The world is in a deep recession, a 'crises' as its called in many countries. Every day people tell me how bad it is, that they have lost their job or that their business is not taking enough money to survive. People are scared. Yet the truth is that in every recession a few people, a minority, have become exceedingly rich. How? These select people are no more cleaver than you and me. They don't necessarily have exceptional education or talent. They simply think differently from the majority. Would you like to know how winners think? If so read on.

Welcome to Keys To Success. Learn how to succeed in life with our free articles. It is only by aiming high that we can ever hope to achieve the heights. This free website will change your life. I know you have a choice of what you decide to read and who you decide to take your advice from, so I really want to thank you for reading these articles. But just reading this material is not enough, you will need to do the homework I set, just like a course of study, and actually apply these principles in your life.

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Giving and sharing are important life principals so if you know anyone who you think would benefit from this material please do share it with them. You have probably been disappointed by free material in the past.  Were they just watered down versions of the author's book or an excuse for him to nag you to join some seminar on the other side of the globe? Not so here. This is a real, ongoing, in depth course packed with great information you can start to apply in your life right from the first lesson. I also recommend extra reading so you can get other teachers' opinions too. Its so important not to learn anything from just one source so if I find a book that can really make this stuff clear for you, or a product or service which really works, of course I will let you in on it. However I do promise you that I will never promote anything which I am not using and benefiting from myself. Fair?

Is the success you crave still tantalisingly just out of reach? If so the help you need is here!!! You have come to the right place. I know you are going to be delighted by the content of this website.  It has been researched from many different sources and everything I teach you has been tried and tested in my own life.  I am not saying there will be no woolly theories but where I use them I will introduce them as such.  Otherwise you can be sure that the things I tell you have worked wonders for me.  If you apply them in your own life they will work wonders for you too.  

Success leaves clues and a clear path you can follow. With this material you will learn how others have achieved the success you crave and how you can follow in their footsteps.. I know you will be delighted with this information packed, life changing website. There are many things that are different here.  For one thing I encourage you to contact me directly any time you have questions, need help or advice, or just need someone to confirm that you are on the right track.

I can teach you a lot here and I will, but I can't teach you everything. Its always a good idea to read lots of books, listen to lots of audio programmes and attend as many seminars as you possibly can.  That way you will gain a much broader and more rounded appreciation of the subject.  I shall be suggesting sources of further study throughout this course. Please don't take the attitude that "Jack's just trying to sell books".  Yes I make a few pence off each one but not enough to make much difference to my already very healthy income. This is your future we are talking about and I really do want you to have the very best future that you can possibly have.  Please take plenty of time to actually do the homework I set you. If you can't justify the expense of buying books right now you can always borrow them from the library. But please do read the books I suggest. These are the books that helped me and they will help you tremendously too. Il will help you all I can but I can't die for you, do your press ups for you or eat your lunch for you. No one can do these things for you and neither can anyone study your books for you or do your homework for you. If you want to benefit form this course you are going to have to do the work. One thing I emphases  a lot here is ACTION! The basis of all success is the way we think, but the thinking is wasted unless it leads us to inspired, motivated ACTION!

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One good way to learn this material is to teach it to others, so you might wish to meet regularly with a group of like minded friends and share the material with them. This material is offered to you without cost so why not get them to read this website too and then meet together once or twice a month to discuss each article. You always learn more about something when you try to teach it to others, and when you have to explain it to someone else, you quickly find out which aspects of a subject you don’t really understand.

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Okay, enough of all that. If we are going to talk about success we better start off by considering what 'success' means to you.  It may well mean something quite different to each and every one of us.  I know what it means to me, it means having the recourses to acquire lots of vulnerable land where I can replant native forest.  To you it may mean becoming a millionaire and to someone else it could mean becoming a published author or having a number one hit record.  The possibilities are endless.  Each definition of success is just as valid as the others. So what really  constitutes a successful person?

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The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines success as: noun - 1 the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. 2 the attainment of fame, wealth, or social status. 3 a person or thing that achieves success. — ORIGIN Latin successus, from succedere ‘come close after’.

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So if you made a plan and followed it, you succeeded. If you made a plan and did not follow it, you failed. This gives us a yard stick by which we can judge our performance each and every day. We can say at the end of the day "I have failed today" or "I have succeeded today."

