You determine your own success.

I was very fortunate growing up.

I had parents who taught me to take responsibility for my own actions and to be the best that I could be.

I loved to read and because of the values my parents taught me I often gravitated towards self-help books by authors like Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Robert Schuller, and many others. I also liked reading biographies about successful people, whether it be Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or Donald Trump.

And what I learned from all of it was the way you visualize yourself plays an important part in who you are and where you are going.

Simply put, if you believe you are a failure or will fail, then it’s very likely that you will.

But if you see yourself as successful, or achieving success, then you are likely to reach your goals, no matter what they may be.

You see, your brain is a very powerful organ. It wants to achieve whatever thoughts you input into it.

You’ve likely heard of the old computer adage, “Garbage, in, garbage out”.

Well, your brain acts the same way as that computer. If you put bad thoughts or ideas into your brain, then your brain is going to put in motion those things that will cause them to come about. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But if you put positive ideas into your brain, then it begins to busily work away to achieve those results.

That’s why so many of these self-help gurus talk so much about visualization and seeing yourself achieving your goals as though you’re already there. Your brain doesn’t know the difference. It acts on whatever you feed it. So if it believes you are successful then it creates those situations it assumes you would be in as a successful person.

And the awesome thing is you define what success is.

Because success can mean so many different things to so many different people. So you set the agenda, you define the parameters, and you make the rules. Then your brain will do what it needs to do to make you happy, even while you sleep.

You may have proven this principle to yourself and never even realized that you had stumbled into the truth accidentally about how your brain wants to satisfy your goals.

For instance, have you ever gone to sleep thinking about a problem and not knowing how to resolve it, and then awakened the next morning having come up with the solution in a dream?

I have and I know a lot of people who have had the same experience.

Why did this occur?

Simply because your brain was fed with an issue that it knew you wanted to resolve, and so while you slept, it went off on the side and started calculating ways to please you and come up with a solution.

I remember when I did something kind of dumb as a child I’d be told “God gave you a brain. Why don’t you use it?”

Little did I know then what I know now…that our brains want to work for us to achieve whatever it is of which we can dream.

My friend, Mark Call, has written an article on a similar subject called “Change Your Association, Change Your Life“!

It’s about who you choose to associate yourself with affects your success. Do you surround yourself with successful people? Or are you mingling with the wrong crowd, for instance, those people who blame everybody and everything else for why their lives are the way they are?

Check out the article and take it to heart. Today is the day to turn your life around and be a success!

Gary Chappelle