How many times has something good come into your life and you were not prepared to embrace it? This happens to so many people. When a special chance to do or have something great presents itself, most people will not be ready. How disappointing!

Preparedness plus chance equals success. Believing you can succeed and preparing to succeed go hand in hand. Both are an extremely vital part of winning in life. In fact, a person will not even prepare to win if he does not even believe he can. Otherwise, why would he put in all the necessary effort it takes to succeed if he really doesn't believe he ever will?

Many people want to win in life, but their self-image limits them on how far they actually can go. Your self image is how you see yourself, and if you see yourself as a loser you will not even prepare to win. The fact is, a person will only prepare to succeed if he really and truly believes he can.

Part of preparation is seeing yourself as a winner. You cannot attract to yourself anything that is greater than the way you see yourself. Therefore, if you become, you can attract. Until you begin to think and act like the person who has the things you desire you will not attract those things.

A common misconception concerning success is that it comes from luck. How many times have you heard people say something like, "He was just in the right place at the right time" to explain away someone else's success? It's a myth, just like the idea of the overnight success. The chances of becoming a success due to luck are about as good as winning the lottery--50 million to 1.

When you succeed, because you prepared to succeed, others may explain it away as luck. How irritated will you be, knowing you have toiled, sweated, and teared in order to prepare for the success you enjoy, and someone says you were just lucky?

One must understand that champions aren't made on the day of the game. That's simply the day the world recognizes all of the preparation that took place before that day arrived. In thousands of little ways, these champions disciplined themselves to do the things that everyone else could've done, but didn't.

The cheering crowds, television cameras, and reporters aren't around when champions are made because they're made in the early morning hours when everyone else is sleeping in just a little bit longer, and in the late evening hours when everyone else has given up for the day.

The will to succeed is obviously important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.

Preparing to win is not doing the big things most people think. It usually isn't the big things that will cause you to succeed in life anyway, but it's all of the little things that you can do over and over. For example, the discipline to plan each day's work the night before, no matter how tired you are, will have more to do with your success than any big thing you will do. Also, little things like hitting mute on the tv during commercials so you can grab a little reading time. Not a big thing, but a necessary thing in preparing to win.

Prepare to succeed by first believing that you can and then do the little necessary things required, for preparedness plus chance equals success. When the next chance to do or have something great presents itself, will you be ready? Life is way to short to be missing out!

Copyright 2005 Daniel N Brown