Success and failure are just programs you create

Here's a success secret few people know: "Success is something you program into being."

An equally unknown principle is that "failure is something others program into your life."

Let's examine success first. Why do I say that it's something you program into being?

Because success, if it is to be sustainable, must be based on a system of some kind. A system is always superior to a pattern or a behavior, and these in turn are superior to an event.

If we use a professional tennis player as a metaphor, it would look like this:

• System: the way he trains, his coach(es), his secret methodologies and technologies
• Pattern: how he plays a tournament match
• Event: he wins or loses

In other words, millions of people can see Federer or Nadal play a match, and some people can even discern patterns in their strategies as they fight it out on the court. And everybody, of course, can see who's winning or losing at any particular moment in time.

But what nobody sees is the secret system which tennis champions use to train themselves to become "winning machines."

Few people know, for example, that Andre Agassi's father reengineered a ball-shooting machine to mimic all kinds of spins so that Agassi would be able to practice hitting all kinds of balls.

My point is that success comes from a system that you create, which works for you and prepares you so that success is the natural, inevitable result.

And we all have the ability to program that sort of system. A few examples of systems: franchising, talent, habit, addiction, society, culture, peer pressure, psychology, etc.

Of course, some systems work for you while others (like bad habits, addictions, peer pressure, social conformism, etc.) work against you.

The important thing to remember is that the more systems you create which work for you, the faster and sooner you will be successful.

The Internet, in fact, is one gigantic system that most people have not yet learned how to program so that it works for them.

However, a few people have cracked the code, including the founders of Yahoo!, Hotmail, Youtube, eBay, Skype, etc. And more recently, a girl -- Gina Bianchini -- has joined the gang so she might prove very soon that girls can make a fortune from the Web too. Bianchini is the hot-looking founder of Ning, which is backed by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and Opsware (which he sold to HP for $1.5 billion).

This secret -- that at the heart of great success is a great system -- was in fact intuited by Archimedes centuries ago when he said: "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world."