I recently received the "fabulous news" that I had won £5,000.00. You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true - they usually are. So I looked for a phone number - absent. I then looked at the return address - Canada. Canada...

I just love watching the Olympics, witnessing the numerous feats of athleticism, skill, courage, endurance and passion. Athletes have to hone their bodies as well as their minds and, on the day, it is often the individual who has greatest control over their mind that wins. Major championships are always dramatic and what occurred during the Pairs Figure Skating Programme in the 2006 Winter Olympics at the Turino Palavela was certainly that.

A life of great achievement can be viewed as a series of failures punctuated by high points - successes for what many fail to realise is that the greater the level of success you achieve in your life then the more failures you will experience. And we have to have both - the failures as well as the successes - for how else would we be able to appreciate our success when it does finally arrive.

Concentration is a mental skill that has to be developed but when honed to razor-like sharpness its benefits are stupendous.

I was attending a training programme on developing your selling skills when I was introduced to a simple yet highly effective demonstration of the power of concentration. The presenter gave each of us a small pendulum to hold steadily in our outstretched hands.

Let's consider the antithesis to this question. Does negative thinking work?

Well, has there been a time when you have worried unduly about something? Maybe you were worried about an exam, a driving test, an interview. Chances are that your worst expectations came into fruition and even if you got the outcome you desired you recognised that you could have performed better had you not worried.

The movie The Secret has been creating ripples across the world. It features some of the world's greatest teachers, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists, doctors, authors and financial advisors and presents the concept of the Law of Attraction in a manner that anyone and everyone can understand.

The trouble with The Secret, or rather I should say with people's comprehension of The Secret and the Law of Attraction, is that many people only half get it.

Bill Bartmann is well qualified to talk about what it takes to be successful. He is a billionaire, about the 25th richest man in the world and has earned the accolade of "Entrepreneur of the Year". However, life for Bill Bartmann started out very differently.

Bartmann was one of eight children. His parents were uneducated and so could not command well-paying jobs.

I met someone recently who worked in insurance but wanted to do something else for a living, in fact she wanted to be a writer. She said she had tried several business ventures but all had failed. I asked whether she chose her business ventures because they appeared lucrative or because it was something she really wanted to do. She smiled and said it was the former.

At the dawn of the new millennium, the then Crown Prince of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, was faced with a dilemma. In less than two decades his country would exhaust its primary source of income - oil. He needed a solution and he needed it fast.

He decided to convert Dubai into the world's number one luxury tourist destination and triple the inflow of tourists from 5 million per annum to a whopping 15 million.

One of my favourite quotes is from the sci-fi series, Andromeda,

"Beneath knowing, understanding
Beneath understanding, seeing
Beneath seeing, recognising
Beneath recognising, knowing."
Vision of Faith CY 10003, Andromeda

I think it's a profound and beautiful quote that sums up the mindset of truly successful people.