With it being early January, many folks are making resolutions for the new year.  In most cases, they expect that the new habits and behaviors will help them achieve success in life.  Some will succeed and reach their goals, however, they will be the minority.  Far more fail to keep their "new year's resolutions" and stay stuck in a pattern developed long ago.

The main problem is that they fail to realize that success requires 3 separate and distinct phases, and it's important to recognize which phase you are in before making plans to move forward.

Phase 1 is where you learn from others who have succeeded in reaching the goals you want to attain for yourself.  Until you take the time to study what has worked in the past for others, you simply will not know what you need to make good choices, and any plans you make will be flawed from the beginning.

Phase 2 is an experimental stage, where you test out the ideas you gathered from Stage 1 and adapt them to your unique situation.  Some people call the activities of this stage "throw it against the wall and see what sticks".  Essentially, in this stage, you're trying many different things to find what works best FOR YOU and YOUR SITUATION.

Phase 3 comes only after you've gone through the first 2 stages, and this is where you take what works, and work it hard to get the most you can from it.  This is where success becomes the most visible, because it's easy to see from the sidelines.

In actual practice, Phases 1 and 2 are often combined, as many people will start testing as they learn, rather than waiting to get a better overall picture.  Some of this is unavoidable, as it's nearly impossible to learn EVERYTHING before you start testing, and there's no reason to make the attempt.

However, most people would find that they get better results if they take a little more time to learn from others BEFORE starting to try out the various ideas they encounter.  By learning from multiple experts, you may start to see the common threads behind the suggestions given, and this can help you adapt their teachings to your specific situation.

As an example, if you want to start your own business, you may hear that starting a blog is a great way to make money.  You may learn from an expert that to make money blogging, you just need to focus on a topic you're interested in, and post banner ads on your blog to promote affiliate products.  Of course, this one expert will give you a lot more details, but this is the general thrust of the material.

If you were to immediately start implementing what you just learned, you may waste a lot of time, money, and energy before you discover from another expert that the choice of topic is a lot more involved than what the first expert led you to believe.

This isn't to say that the first expert was wrong.  He/she just didn't give you enough information for you to make good choices.

When you're ready to start phase 2, it's important to diversify your efforts and test many things to find out what's going to work the best FOR YOU.

To continue the analogy, if you're working to start an online business, set up several websites and not just one.  The reason for this is because each one is a test, and you may find that running an ezine is more suited to you than writing a blog.  Or you may find that selling products created by others is a much more profitable use of your time than blogging or publishing articles and running ads in the content.

In my own business, I've tested simple sales mini-sites, multi-product shopping-cart sites, membership sites, an ezine site, a resource site, sites with blogs, sites with articles, and various combinations.  Any of these could work for the right person, yet for me, the best combination is what you see on this site now.

As you go through Stage 2 and learn what works, keep lots of notes so you can compare different things over time.  Eventually, you'll discover that YOU are the expert, and it's time to simply focus your energy on doing those things which work best.  

This doesn't mean that you never again learn from others, or that you never run other tests. You will.  You'll just do it all on a higher level of sophistication, even advancing the knowledge-base of the world.

As you consider what resolutions you may want to make, consider what phase you're in, and go from there.