4 Steps to Success

1. Good Ideas

Ideas are the life seeds of enterprise. A better life comes by the search for good ideas. Never cease your quest for knowledge. Finding ideas can be life changing. Business ideas, social ideas, personal ideas—nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Be a searcher of good ideas: timely ideas, political ideas, family ideas, healthy ideas. Then, do what I do: Keep a journal. Keep a log of good ideas. That’s for the serious students. I used to take notes on pieces of paper and found out I couldn’t go through them, couldn’t catalog them, and I missed a lot of good stuff. So I learned to keep good ideas in a journal. It’s an extension of your learning library.
2. Good Plans

Be a student of good plans. Plans are important because they give birth to ideas. Plans take ideas to the marketplace. Plans well executed bring ideas into the better life. Ideas without plans forever hang like an artist’s rendering on the wall. They never become reality. They never become substance. So be a student of good plans. Develop good, disciplined plans. Riches do not come by crossing your fingers and walking through the day hoping. Riches and wealth come from well-laid plans.
3. The Passing of Time

All of us have to learn to handle time. It’s one of the challenges of life, learning to wait. Part of success is patience—the passing of time. It takes time to build a career. It takes time to make changes. It takes time to learn, grow, change, develop and produce. It takes time to refine philosophy and activity. So give yourself time to learn, time to start some momentum, time to finally achieve.
4. Solving Problems

Success is simply solving problems. There are all kinds of problems: business problems, family problems, personal problems, financial problems, emotional problems. Everybody’s got a list of problems. Problem-solving is where enterprise comes from. It’s how you build worth and wealth.

I once met Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. He put it fairly simply. He said going to the moon and back was merely a matter of solving problems. Problem 1: how to get there. Problem 2: how to get back. That’s simple, right? He said make sure you don’t leave until you’ve solved both problems. Well put. Sure, some things are complicated, but if you take it one piece at a time—solve the problems, put it back together—you can’t believe the enterprise you can build, the life you can build, the skills you can build. Take it a piece at a time, master it, and then put it back together to solve it.

source: success.com