However you define success, everyone seems to want it. Whether it’s achieving goals, living according to one’s calling, or making a difference in the world, everyone wants to accomplish something. But the truth is that most people struggle in the effort, and that begs the question, what is needed to get past the obstacles on the road to success?

To help answer this, I turned to the world’s largest bookstore, amazon.com, and entered the word “success” as a search term for books. Turns out that nearly two-thirds of a million titles are tagged with the search term “success.” Not being able to afford that many books, I picked up the top three. No one book can represent the definitive work on success, but when you combine these three, I think they come darn close.

This is Part I of a three part series of entries I plan on making, offering a brief review of each book.  I want to emphasize that each book is worth your time!

The Success Principles

First up is Jack Canfield’s and Janet Switzer’s The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. It’s loaded with 64 principles—which at first feels like an overwhelming number. But each principle is addressed in a short, sweet (and often fresh) manner.

I especially like the first principle, Take 100 Percent Responsibility for Your Life.  The reason I like it? We can’t become successful if we’re blaming others for our condition in life.

Think about the successful people you know. Do they sit around and complain about how the world is working against them, or do they assume responsibility for their situations and take actions to make their lives better?

More often than not, people who become successful are those who take 100 percent responsibility for their own lives.

Here are just a few of the other success principles Canfield and Switzer give us:

- Be clear why you’re here
- Decide what you want
- Believe it’s possible
- Unleash the power of goal setting
- Feel the fear and do it anyway

There are so many golden nuggets in this book, you can’t go wrong reading it.

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Filed in Work, Motivation, Leadership, Workplace, Corporate Culture