by Michel Fortin, (the most brilliant internet marketer)

"Your only obligation in any lifetime is to
be true to yourself. Being true to anyone
else or anything else is not only impossible,
but the mark of a fake messiah."
-- Richard Bach

"This above all: To thine own self be true,
and it must follow as the night the day,
thou canst then be false to any man."
-ó Polonius, in Shakespeare's "Hamlet"

Before we begin, note that this article may not necessarily
deal with specific tactics for creating wealth online. It may
be somewhat philosophical too. But this is probably one of the
most important strategies you will need to implement in your
business, based on my personal belief and experience, that
will lead you to true, abundant wealth and success.

First, realize that the path to true personal greatness can
often be found through the use of a personal journal. Remember
that you will never be as successful as you will be to your
own self, and the journal can enlighten you in more ways in
this area than you would have ever thought possible. Many
great successful men and women have kept personal journals.

As a young salesman, dealing with the psychological scars of
an abused childhood, the one thing that kept me hanging on was
through the writing and reviewing of entries in my personal
journal. Knowing how far I've grown was the fuel that helped
me grow further. My journals contain thoughts, feelings,
inspirational messages and all sorts of information about
myself as well as about the people around me. In fact, my
website at http://SuccessDoctor.com/ is almost entirely based
on, or the result of, entries made in my personal journal.

You can use a physical journal or a plain text editor on your
computer -- it really doesn't matter. But use it to reflect
on, develop and prioritize your personal set of values, goals
and, most importantly, learning experiences. Better still, you
should use one to develop and integrate the "best-better"
system you will learn later on in this article.

Never underestimate the power of keeping a journal. You can
use one to help associate feelings to thoughts and thoughts to
feelings. And most important, it can help you to discover the
motives that motivate you. For example, use it to capture
ideas, new skills, different strategies learned, situations
you are facing, questions about yourself and answers you come
up with. You may think you know yourself well but this is
rarely if ever true. You only know yourself to the degree to
which you learn about yourself. And the journal can positively
and profoundly impact this important learning process.

Moreover, the journal can help you in developing, tapping into
and exercising your most precious resource: Your intuition.
Recently, psychologists have discovered that we do not operate
at a single level but at three. In other words, we do not have
only one mind but three distinct minds. Beyond the conscious
and subconscious minds, we also have an all-powerful, all-
knowing, "super-conscious" mind (a term originally coined by
turn-of-the-century American psychologist William James).

Some people call it the "infinite intelligence." Others call
it the spirit or soul. Simply, it is your conscience or
intuition -- this dormant, higher intelligence that's within
us all. In essence, it is the place from which all flows.

Look at it this way: Your mind is much like a computer. The
random-access memory (or RAM) is your conscious mind in which
you sort, calculate and process data. It's your thinking
brain. But on the other hand, the subconscious mind is the
read-only memory (or ROM), where information is stored, coded
and retrieved. It's your memory or your functioning brain
(which, like a registry, tells your body how to breathe,
function, pump blood, etc). However, the super-conscious mind
is the programmer on which the other two depend, since the
computer can not operate without one in the first place.

Therefore, your super-conscious mind, being all-knowing and
perfect, can help you along your journey and maybe more than
you think. As such, your personal journal can become a great
tool for tapping into the source that lies within you. You can
record hunches, flashes of inspiration or whatever your
intuition is telling you. You never know: A breakthrough may
be lurking in that mind of yours. In fact, some of the
greatest thinkers, entrepreneurs and inventors of our time,
like Edison for example, often used personal journals.

Additionally, it is of paramount importance for you to be able
to keep records and refer back to them. References can help
you to become resilient and flexible in times of challenges.
In other words, if you had a bad experience and overcame it in
the past, the journal can help to remind you of your successes
or of the learning experiences when another confronts you.

The best way to do this is to use the "best-better" technique.
With any given situation in your life, look at what is the
best thing you can pull from or liked about it, and then look
at how you would do better next time or how you can better
yourself from the experience. Don't write what you hate about
an event or how terrible you were in dealing with it. And more
important, don't justify it by saying, "I have to know what I
did wrong so I won't do it again." This can backfire.

Finding out what's wrong about any situation is in fact
emphasizing it as well as reinforcing it. You become what you
focus on. You reap what you sow. As RenÈ Descartes once said
in 1637, "Cognito Ergo Sum" (i.e., "I think, therefore I am").
So instead of what you did wrong write down what is the best
thing you can pull from what happened or what you liked best
about your experience. And look at what will make things
better or how you would handle the situation better next time.

Understand that you must first work on your strong points
instead of your weak points. Oftentimes, people work on their
deficiencies and, as a result, unconsciously reinforce them or
lower their self-esteem in the process. However, if they had
focused on their strengths from the onset, many of their
weaknesses would have been diminished or self-corrected.

Nevertheless, your self-esteem is crucial in business. And
building your strengths will increase your self-esteem, which
is the key to understanding your weaknesses and how to correct
them. And your personal success journal can be a wonderful
tool for helping you do exactly that.