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“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing,” counseled Abraham Lincoln.

This resolution is made up of three essential features.

Success happens when you follow a simple three-step formula.

One, success happens when you have a clear idea of where you want to go.

Two, success happens when you have a strong feeling about the value of what you are doing.

Three, success happens when you are able to do the physical work necessary to rearrange the world to meet with your vision.

Miss any of these three steps and you get what most people get: a life of mediocrity and failure.

Pursue these three steps and you get what most people long for: a life of success, where all needs are effortlessly met.

Thus, success consists of three essential parts: thinking, feeling, and acting.

The thinking stage is making discoveries, creating choices, fashioning goals, and outlining commitments.

This conceptual stage is then followed by an emotional stage.

The emotion is the fuel that fires up the ideas.

This emotional energy is enthusiasm, or en theos which means to be filled with divine energy.

Once we have recognized our goals, we have to feel them.

This feeling stage is what brings the ideas to life.

Once these feelings build up, they form passion. When you are passionate about something, then you are highly motivated and are ready to act.

Sheila Graham explains the value of feeling your way to success:

“You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.”

Without strong feelings about your goals, they will be squelched by your own inner comfort zone and your own limiting beliefs.

Furthermore, a single word of criticism from someone or a single obstacle along the way is enough to stop you completely.

Thus, your enthusiasm, your passion, your burning desire is the fuel that converts ideas into actions, and these actions, in turn, will change the shape of your world.

The final stage, then, is action. When you move toward your aspirations, things start to shift and change both within you and around you. Like a blacksmith, you have to hammer the shape of your ideas on the anvil of action.

Yet premature action is foolish. Action that is tempered with a clear ideas and galvanized with passion is action that will get you where you want to go.

The inclination to just act alone is not helpful. Heading in the wrong direction is not of much benefit to you. And acting without burning desire is action that will soon collapse into inertia again.

As you pursue these three essential steps to success, you will create excellence. And you will also find that there is little competition on the road to excellence.