One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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“Suc­cess is sim­ply a mat­ter of luck. Ask any fail­ure.“
– Earl Wilson

Goals prop­erly aligned will give you an impelling momen­tum that, like a snow­ball rolling down a snow cov­ered hill, increases in size and speed along the way. The more you work on your pri­or­i­ties, the more moti­vated you will become and the more timely the results you will pro­duce. They will increase and keep on increasing.

Pam Lon­tos once wrote, “Momen­tum cre­ates more momen­tum as moti­va­tion actu­ally feeds on itself.” Each lit­tle suc­cess achieved will increase your self-​​esteem, your effec­tive­ness, and of course, your efficiency.

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A fair warn­ing: this post delves into some­thing I’m pas­sion­ate about, which is some­what philo­soph­i­cal in nature. So if you’re of a cer­tain reli­gious per­sua­sion and eas­ily offended by oth­ers, then please skip over this blog post. If not, read on…

“The Secret” is tak­ing the entire world by storm. It deals with the “Law of Attrac­tion,” in that we attract to our­selves what we think and feel, and that our per­cep­tions mold our reality.

As Earl Nightin­gale pro­claimed in “The Strangest Secret,” one of the first self-​​help pro­grams I’ve ever bought: “We become what we think about.”

You may have seen it talked about on Larry King, Oprah, and many other talk shows. It’s the most suc­cess­ful Inter­net launch of any prod­uct. It hit Alexa #1 soon after its launch, and pro­pelled to the Amazon.com’s #1 best sell­ing book and DVD within a few months.

It appeared in The Wall Street Jour­nal, New York Times, and Time Mag­a­zine, and even on the cover of Newsweek, which came shortly thereafter.

But is “The Secret” truly worth the buzz? Or is it just an old-​​world phi­los­o­phy pack­aged in some new­fan­gled mar­ket­ing? The answer to the for­mer is def­i­nitely “yes.” But for the lat­ter, it’s “yes” and “no.” Let me explain…

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Now that I’m back from my hon­ey­moon, my inbox and forum have been flood­ingly busy! In fact, one thread on my Copy­writ­ers Board gar­nered so much inter­est that it cre­ated close to 10 pages worth of posts.

It’s a member’s take on “Michel Fortin’s Suc­cess Secret.”

Dale King, the author in ques­tion, pos­tu­lated that in every post and arti­cle I write, there’s a “secret” to my suc­cess. Although he hinted that the secret can be found in the book “Think and Grow Rich,” the rea­son why the thread became so pop­u­lar was because Dale never revealed it until the very end.

It’s a great exam­ple of the Zeigar­nik effect and keep­ing peo­ple inter­ested in your copy. It was so pow­er­ful that some peo­ple became out­right pissed off at Dale’s reluc­tance in reveal­ing “the secret” and posted harsh com­ments as a result.

In order to assuage the dis­grun­tled, here’s what I said. The secret is…

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