There is a lot of talk today about "the Secret" which has led to a great discussion about success in general. People often don't realize that "the Secret" was just meant as an introduction to the "Law of Attraction" and as such left out a lot of information. Many people are trying to fill in that gap. Here are some success principles that I have found useful in my life. Hopefully they will be helpful to you too.

1. Never complain, or blame anything. When you complain you are making yourself into a victim. You are effectively saying that you are helpless and can't do anything about the situation. You are also focusing on what is wrong with your life. Since, as many authors have pointed out "what you focus on expands", this means that you are actually attracting bad situations into your life because you are focusing on what you don't like. You are also convincing yourself that you are powerless to do anything about it. That's not a good situation to be in. When you blame someone or something for what has happened to you, you are again making yourself into a powerless victim. You give any control over your situation to the person or thing you are blaming. That's not a good place to be in either. You need to know that you can change your future and then take responsibility for your life.

2. Know who you are. You probably think you already know who you are, but do you know what you really want to achieve in life. Most people don't know what they really want. I didn't. Likewise, most people couldn't tell you all their strengths and weaknesses. Life happens to people, and they're so busy coping with it that they never really sit down and ask themselves what they really want, and what personal resources they can utilize in order to get it. If you don't know what you want, it will be pretty difficult for you to achieve it. To achieve anything, you must have a clear goal. If you don't know where you are going, you probably won't arrive, and even if you do you won't know it.

Believe in yourself. The single biggest thing that prevents people from being successful is fear. They think they won't be able to achieve success, or if they do that they won't be able to handle it. They give up before they even get started. As several teachers have pointed out, however, we really are children of God, and we can achieve anything we want to. It is our fearful, doubting, ego that gets in our way, and makes us see ourselves as being "poor me". It is our ego that reminds us of all the times in the past that we have failed (exaggerating our failures), and forgets or trivializes all the times that we have succeeded. You need to start focusing on your strengths and all your past successes, and gain confidence from those. You need to talk back to your mind when it starts reminding you about how difficult success is, and why you will fail.

4)Take action. Many people decide on a goal and then research it and try to find out everything that could possibly happen if they start trying to achieve it. They spend so much time researching that by the time they are ready to do something, the window of opportunity has already passed by. A better plan is to get as ready as you can in as short a time as possible, take action, and have faith that you can correct along the way as needed. Just get started with whatever you've got from wherever you are.

5. Create successful relationships. The first thing you want to do is to eliminate negative, complaining people from your life as much as possible. You want to spend your time around successful supportive people, so that you can learn from them, and also be motivated by them. Since you can't learn from someone you don't like, you need to practice admiring successful people instead of being jealous and resentful of them. You don't want to bring them down to your level. Instead you want to bring yourself up to their level. Try to create a way to get together with rich successful people and maybe become personal friends with them. As they say "it's not what you know, it's who you know".

If you take action to follow these five principles, you should be well on your way. Good luck.