"Success Secrets", "The Secret of Success" and "The Secret Key to Success" - frequently seen headlines that continue to be a fascination for many. We're seemingly always on the lookout for success, believing there must be a secret to it. Yet this story shows it can be much more straightforward than that.

Clara Cannucciari, the sheroe of our story, is 94 years old. According to recent coverage by the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, click here to see the article - she has a blog, a Facebook account and an online cooking show, "Great Depression Cooking With Clara" which has become a YouTube sensation, with nearly 2 million hits and counting.

Clara Cannucciari, her drive and success, and how she did it, surely can be inspirational to people of all ages, hence my blogging about it. She "simply" took a valuable lesson from the past - from the Great Depression 80 years ago - and shared it with the world - via nicely done YouTube videos - and abracadabra, success.

No secret needed. Just approach business as you would cooking. Take the right  ingredients (required by your recipe), cook them in the right way and you will get a somewhat predictable outcome. Put differently, success is learned - and done - in the same way as cooking. You must have the right recipe, and the right ingredients, but that's as far as it goes. From there the rest of success follows, more or less naturally, very much predictably.

Clara's recipe features a cup of past (valuable lesson), a pound of present (sharing it with the world) and much help from your friends. I have a strong hunch that  Carla knows the best vitamin for making friends is B1. Other ingredients probably also included perseverance, promotion and search engine optimization, but these are standard in every recipe for online success.

"I'm too old!" - it's one of the best liked excuses around the world. If nothing more, I hope Clara Cannucciari's story makes the "I'm too old" excuse a thing of the past, where it belongs.

Thanks to Chris Brogan over at http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ I stumbled upon a little big video on the topic of sharing. The people at Red Hat don't just share in an everyday kind of way, they've made sharing the cornerstone of their business model. With impressive results, which they happily share with - you guessed it - their shareholders. Indeed, sharing their product (for free) has allowed Red Hat to become a billion dollar company – billion as in a thousand millions - proving again, as if proof were needed, sharing your passion can be profitable business.

Sharing is a good idea any time. For example, share your dreams of an own business or for a career change with a couple of friends and see whether it touches, moves or inspires them. If not, revise. Sharing dreams and passions leads to spending more time with people who share your desire to succeed. Focus on the sharing, leave the marketing at the door, see your business grow. See your happiness grow, too (the state of mind in which your thinking is pleasant a good share of the time). For a stark contrast to sharing, try keeping it to yourself. Travel alone to a wonderful location that offers breathtaking scenery. You're by yourself, so the scenery only takes your breath away. No-one around to share it with. How does it feel? Makes the Red Hat people look even brighter, doesn't it?

Your beliefs, like tobacco and obesity, can do more harm to you, than help.

"Bad" beliefs about yourself, expressed in words demeaning of you, weaken and damage you more than cigarette smoking and obesity would, if you were a smoker and over-eater. It makes no difference whether the demeaning words are spoken by yourself, in silent self-talk, or by another person, from the outside. As long as you express demeaning beliefs about yourself, you're as powerless about the damage to you as the smoker and over-eater.

A recent dinner party included a man who had lost his job. It was a good job, well paid, in a nurturing environment. Now he answers phones at a call center. Not what you'd call a great career move. A couple of dinner guests talked about the things they're doing with their lives, the dreams they're pursuing. He joined their conversation with a truly bad belief about himself. He said, "I'm too old to land a great job again."

With these words he not only joined the conversation, he ended it. What to say next? Even your best friends can't help, if you're continuously clipping your wings with demeaning beliefs about yourself.

It's not the man's age that's doing him in, it's his belief about being too old. With a more loving attitude he might have said, "I'm not sure how to get a great job at my age. Any ideas?" There would have been an outpouring of help. Instead of a show-stopper, he would have created a delightful experience for himself and the people around him.

Choose your beliefs wisely, lovingly. Your life depends on it.

Success comes in many forms and shapes. The word "success" means different things to different people. Here it's defined as happy, joyful and lasting - you're always either moving towards it, or away from it.

Here are some tell-tale signs that you’re headed in the wrong direction? (Right direction tell-tale signs will be covered in an another post ).

You know you're headed the wrong way when ...

1. You're in denial. Or, as insiders would say, "in the Nile."
2. You're recycling the infantile belief that things come into existence when you open your eyes and go away when you close them.
3. You hear and see selectively, what you want to hear and see.
4. You know the difference between right and wrong, and choose to do wrong anyway (the mark of fools the world over).
5. You believe you can get away with “it,” whatever “it” might be.
6. You can rationalize and explain everything.
7. You feel you’re entitled, that life owes you.
8. You don’t journal.
9. You have a victim mentality.
10. You have an endless supply of couldhaves and shouldhaves.
11. Ashamed of your own actions, you keep secrets. You walk in the shadows.
12. You’re alone. Even among family and friends.
13. You lie. In your self-talk, too. Each time your lips move, others know you just lied.
14. In your own eyes, you’re “the man” (or woman).
15. You don’t know you're moving in the wrong direction, away from happiness, toward despair. You reject the notion that it's happening to you. It's insidious when you’re in the Nile …

Do you know of any other "Wrong Way!" tell-tale signs? Let's hear it.