This is the third post in a ten part series that began with the brief outline of the 10 steps to becoming the greatest salesman in the world, as outlined by Og Mandino in his book, The Greatest Salesman in the World.

The third step in your journey is to persist until you succeed, or as our motto here at existing2living states “Success lies just one inch beyond your limits.”

What that means is that all the results you want in your life are exactly one step beyond your stopping point. The challenge is that in life, more often than not, it takes a lot of steps to get to where you want to go and throughout the journey you won’t know what the end point looks like or how much more time it will take to get there. Therein lies the biggest reason why some people fail.

If you ate a cheeseburger at McDonalds and immediately got a heart attack and died, would you still eat it? Or if you went for one short run and got the six pack you wanted, would you make the effort to step out the door? Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you choose to look at it, life doesn’t work that way. The effect of our daily habits don’t reveal themselves until it’s too late. But make no mistake, eventually those effects will catch up to you.

Success does not happen overnight. Success is a habit. It takes hours, days, months, maybe even years of seemingly tedious actions repeated over time to produce the results you want in your life. No matter how many roadblocks come in the way, if you want success, it is necessary to keep facing those roadblocks and push on despite them. To persist until you succeed.

Darren Hardy, the publisher of Success magazine, calls this process the compound effect. He states in his book, “The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices.” Every choice you make has a consequence. A consequence that remains hidden from you until you are much further down the road to your destiny.

Jeff Olson further reinforces this point in his bestselling book, The Slight Edge (Revised Edition): Turning Simple Disciplines Into Massive Success, “tapping into the slight edge means doing things that are easy. Simple little disciplines that, done consistently over time, will add up to the very biggest accomplishments.”

It’s really that simple, just keep venturing beyond your perceived limits through small actions every day and eventually you will get everything you want in life. Reinforce the empowering actions over a period of at least 30 days to turn them into automatic habits. You will transform your life by building one new success habit every month. As Brian Tracy said, “successful people are simply those with successful habits.”

As soon as you have finished reading this, take one small action that moves you toward the life you want to create and more importantly trust that it will get you there. Keep the big picture and the future vision in the back of your mind, but focus only on the next step. One you have taken it, then focus only on the next one. Keep moving forward one inch at a time and success will be inevitable. If you trip and fall three steps backward, use your future vision to remind you why you need to get back up, and keep pushing onward.

If you want more inspiration from some of the most successful people in the world, fill out the form below and become a part of the community. Once you sign up, you will be able to read about 30 people who failed repeatedly and still found success. Additionally, you will get access to a powerful set of questions that you can use to stay on your chosen path to success no matter what comes in the way.

Persist until you succeed and failure will be nothing more than a bump in the road. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. What does your journey to success look like? What strategies do you use to push past failure?