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Brian Tracy said that "success is goals, and all else is commentary." He teaches us that people with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them. We will be talking more about goal setting in a later article.

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Jim Rohn teaches that success is just a few simple disciplines practiced daily.

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Jim Ryun, the famous American track athlete turned politician, once said that "motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going"

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Napoleon Hill, the famous author of Think and Grow Rich and other books, has a great way of describing success. To Hill, success consists of attaining what he calls The Twelve Great Riches of Life. So what are those Twelve Great Riches of Life? According to Hill, they are: 

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12) financial security.

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Its interesting to notice that Hill puts a positive mental attitude first. As Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or you think your can't, you're right". 

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Hill puts Sound physical health second. If you are fighting health problems, it certainly makes it harder, though certainly not impossible, to be successful. It also makes it more difficult to enjoy your success. 

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Third comes harmony in human relationships. Surely this is one of the great riches of life. With it you will have love in your life, and friends, and people you care about and who care about you. And, with the ability to have harmonious relationships you will also be able to attract whatever help you need in dealing with the challenges you encounter as you work to create whatever you want in life.

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Fourth he lists freedom from fear. If you focus on what you are scared of, instead of what you want, you feel bad, may be unable to move forward, and you also attract what you fear into your life. Conversely, if you fearlessly think only of what you desire, it will be drawn towards you and you will be dawn towards it.

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Fifth is the hope of achievement. Just the "hope of achievement" causes us to feel better. The idea of something to look forward to, the idea that we can make a difference in the world, makes life worth living. One of the main things I want you to get out of this website is the hope of achievement.

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For number six, Hill gives us the capacity for faith. Napoleon Hill talks a lot about faith in his writings. What did he mean? Did he mean religious faith or something different? Hill was a preacher's son so its reasonable to jump to the conclusion that he meant faith in his own particular religion, but I think he meant something broader. I think he had discovered that once you understand the way the universe works, you just know that you can make things happen the way you want them to.  

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The seventh of Hill's Twelve Great Riches is a willingness to share one’s blessings. Once you understand how achievement and success work, once you know how easy it really is to create what you want in life, you will want to share your blessings with others. And, the more you do share your blessings, the more that you’ll attract additional resources that will increase your ability to have and to share even more. If your purpose in life is for the good of other people, it’s as if the whole universe lines up behind you to help you make it happen. 

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Number eight on the list is a labour of love. Making a ton of bunce from something you hate is not success. To be really successful you need to follow your joy and find something you really love to do, something that challenges and energises you,.  Something that makes you jump out of bed eagerly each morning. 

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The ninth of Hill's Twelve Great Riches of Life is an open mind on all subjects. Without an open mind, you stagnate. Successful people never stop learning, and they never stop challenging their own views and beliefs about themselves and about the world. They want to know everything, and their minds are always open to new ideas, new ways of seeing things. They don’t care if their cherished opinions are shown to be incorrect.  They are interested in what is real and true, not in being right and looking clever. They are flexible about everything.

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Hill's number ten is self-discipline. At first glance this may stick in the throat a bit but remember that self-discipline is effortless once you have a labour of love. When you do what you love, and focus on what you want, self-discipline just happens. 

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Number eleven is the capacity to understand people. When you understand people, you have compassion for them. You see how they limit themselves and create their own suffering, and you see their way out. Understanding people allows you to help them, to find a creative way for everyone to win.

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Finally Hill lists financial security. Most people would put this first but not Hill. He understood that if you have the other eleven riches it becomes very easy to create financial security because all of the other eleven riches naturally lead to success and financial gain. Hill lost his first fortune in the US stock market crash of 1929, but because he understood these principles he went on to make another, much larger, fortune.

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I know a lot of you have been struggling with money so lets look at that for a moment. By the end of this course, if you  do the homework and at least some of the recommended reading, you will know everything you need to know about how to make as much money as you want. There are a few things you have to know and do in order to make money, but they are no big deal. By the end of the course you will know what they are. Then, it’s up to you. There will always be ups and downs in life. The real security comes from the other eleven riches, because with them, you can create wealth whenever you need it. 

