How often have you kept at it, even in face of adversity, only to realize your dream shortly thereafter?

I can tell you from my own experience that this has happened in my own life on many occasions. Building a successful business is a process that takes time, energy, effort, and most of all it means that you never lose sight of your dreams.

I know many people who lost sight of their dream of business ownership and who are today working at jobs they hate for bosses they don't respect. Their lives reflect their pain in poor bank accounts and poor relationships. The good news is that this does not have to be way they go through life!

Listen, if this is indeed your life, and you are indeed going to make a success of it, why would you ever let anything come between you and your dreams? Start out by making a decision right now that you will do what it takes to get what you really want in your life.

Create a powerful, highly detailed vision of what your life looks and feels like when you have what it is that you really want.

Spend a lot of time on your vision. Make it as vivid as you can. Feel how it feels inside, see it, smell it, taste it, and touch it. Make it so real that your mind cannot tell that it is not already real in your life.

Then, stick to it. Keep focused on your vision no matter what happens in your life and you will realize your dream – life is simply set up that way.

In 1989 I began selling for very first time online. Today, I am one of America's top Internet marketers because I stuck to my vision of becoming this very person. It didn't happen over night. It took years and tens of thousands of hours surfing Internet. And there were many times where I could have just quit, but I never did. I kept my dream alive in my heart.

And because I didn't quit, I get honor and privilege to sit here and write to you today. To teach you what I know. And I get to live life of my dreams, living in most temperate climate in entire country.

These things are real today in my life because I made a decision, created a vision, and I stuck to it no matter how hard things became.

Today I get to teach thousands of people how to make money on Internet. And, I get to meet new people all time, I get to travel, and I get to do what I want when I want.

And, you can too! You have potential within you to make your life everything you've always wished it would become... and you can start right now!

This article is over. It's time for you to take action and make your life a life that is enjoyable in every way. You are only one that can make it happen. . . so go to it!

One of best illustrations of power of "inside-out" came to me when I was a child. I went to see movie Papillon. For those not familiar with this story, Henri Charriere was a Frenchman who was convicted in 1931 of a murder he did not commit. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he spent 12 years in penal colony of French Guiana. After eight unsuccessful attempts to escape, he finally got away to Venezuela. More than 20 years later, when he was 60, Charriere wrote his story, which became an international best seller and was made into a movie. One scene from movie has stuck with me all these years. Charriere was locked in a dark, small cell in solitary confinement almost 24 hours a day. The only living things sharing tiny prison cell with him were roaches. He chose to make these roaches his "friends" and actually looked forward to seeing them on occasions when a beam of light would come into his cell so he could see.

Now, if you're like me, I was taught that roaches were not my friends. This scene in movie taught me a very important lesson in life: It is not our circumstances that make or break us, but rather our response to those circumstances. Jack Canfield illustrates this beautifully in his book, How to Build High Self-Esteem, by sharing this simple equation: E (experience) + R (response) = O (outcome).

In Charriere's case, experience was that he was imprisoned in solitary confinement in a very small roach- infested cell with little or no light. The response was that he chose to think of roaches as welcomed guests in his home -- his way of honoring his own value of having companionship in his life. The outcome was that he was able to maintain his sanity by inviting roaches to provide him with companionship he so desperately craved while in solitary confinement. Had Charriere's response been different, I'm certain he would have experienced a completely different outcome. As I recall, movie paralleled Charriere's life with that of another prisoner in same penal colony. Although two prisoners shared similar experiences, their responses were quite different. The other man ended up losing his sanity and dying during an attempt to escape.

Although we may never find ourselves in Charriere's circumstances, I believe most of us are mentally imprisoned by our own response to experiences in our lives. When we experience emotions like fear, anger, and jealousy, we have chosen thoughts that put us in smallest of jail cells. These emotions completely paralyze our freedom of choice.

We have ability to be completely at choice about how we see things, how we feel, and what we do as a result. In Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he explains how these things are all connected: Our paradigms -- lens through which we view things -- inform our thoughts. Our thoughts inform our feelings. Our feelings inform our response. Our response affects outcome. This explains how two people working from different paradigms can experience same event and yet experience completely different outcomes. To illustrate, Stephen Covey tells of an experience he once had:

Mr. Covey was sitting on a New York subway one quiet Sunday morning when a man and his children got on his subway car. The man sat down next to Covey and closed his eyes, while his children immediately began yelling back and forth, throwing things, and even grabbing people's papers. Although children were being very disruptive, father made no attempt to control his kids. It appeared that he was oblivious to situation. Covey grew more irritated by minute. Clearly everyone else on subway felt irritated, too. So Covey finally turned to man and said, "Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn't control them a little more?" The father lifted his gaze as he became conscious to situation, and he said, "Oh, you're right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don't know what to think, and I guess they don't know how to handle it either." At this point, Covey shifted from feeling irritated and judgmental to feeling compassion, concern, and empathy. In other words, as Covey got more information, it shifted his paradigm, which shifted way he thought about situation, which shifted his feelings about man and his children. And all of these shifts helped Covey to choose a different response, which changed outcome for both Covey and other man.