Our habits make us . . . or break us. It's as simple as that. When we start searching for success, we often make it too hard. We learn early the fallacy that success is reserved for those who go to the best schools and get the highest degrees. To those who have the luxury of attending the most expensive trainings and seminars.

"Hard work, study, and many years of it" was the success formula my father taught me. But things are changing. It's now easier than ever to make a good, honest living owning your own online business. It won't cost you near the money it once did to become successful; and it doesn't take as much time.

Just a few fundamental principles separate those who succeed from the masses. And the majority won't make the effort to study and implement these principles.

One way to identify whether something is a fundamental principle of success is to look at its history. They don't change. There is no NEW fundamental principle of success. They're all just as true today as they were in the 1600's.

Sure, maybe the details have changed. I used to be in the bad habit of beginning each day reading email, buying another product to take up space on my hard drive, being sucked into the Twitter stream . . . you get the picture. Before I knew it, all the kids were up and my "work" time for the morning was gone. Not one revenue-generating or business-advancing action taken all morning.

Certainly, John Dryden faced none of these electronic age "bad habits" during the 1600's. And, I doubt he had to squeeze in his work time around his kids. Even still, in his vastly different world, the fundamental principle remained. We become our habits.

Unfortunately for most of us, the very nature of habits makes them something we do without thought. Most of us have a number of habits we never even realize. A few we'd probably be horrified of if we sat down and thought about them.

For the most part, we recognize our bad habits, and then blow them off. We either put them on our list of things we should change "someday." Or, we laugh and say "that's just the way I am."

But what if your habits were making the difference in whether you met your goals? What if the difference in personal and financial success, and continued struggle, came down to a change in a few habits? Could it really be this easy? Yes. We'll talk about how in part two of this article.