Make up your mind to win and nothing else. Norman Vincent Peale

Peale believes that all the resources you need to succeed are in your mind. If you expect to succeed, you likely will. If you think you will fail, you probably are right. Peale counsels you to expect success. Pealeisms have a powerfully positive ring. Always play with abandon. It is always too soon to quit. Conditions will shift in your favor. Faith cures fear. Are you climbing aboard Peale's winners' express? Do you believe you can succeed? Dr. Peale knows you can succeed. You can if you think you can. Stinking thinking leads to hardening of the attitudes. Zig Ziglar is at least as colorful as this Ziglarism. In How to Get What You Want, Ziglar quickly cuts to the chase. If you don't think you deserve success, you will do things to keep you from getting it.

How do winners who know they deserve success get their get up and go up and going? Ziglar contends they start from where they are with what they've got. They do not wait for something to change or for things to get better before deciding to succeed. They just get on with it. They go as far as they can see, knowing that once they get there they will always be able to see further. Ziglar combines his self-motivation philosophy with personal goals and a zest for people helping people. On personal goals, Ziglar zeros in with a total lack of subtlety. You cannot reach goals you do not have. You cannot reach someone else's goal. you can only reach your own. Thinking you are too busy is stinking thinking. It is not the lack of time that is the problem, it is the lack of direction. Either you think you deserve success and go for it or you will get cooked in the squat which is even worse than it sounds. You will get everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want. For Ziglar, this is the nub of personal goal setting. It is both the value and the direction. More eloquently, Ziglar says, You don't climb the high mountain by yourself. it is in conjunction with others that you really accomplish the major things in life. If you look, think and behave like everyone else, you will look, think and behave like everyone else.

Michael LeBoeuf calls his success philosophy Imagineering. Your uniqueness is your ticket into the winner's circle, according to LeBoeuf. Getting to the circle to be admitted is your personal creative challenge, the problem before you. But waiting on an inspiration is useless. Start on the problem and then the ideas will come. Inspiration, LeBoeuf advises, usually comes to those who have done the groundwork.

In Blow Your Own Horn, Jeffrey Davidson shows he knows about the ways of winners. You are your own marketing department, according to Davidson. In one sentence, what is it that you are marketing. what is it that you have to offer the world? If you do not know, no one else is likely to care.

Peter Drucker makes a similar point when, in The Frontiers of Management, he says, It is your vision or its absence that shapes your future. Drucker sees success itself as the ultimate test of success. and your personal vision is the key to your status as a winner or loser.

In Developing Winner's Habits, Denis Waitley adds meat to the wishbone of goals and personal vision. Waitley insists that winners never let anyone know they are scared or unprepared. Winners act like winners. they project confidence. Waitley's strategy is to find one good idea to pull your trigger on, remembering that there is still plenty of time to win but never enough time to lose. Attack the problem and never the people.

Roger Fisher and William Ury in Getting to Yes join the unanimous chorus of success experts in emphasizing the importance of people skills. Fisher and Ury give their attention to negotiating. but their main points could equally apply to almost any success opportunity.