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Whatever you want, there is a price to pay to get it. Even this free course has a price and that is the time it will take you to really study it and do the extra reading. But reading about this stuff is not enough.  There is a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path. If you want to change your results you will have to pay the price by changing the way you think and the way you act.  There is no other way.  If you keep on doing what you have always done, you will keep on getting what you have always got.  It really is that simple. 

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As Bill Harris says, "there is a certain way of thinking and acting that will lead you to any future you want. Your job is to discover what it is and to be flexible enough to adopt it".  I am explaining what that way is in this website. Will you be flexible enough to adopt it?

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We are constantly creating our reality by our thoughts and our actions. None of this is coming from outside. Outer circumstances are a factor in our success, but they are a small factor. They determine some of the minor details of how we go about creating what we want. The real power comes from inside our own heads and our own hearts. If there is one stumbling block that absolutely must be removed if we are to become successful, it is the idea that our environment determines our results. The truth is that it is how we focus our minds,  how we act, and how we respond to environmental factors which really determines our results. 

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Unfortunately a lot of people who write in to me for advise seem to have hold of the wrong end of the stick. They seem to think that they only have to do the thinking part of the thinking and acting formula and everything they want will come to them. Yes there is great power in positive thinking and focusing on what you want.  Yes you can manifest the things you want in the world but only by taking action. You can say all the prayers and affirmations in the universe, and do all the visualisations you want about being rich but no dumper truck is going to unload gold bars on your driveway.  Yes, right thought must precede taking right action, in order to focus and motivate your efforts. But it is equally true that right action must follow right thought in order for the thing desired to manifest in your life. 

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Yes thoughts probably can act upon the environment directly and the science of quantum physics is discovering exciting things in this regard. However I seriously recommend that you don't rely on this alone. Do five decisive things every day to move you towards your goals, then if quantum effects do turn up as well, treat them as a bonus. This course is about giving you simple, practical tools which you can integrate into your life right away. We may get into some of the more esoteric stuff later on but for now let's just get you firmly set on the path to achievement.

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There are five main things I really want you to get, and I will be going on about them quite a lot as the course unfolds.  These are:

1) You are responsible for what happens in your own life.
2) There is a certain way to think and act that will get you any result you want.
3) There is always a price to pay to have anything in life.
4) What you focus on directs your mind in that direction and motivates you to take action.
5) Beliefs are not fixed. They are just the thoughts we habitually think. Synapses in our brains wire together to support our habitual thought patterns. By deliberately changing the thoughts we habitually think we can rewire our brains for success. 

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So as this course unfolds please do have the flexibility to change the way you think and act in order to attract the success you desire.  The rewards will be well worth it I promise you.

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I want to share a very simple formula with you for getting whatever you want in life. Few people follow it, and if you do follow it, you can create anything you want in life.

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Aristotle considered that there was a simple three step process to get what you want out of life:

1) Understand that you can achieve success.
2) Define what success represents for you.
3) Organise your life around its achievement

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This is so simple it seems trivial when you first hear it and, to be honest, I think Aristotle was oversimplifying a little bit. Lets expand on that, lets work it up to the six steps as suggested by Bill Harris. So here is Bill Harris' simple, six step formula that really works:

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Step One - Know where you are right now. Evaluate your circumstances honestly and become clear about exactly where you are. How can you plan any journey if you don't even know where you are starting off from? So start today by working out exactly where you are, take inventory of all your assets and liabilities in every area of your life AND be happy and grateful for all the wonderfull things you have right now!!!

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Step Two - Know where you want to go. This is a big one, and we’ll deal with this in great detail later. You have to know where you want to go, or what you want, before you can set out on the road to get it. If you just say, "I want to go somewhere," you wouldn’t have enough information to know what to do, what action to take, would you?

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Step Three - Take action! Any action. Just take the best first step you can think of even if you know its pathetic.  Do you realise that even the most successful people in the world didn't know what to do any more than you do when they first started out.  If you wait until you know exactly what to do you will never get started.

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Step Four - Evaluate the results of the action you took. Check to see what happened. If you made some progress, you might want to do some more of the same action. If not, you ask yourself what other action you might take. If you made some progress but not a lot, you might ask yourself how to improve the action you took in order to make it work better. Whatever you do, you will get feedback and learn something. Take enough action and heed the feedback and you will eventually become very wise. Please help me in this regard by giving me honest feedback about this course. 

