Success Begins in Your Mind, So Let’s Start There (Book Excerpt)

Before we get into the heart of this book, understand that if you read what I am about to say very carefully and then do it, chances are you will be earning large sums of money in just a few short months – each and every month.

But all I can do is provide the information. How much money you make is up to you. Only you can determine your success.

If you are determined to succeed, I suggest you model two vital traits of successful people.

Apply and Test What You Learn

One of the two most important characteristics that successful people share is their constant strive to improve themselves through ongoing education.

Which is what you’re doing by reading this book. But don’t congratulate yourself just yet. Not until I explain the other half of this education equation.

Successful people are not content to simply learn. What separates them from unsuccessful people is their ability to apply and test what they learn.

Let me say that again: they apply and test what they learn.

You see, knowledge is absolutely useless unless you use it. Does it do you any good if it’s just taking up space in your head? NO!

In order for it to benefit you, you need to act on the knowledge that you have. You must, therefore, apply it to your life and your business.

You probably already know you need to apply yourself. After all, how many times did you hear that phrase from your parents and teachers while growing up?

So if the concept of application has been drilled into our heads from childhood, what stops us from applying ourselves and reaching our full potential?

The reason that stops most people is summed up in one word: fear.

FEAR: Don’t Let It Control You

The second key characteristic or trait that successful people share is that they act in spite of fear because they are not afraid to fail. They are fearless.

What is fear, anyway?

Can you touch it?

Can you hold it?

Can you show it to another person?

I can hear your answers from where I’m sitting: “No. No. No.”

Okay then, we agree. You can’t touch it. You can’t hold it. You can’t show it to another person. Then why do we have fear?

Fear is nothing more than an emotion or a feeling that we hold in our minds. We fear either the emotional or physical pain something may cause. The problem arises when these emotions and feelings affect the way we live our lives.

We fear doing certain things because we think we might fail. This may be due to past failures we have actually experienced, or it may be due to failures we fear we might experience.

If for any reason you fear trying to build a huge, highly profitable opt-in email list I urge you to remember the following acronym for fear:

False
Evidence that
Appears
Real

Most of the time we have never even experienced what we fear. How crazy is that?

You see, your subconscious mind has a hard time determining whether you’ve actually experienced the failure or just imagined it. Either way, you feel the physiological symptoms of the fear, such as an upset stomach.

Mark Twain explained it best: “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which have actually happened.”

Often, we believe our imagined failure will come true, and so we don’t even try to do what we’re afraid of failing at in the first place! That is what makes a failure: a person who is afraid to try because he fears the potential of a negative outcome.

Therefore, you must put aside your imagined fears and go for it! Otherwise, you can never succeed at building a huge, highly profitable list.

How Do You Define Success?

Who defines what ‘failure’ and ‘success’ are?

You do.

Either you create the definition yourself or you accept someone else’s definition.

For example, which of the following men do you think lives a more successful life based on the definitions they created for themselves?

Adam: “Everyday that I wake up and am not six feet under is a great day.”

Jeff: “I have to be earning at least five million dollars a year before I am successful.”

If you guessed Jeff, you better pay extra attention to the next two paragraphs.

You see, Adam has created his own definition of what success means and that definition is relatively easy to achieve. All he has to do is wake up, and he considers himself successful.

Jeff, on the other hand, has decided he cannot be successful until he is earning five million dollars a year. Sadly, most of the ‘Jeff’s’ in the world feel like failures on a daily basis because they are not earning five million dollars a year.

A word of clarification…I’m not saying you should refrain from setting high standards and goals for yourself. If I believed that, I would have titled this book:
AVERAGE LIST BUILDING
"How a Few People Are Building Normal, Sometimes Profitable Opt-In Email Lists To Make a Little Bit of Money Online.”

Who would want to read a book about being average, normal and making a little bit of money? I hope no one because I certainly wouldn’t want to write such a boring book.

So what I am saying is that you have to be careful that you ‘happily achieve, rather than achieve to be happy.’

The more difficult your definition of success is to fulfill, the more fear you will attach to it; the more you will limit your success.

When deciding what success means to you, create a definition that makes it harder to feel like a failure and easier to feel like a success. That way you will attach less fear to what you want in life, and become fearless.

Imagine what you could achieve if you were fearless. What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

By the way, I know a secret that guarantees you will never fail again. Want to know what it is? It’s simply this: think of every ‘failure’ as a success.

Every time you ‘fail’ at something, realize it is actually a success because you have learned what does not work. Therefore, you are closer to succeeding the next time you try.

Remember that the past does not equal the future. Just because you may have failed last week, yesterday or five minutes ago doesn’t mean you are going to fail again. Simply learn from what you did wrong and change your approach.

Don’t fear the past. The past is what has taught you how to succeed in the future. Be fearless, and put into action what I teach you in this book. After you do, contact me at http://lucrativelistbuilding.com/contact/ and share your success story!

Now that your mind is set for success, let me show you how to succeed.