Well, it’s a new year and a new decade. What a great time to look back and reflect on past personal triumphs and tragedies and decide whether it’s time to tear up the old life script and write a brand new one! That’s exactly what I’m going to do.

After all I’m in my mid 40′s with a mortgage on my house and a mortgage on the building that my shop is in and I really should have had both of them paid off 5 or more years ago. This year I’m setting some goals and working to a much more positive plan. So… why the sudden commitment to change?

Several months ago I started to change my way of thinking. I’ve since found out that I was actually changing my philosophy and I’ll talk a little more about that in a later post. Anyway, I was in a bit of a time management crisis. I was always feeling that there weren’t enough hours in the day and I was falling behind on my work and not getting ahead financially. So instead of just getting out of bed and sitting at the computer I started asking myself a question each morning and a question each night. The morning question was ‘what am I going to achieve today?’ The evening question was ‘what DID I achieve today’. They’re not exactly big questions and that’s not a major life change right there but it did get me into the right frame of mind to take the next few steps.

Around the middle of the year I was feeling seriously negative about life in general. I was making just enough to pay the bills and I decided to put the only website that had brought in a small income up for sale. Perhaps that was the trigger. I’d had this site for a little over 3 years and put quite a bit of time and effort into it. What I found though was that I couldn’t even get half of what I considered to be a very low price for the site. I got a couple of nibbles but nobody really wanted it or saw much potential in the site. That annoyed me a little and at the same time I was regretting putting it up for sale. I had members that had been with the site since day 1 and it had been responsible for putting me in touch with some contacts which pretty much paid my bills over those 3 years via programming and server administration work I was doing. So I made two decisions. Firstly I decided that I really didn’t want the site in someone elses hands..particularly if I didn’t think they would give the site and its members plenty of TLC. Secondly I decided that I would show those people who had little faith in the site, that it could be turned into a thriving and profitable business.

Over the following months I used my programming skills to add a large range of features – some of them very unique – and I started networking with people who I felt had the right philosophy (there’s that P word again)! What I found was that I gained more paying members in 3 months that I had been able to gain in 3 years.  Members started promoting the site and referring many new members. I was receiving emails from members praising the work I had done to turn the site into something a little more special than the average similar site. All of this was achieved purely through acting on suggestions that had been made previously and providing genuine value for money. You see, I’m not a hard sell, long sales copy kind of guy. If I’m going to build a successful site then that success has to be based on genuine good value and it has to be something that I would gladly pay and use myself.

So that brings us to the end of December 2009. I received an email amongst the hundred or two that come in most days. This one was advertising a self improvement course called ‘The Success Principle‘. It was from a guy I’d never heard of and the email came from an affiliate who I don’t particularly trust. There was something in there that caught my eye though so I decided to check the site out. The sales page WAS one of those awfully long ones but it had a few videos amongst the sales copy which I watched. The site owner, Mack Michaels, seemed like a genuine person. He logged into some of his clickbank accounts and showed his income on those and talked about the success principles and how they could change your life. I’ve always been a bit of a sceptic when it comes to motivation and the like. Perhaps because I’d only ever been to a few hand waving, warm, fuzzy Amway conventions when I was in my early twenties. They were purely about making you feel good but didn’t really go into the fundamentals of making a permanent change for a new outlook and better outcomes with your life.

So I signed up for The Success Principle and that’s what I’ve committed myself to for the next 9 weeks. I’m going to post to my blog a couple of times a week and let you know my progress. So far I’m feeling pretty good about the relatively small investment I’ve made but I’ll post about that in the next post.