Do you find yourself playing, when you know you should be working? Do you put off until tomorrow what you should be doing today? Unless you are independently wealthy, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Despite all of the glamorous stories you hear about Internet riches, Internet marketing is hard work.
Anyone who tells you differently is either a liar or a failure. The most successful people I know also work the hardest. I know. Various e-books and marketing systems claim that you can make tens of thousands of dollars a month with very little effort, if you'll just try their secret formula.

Sorry to burst your bubble folks, but there is no secret formula for success. There is no magic bullet. Success is and always has been dependent on one thing - hard work.

There's simply no getting around that fact - unless of course you have a rich relative who's going to leave you a huge inheritance when they die. No? I didn't think so.

So, that puts us right back where we started - with that despicable four letter word...W-O-R-K.

Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is a Psychologist at Florida State University. His specialty is researching how superior performers become good at what they do. His research seeks to answer the question, What matters most in producing high performance? His findings:

Nobody becomes successful without hard work! In the Fortune magazine article, "What it takes to be great" discussing Anders Ericsson research makes this profound point:

"It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule."

In another of his findings Anders states that:

"It isn't magic, and it isn't born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery. These people don't necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort."

Investment of effort. In other words, hard work.

The New York Times article "A Star Is Made" discussing Anders research, reinforces the importance of passion when deciding what to pursue in life:

"When it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love - because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.......Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback."

Another excerpt from the "What it takes to be great" article states:

"Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better."

The article goes on to say:

"For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done."

The good news is, success is available to you and to everyone, if you really want it. You just have to be willing to work at it!