It appears that ordinary people are as afraid of success as they are of failure. After all, to be spectacularly successful would set you apart from the herd and you might even put some people's noses out of joint.

To hell with all that! Sit down for a few minutes with yourself - because your worth it - and explain to yourself how it would look, feel, sound and even small and taste, to be effortlessly successful. How you want to define success is your own business. To ensure that you've 'got the picture' write it down... handwrite it.

A well known book suggests that you should 'Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway' - but there is no fear, it's just another useless thought. Overcome the thought by giving yourself an exciting enough picture of success. It really does focus the mind.

I should have kept an archive of last week's business news headlines - particularly as they related to world stock markets.

On Tuesday, some index or other hit an all time high - investors expressing their confidence in economic prospects. On Wednesday, an announcement by the Fed in the US (about the apparent success of bond buying activities) was taken with a grain of salt by investors who were getting nervous. And, on Thursday, stock markets plunged as the outlook for economic growth worsened. All in the space of forty eight hours.

Investment markets do affect the real economy - the consequences of the banking crisis being the most obvious and painful example. Yet the people who play these markets are just a little more childish than a three-year-old who's just been let loose in a sweet shop. "I'll have this one. No, I want that one. Can I have some of those? Oh no, I'd like these instead."

It's reminiscent of the studies that have found a chimpanzee with a pin makes better investment choices than leading investment experts.

I mentioned booze last week - and whether or not you drink it, or how much of it you drink, as one of those moment to moment choices. Our lives are made up of these choices - little and large. Indeed, where I am - where you are - now is the result of every single choice that was made up to this moment in time.

Unfortunately, most of our choices are made for us by our subconscious mind. In doing so, our subconscious uses, as its point of reference, 'stored knowledge' that was largely learned during our formative years. So the choices that we automatically make are rarely the right ones... if they are it's by pure chance.

Now, that's no way to manage your life. That's no way to get what you want out of life (assuming you have given some consideration to what that might be). And it's certainly no way to interact with other people - some of whom are incredibly important to us.

Your mission - should you choose to accept it - is to start making conscious choices, deliberate decisions on what to do, what to pay attention to and how to behave right now. You can't decide today that you'll behave yourself tomorrow - these vital, life-changing choices must be made moment to moment... because life is lived moment to moment (or you would hope it would be!).

Consequently, you've got to train yourself to be a chooser. You've got to start making these little choices when it doesn't matter so that you can really step up to the mark when it does. That's why it is suggested by those clever people at Harvard that you do small, inocuous, things differently. You get used to the idea (and practice) of making moment ot moment choices.

So, the moment you stop reading this, do something unusual, out of character, spontaneous, different - not necessarily something that anyone else will notice, the really important point is that you notice it yourself!