These are Perseverance, Passion and People!

**Perseverance - Building a successful online business can take months or even years. Examine your goals and your life.

Will you have what it takes to not give up when things are going bad?

Do you have determination to work this business for weeks or months without making any money?

Do you want to give up most of small amount of spare time that you now have?

Go over these questions in your mind and see what you come up with. Despite all "get rich quick" ads you see, this most likely will not happen. Most people will not even get rich slowly, however, you can make a good income.

You might start making a small amount of money in a few weeks or months, then you might not make any for a few months. You must not let yourself give up, when business is not all it's cracked up to be! You must have Perseverance!

**Passion - When you are choosing your business, build your business around something that interests you, something that you are passionate about. This will help you keep going when things get tough.

Will I want to work with this business everyday?

Does this business interest me enough to keep my determination going?

Will my passion override any doubts that I will have about becoming successful?

© 2002 Elena Fawkner

Remember when you were a kid how you could make paper catch fire by focusing sun's rays with a magnifying glass? You'd look over your shoulder at sun, get angle of rays just right, and move magnifying glass until you could see a small circle of bright light on piece of paper in front of you. Gradually, that circle began to turn brown and paper began to smoulder until its edges began to curl under as flame took hold.

How did that humble magnifying glass start something as powerful and elemental as a fire? The answer, of course, is concentration. Concentration of sun's rays into a tiny, intense circle of heat. In a word, FOCUS.

We work same way. If we truly focus our energy, concentration and creativity, we bring an intensity to task that we just can't generate if these things are scattered amongst several projects at once.

Now, to simply say to you, "focus your energy and you will achieve greater results" is all very well. It's quite another matter entirely to be able to do it, especially when there are umpteen different priorities constantly tugging away at you, each demanding at least some of your attention and NOW.

To bring focus to your various activities, you need to break cycle of allowing yourself to be distracted from task at hand.

-> Identify Priority Tasks

To start with, you should allocate your time proportionately to all of various tasks you need to do. Notice I said NEED to do. The first step is to decide what truly needs to be done and what doesn't. If you categorize a task as something that needs to be done, ask yourself why it is necessary. Another way of asking same question is to ask yourself, "what will happen if I don't do this today?". If ultimate consequence is that nothing will happen, why do it?

If you find yourself reluctantly concluding, well, I don't NEED to do this, I WANT to, then put it into "need to do" category. Doing things for yourself, for your own enjoyment or satisfaction, should be a priority. Focus is not only about doing things you should do, it is doing things you want to do as well. By including in your need to do list things that are for your own personal pleasure and enjoyment, you replenish yourself and this in turn allows you to bring even greater focus, awareness and creativity to your other activities. So, give yourself permission to enjoy yourself.

->Allocate Time to Priority Tasks

Now that you have identified your 'need to do' activities, decide when you are going to do them and estimate how long you think they will take. Then add 40%. One of immutable laws of universe is that everything takes longer than you think it will. Save yourself stress of running to keep up with clock.

When thinking about when you will do a specific task, work with your body. Are you a morning person, a night-owl, a late-afternoon person or something else entirely? Whichever you are, schedule for that time your most intellectually demanding tasks. If you're a morning person, for example, and one of your 'need to do' activities is to write a sales page for your website, allocate this task to your prime time. Then allocate your less intellectually demanding activities, such as reading and responding to email, to your off-peak time.

Similarly, don't schedule your personal time for your prime time. Again, if you're a morning person, schedule your hour lying out in sun for mid-afternoon, your 'off-peak' time.