Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Do You Believe You Can Succeed?
What a silly question! Of course you do! Or do you?

Do you keep trying one thing after another only to fall short and try something new? It could be that, deep down, you simply don't believe that YOU can succeed.

Many of us don't want to admit it, but we doubt that we have what it takes to succeed. So we look for something that will succeed for us.

We grow up believing that those who succeed are somehow less flawed than we are and that the only way we can succeed is to try as many things as we possibly can in the hopes that we will simply luck into success.

But we all have a lot more going for us than we think we do.

I knew a man once who was a masterful woodworker. Year after year, he brought home tons of blue ribbons from the county fair and even the state fair. I was always astounded by the quality of his work. It was simply flawless.

Yet if you praised him for a project he did, he would always express disappointment. Having worked on each piece intimately, he was aware of every thing that hadn't gone absolutely perfectly. He knew every measurement that had been 1/32 of an inch off and every joint that hadn't joined perfectly.

No one else could see any flaws, even when he pointed them out, because they were so minor. But he was painfully aware of each one and was disappointed with himself for them.

We tend to be the same way with ourselves. We see flaws that no one else sees and we downgrade ourselves. But if we just move forward and do our best, eventually the end results will make those flaws unnoticeable.

That's why it's important to keep moving forward on the path we determine toward our goals. We get a lot farther when keep moving and learn along the way than when we discard our efforts and start over again at the first trouble we encounter.
Jeff

Labels: mindset

The Simplicity of Success
I just read a forum post the other day from a woman who had faced financial disaster, but worked her way to solvency in five weeks. The route she took was simple, compared to the convoluted paths we sometimes try to navigate to success.

Here's what she did:

• Found a niche
• Built a free WordPress blog
• Created a Squidoo page and pointed it to my blog
• Wrote about the subject and created about 10 posts, adding more throughout the process
• Wrote her first eBook and priced it very low
• Contacted 10 other site owners in the same niche and got two of them to link to her site
• Wrote another low-cost eBook
• Kept adding more and more content
• Communicated immediately with readers who emailed or commented on her content

Within in a few weeks, she was on page 1 of Google. She eventually had to change plans a little because WordPress didn't work well for selling her ebooks.

But she stayed focused and from the time the sales started coming in, she had made more than $12,000. And she did all this with minimal investment, because she had no money to spend.

Her secret was not that she lucked into a magic formula for success. Her secret was that she identified a problem that people wanted solved, provided solutions for it, and let nothing get in the way of her moving forward toward her goal.

Her secret was something thousands of others have done. Her secret was something hundreds of thousands of others have dabbled at, but got distracted from and never achieved her success.

Her secret was to set a simple path for herself and then keep following it, without fail, until she arrived at it.

Do you have a simple path planned? And, if so, are you following it relentlessly?
Jeff

Labels: case studies, start business