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The older I get and the more I work on growing my online empire, the more I realize that there is a direct correlation between frame of mind and success. If you act like The Man, you will be. If you don’t, well, let’s not go there.

One of the most important things you can do to make sure you’re in the right frame of mind for success is to focus on what you have and what you’ve accomplished instead of what you don’t have or what you have yet to accomplish. The moment I started focusing on the positives of my current state – while still keeping true to my long term goals – is when everything turned around for me and I started making my biggest gains, both in terms of my business and my life in general.

When I first started my online business I really had no idea where it would take me. It was just something fun to do in my spare time. If I made money from it that would be great, if I didn’t, I was still being productive and doing things I thought were fun, like writing and website creation.

Unfortunately, as my business started doing better and I started making more money my focus and mind set began to shift. Working on my business was no longer something I did just for fun; I started to do it solely to make as much money as possible.

At first, when money started coming in, it was easy to justify this new mind set. After all, this was what I wanted, right? Waking up and seeing my Adsense account grow every day, or seeing that I made three more sales on Clickbank was what got me going in the morning and drove me throughout the day.

But when the growth leveled off and I wasn’t seeing more gains, I started freaking out and focusing on what I wasn’t getting, which was more traffic, sales, or money.

Then it just sort of snowballed and I started focusing on what I didn’t have — hundreds of thousands of dollars in my bank account, a big house and a 7 series BMW — than what I did have. This made me feel frustrated, tired and burned out. Doing something I had previously loved – writing and developing websites – became something I loathed.

In short, I felt like a failure.

After finally reaching the breaking point and nearly deciding to delete all of my sites, I decided to take a couple of days off and get my head straight. After thinking things through it finally dawned on me: in order for me to be successful I had to completely change my frame of mind.

I had to appreciate what I had accomplished thus far. After all, how many people talk about starting a business yet never follow through on it? Plenty! So that put me ahead of the game right there! Simply attempting to grow a successful business was a huge accomplishment in and of itself.

While my business was still small and not generating “yacht club” money, it was still my business and was generating enough money that it would help me achieve my modest goals of paying off my mortgage and being able to do nice things for the people I care about.

By realizing I should be proud of what I’d accomplished so far and be grateful for everything that I had and all the help I had received along I was able to turn a corner and get back to growing my business.

Writing and website creation became fun again. I stopped worrying about money, traffic and sales and just started focusing on being good at what I was doing.

Not coincidentally, my revenue started growing again, too!

I promise that if you stop focusing on what you don’t have and start focusing on what you do have and all the great things going on in your life, you’re going to set yourself up to be an incredible success, not just in business but in life too.