When you’ve hit the depths of despair, often you feel as though life holds nothing for you.  You’re drifting from one dead end job to the next and consumed by money worries.  Your wife may just have left you, your home is about to be repossessed and you’re scared your boss plans to fire you.

During life’s toughest moments, it’s extremely challenging to feel positive about the future, let alone next week or even tomorrow.  Yet some of the greatest visionaries hit rock bottom before finding the will and determination to climb the ladder of happiness, health, wealth and success to make their dreams become reality.  What they all had in common is the fact that they set goals for the future, helping them to create positive mental images of how life can be and give motivation to work towards it.

I have a confession: When I go to a bookstore, I like hanging out in the self-help section. I don’t know if it’s because I think I’ll find a book that will solve all my problems, or if seeing all the books on problems I don’t have makes me feel better about myself. But whatever it is, I keep going back.

On recent visits, I’ve noticed a trend: The market has been glutted by books promising the secrets to happiness. That might not seem new (isn’t happiness the point of the entire section?), but these aren’t touchy-feely self-help titles - they’re books by scientific researchers, who claim to offer prescriptions based on rigorous empirical research. It’s all part of the “positive psychology” movement that has spilled out of academic journals and into best-selling books, popular magazine articles, and even school curricula.

The secret of success is focus. It is the one secret that ties everything together. According to the law of attraction, what you focus on is what you get. Therefore when you focus on all the qualities of success, you attract them to you. The more you do actions that lead to success, the more success you experience. The success of anything you do begins with focus. That’s when you call all your powers together for the accomplishment of a thing. Focus is an act of will which is the faculty that rules everything.