does it?

While many equate success with owning the large home and the boat and the second home and a large SUVs, they have found very little fulfillment in those objects and until they can find personal success, they will never feel truly successful.  Take the time to work yourself, being a well-balanced individual, physically ,mentally and spiritually, and you will find your path to success in business much easier to handle.

Every aspect of our business should be a reflection of ourselves.  If you can take pride in who you are and the way you represent yourself to the world you can also take pride in your business and the way it represents itself to the world.

Equipping Yourself for Success—Must Have List of Gear for the Telecommuter
By: Sylvie Fortin

There are few things more aggravating for a business owner than hiring someone to work from home and finding out they don’t have the proper equipment or software. Worse yet is when someone has the equipment, but doesn’t have a clue on how to use it. Don’t be one of these telecommuters!

If you are a telecommuter, you need to equip yourself for success with the best must-have gear available. The actual equipment and software you need will be dependent on the type of work you perform, but the following list of barebones minimum requirements should help you get started down the road to work-at-home success.

Computer
It is critical that you have a superior computer system if you plan on telecommuting full-time. Computers are a lot cheaper these days than they once were. It is worth the investment to have a system that doesn’t crash constantly, can access the internet at high speeds, and can process documents rapidly.

Good Quality Printer
Consider investing in a laser printer. With professional quality proposals and documents, you’ll be stunned with how much more effective you can become as a telecommuter with a quality printer. Definitely recommended!

Fax Capability (fax machine or online fax service)
Whether it’s an inexpensive online fax service like j2.com that allows you to send and receive faxes using the internet or a traditional fax machine, having fax capabilities will be invaluable to you as you create a professional image with your customers.

Second Phone Line (if using dial up access) or use Cable / DSL
If you must use dial up access, rather than have a cable modem or DSL high speed, then you need to have a second phone line. There is nothing more frustrating for employers than to try and reach a telecommuter and cannot because they are online and there’s a busy signal. Remember: the faster your internet access speed, the more money you can make!

Software You Can’t Live Without
Part of what will make you very good at what you do is handling all the stress on behalf of your customers. They don’t need to hear “No, I’m sorry. I don’t have that software, so I can’t do that project you needed done yesterday.” So, make a concerted effort to have a wide assortment of software at your disposal. To save money, consider buying used software. You can keep an eye on local newsgroups to see what people are selling that they don’t need anymore. Also check out eBay.com and Bidz.com for software deals.

Microsoft Office, especially Word and Excel, can set you up to handle just about any telecommuting need. Data entry, research, technical writing, web design, graphics…pretty much everything you’ll typically need to do can be done with this one set of software.

A Good Web Browser
Obviously, you need a good web browser, like Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, but you also need to know how to use it effectively!

WinZip
As you know, size isn’t everything, but when you’re talking files and download speed, bigger isn’t better. WinZip opens files that are sent to you or downloaded, but more importantly, it is used to compress files that you need to send to your clients. Why is this important? Simply put, with zipped files, your clients won’t have to painfully watch their email being downloaded with large file attachments. Spare your clients the pain, download WinZip for free from http://www.winzip.com.

Adobe Reader
Put simply, Adobe Reader allows you to view .pdf files. Without it, there are very few documents that you will be able to read, including many eBooks. You can download the Adobe PDF reader for free (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html).

HTML Editor
You will need a good and simple html editor. This allows you to modify sites and website templates, but more importantly, you can take on projects that involve working with html files. The more variety in projects you can take on, the better for your bottom line!

Graphics Program
Even if you aren’t planning to be a graphics designer, you should definitely have a decent graphics program. No matter the reason—whether it’s resizing, changing a file type, or making a minor modification—you will need a graphics program.

Your Own Website
If you don’t have your own website, you’re seriously hurting your chances of getting the work you deserve! A web site shows the business world that you are serious, professional, and ready to get to work on their project. A telecommuter without a website is like a business without a building. Start building yours today!

As you know, to be a successful telecommuter takes hard work, dedication, and a commitment to excellence. When it comes to equipping yourself with the right stuff, make sure you get off to the right start by equipping yourself with the gear you need to succeed. To your success!

 
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This article is excerpted from “You Can Work in Your PJs”, a real world guide to telecommuting. Sylvie Fortin works from home full time and wrote this book to share her unique techniques with others. You can download your copy of “You Can Work in Your PJs” by visiting You Can Work in Your PJs =================================================