What makes some people more successful in life than others ? What makes people happy? Are success and happiness linked?

These are questions which have been asked for hundreds of years and many answers have been discovered and rediscovered over this time. Many of the main answers relate to how you think about yourself and the world around you and simply by changing how you think will start to have a dramatic effect on your life.

One of the first principles which you must accept is that you must take full responsibility for the events in your life. It is no use blaming other people, the government, your boss etc. for the things that are wrong in your life. You have total control over how you think and act and it is up to you to decide to be happy and successful. Happiness comes entirely from a state of mind. If you decide to be happy you will be. The more you think about happiness and success the more it will happen. Once you accept this first point you can take many positive steps towards success.

Probably the most important of these can be summarized in the following three steps:

Assess your main target in life.

Choose a definite aim in life, one which you know is realistic for your talents and abilities, one which you know is something you really want to do and enjoy doing. Make up your mind that you will push as hard as possible towards that aim. To ensure success you must have a burning desire for this purpose and want to take the appropriate action to achieve this purpose. Write this aim down.

"Know what you want, when you want it, why you want it, and how you intend to get it."

Set goals which are consistent with this target.

Goal setting is one of the most powerful ways to focus and achieve success. However goals must be in accordance with your main aim in life. If you strive for and achieve a goal which is not in line with your target, it will not help you to be happy even if you are generally successful. Goals can be of different length, short term, medium term or long term. Ideally have a mixture of all three. You should write your goals down, even this act alone will make it much more definite and much more likely to achieve. Read and review your goals often. Make your goals achievable and have at least some which you can see the path to achieving even if it's not always clear how you will reach the longer term goals.

Take continuous action towards your goals.

Once your goals are written down aim to take definite actions towards these goals even if they are very small. It is essential to get into the habit of avoiding procrastination when you know there are tasks to be done. A great way to do this is to plan to only take a little action, sometimes as short as a few minutes at a time. Often this will get you going and you will devote more time to it than you originally planned, at other times you will realize that now is not such a good time, but you will have achieved a little bit towards your goal. Another great habit to adopt is to tackle the most difficult task first and get it out of the way. This usually makes all the rest of the task so much easier.

Following these easy three steps will have a very positive effect on your life and will dramatically improve your chances of success.