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Step Five - Refine the action in the light of your experience and then act again. Of course your refined action might be just as pathetic as the first action, or it might be better. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you are receiving feedback and learning all the time. As the saying goes "don’t just sit there, do something!". Obviously you will want to take the best action you can but please realise that you will learn a lot more from a bad action than you will by sitting around trying to get all the details worked out. When you act you soon find out what works and what doesn’t. Until you take action you are just guessing, just flying blind. 

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Step Six - Keep repeating steps 3, 4, and 5, and continue acting, evaluating the results, and refining your action until you get to where you want to go. If you follow these six steps, you can have every reasonable thing you want in life.

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When Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) was developing his light bulb, he experimented with some 10,000 different filaments to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting. In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an vacuum or an inert gas bulb glowed well for about 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours. Early on in this long process of trial and error, a reporter asked him if he was discouraged by so many failures. He said, no, not a bit. In fact, he was thrilled that he had already found over five hundred things that didn’t work, because he knew he was just that much closer to finding the one that would work.  So don't get discouraged if you don't succeed first time.  All successful people make a lot of mistakes along the way and you will too. Just keep acting and learning and growing and improving. I remember a school teacher of mine once telling me "The man who never made a mistake never made anything".

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Far too many people never start out towards their dreams because they don’t know how to get there. They think they can’t start until they have it all straight in their heads.  But it doesn't work that way. Successful people don’t know any more than you do how they’re going to get there. They just start and learn along the way.  If you will do this, and follow the six step plan, you can create whatever you want.

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So how do you refine your actions? As you act, look for feedback, ASK FOR IT!  Then depending on the feedback, refine your actions accordingly. But this isn’t what most people do with feedback, most people, losers, push feedback away, close their ears to it or use it as an excuse to give up. Successful people welcome feedback, actively ask for it and learn from it.

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As the course unfolds you will find your attitudes about a lot of things changing. You will start to think and act like a successful person. There are certain things successful people have in common and they mostly involve the way these people think and act.  You have to be willing to adopt their ways of thinking and acting if you want to share in their success.

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Remember there is a price to pay for everything. There is no such thing as a free lunch. As soon as you work out what the price is for whatever you want, you must be prepared to pay that price in full and in advance.  Whatever you want in life, you’re going to have to be prepared to give something in return for it. That may be time, it may be effort, it may be service to others, it may be making changes in yourself, or it may be something else, but in some way, there will be a price. There is no getting away from that. The good news is that if you act in alignment with your true life purpose it will be a lot of fun to pay that price.  We will be looking at this in much more detail in a latter lesson.

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Homework (1): Paying that price starts now. It starts by doing the exercises and extra reading I recommend. Your homework for this lesson is to work out exactly where you are in your life right now. 

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We will talk a lot about the seven major areas of life.  These are:

1) Financial

2) Career

3) Recreation / Free time / Having Fun

4) Health and Fitness

5) Relationships, family and friends as well as romantic relationships.

6) Service to the community and to the planet / conservation / helping others.

7) Education / Spiritual development / Personal achievements not covered elsewhere.

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So please take inventory of all your assets and liabilities and calculate your net worth, in each of these seven area of your life.

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Homework (2) Reading assignment: I will be taking a lot about Napoleon Hill in this course. His was probably the first dedicated study of success.  His life's mission started as a challenge from Andrew Carnegie (1835 – 1919), to interview the richest men in America at that time (Andrew Carnegie was Scottish but he had moved to America) and work out what they all had in common. You can hear Hill's own account of his first meeting with Carnegie on YouTube, it really is fascinating. As a result of this work he wrote several books, the most famous of which was Think and Grow Rich. Its not a big book but it most certainly is a life-changing one. So this is your set reading for this lesson. You can borrow a copy from your local library or buy your own, whichever you prefer.  

To buy the book in British Pounds just click on the Pound sign or for US Dollars click on the Dollar sign. There is also an audio version available. Please do read this book before next time and if you have read it before, please read it again. It really is a life changing book.