This is a long letter and I don't apologize for it. People who have taken the time to read it have told me it has dramatically and positively changed their thinking in many subtle, yet profound, ways. As you read these words expect to feel empowered.

Please read the entire letter before you contact me.

Print it out or bookmark it on your browser so you can relax, take your time, and honor yourself because this could be THE answer you have been looking for and you deserve to find out more.

If you define success by the world's or other people's standards, you WILL come undone.

It is the essence of the so-called 'mid-life crisis', also known as the...

The success I had achieved was not what I was passionate for, not what I enjoyed.

You may be saying, "But you can't enjoy yourself all the time." And certainly that might be true.

But honestly - tell me this - can you truly give your best each and every day, if you're not enjoying it as you go?

Lesson Of Personal Enjoyment: Doing what you enjoy and have a passion for, automatically builds the foundation for success.

Each of us is a little different in what we enjoy and are passionate about, both for and against. When you tap into ones that are personal to you, you access some of the most powerful motivators you will ever find.

If you feel this is selfish, and feel guilty for even thinking of enjoying yourself, then realize it's not that you have to change right away.

Sometimes you do have to do stuff you don't enjoy, but the reason you are doing that stuff is not so you can stay there, but to get to the point where things change and enjoyment is more and more a part of each day - for you and those you care about.

Realize that passion is a like a compass needle that pivots to your personal meaning for "success".

If you want to go in a new direction you need a new plan, and as obvious as that sounds, that doesn't make it easy.

I knew I had an passion for counselling which had retriggered in my final year of training to be a family doctor, when I found a book on the psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Dr Milton Erickson. I read it and fell in love with his work.

I had done further training, read every book I could find, but doing this type of work was a dream that I had never thought would happen because counselling was always and add-on to the work I did and all it meant was that I took longer with each patient and got paid less.

I definitely had no interest in going back and doing a further degree in psychiatry which was the obvious path.

But finally after almost a year I found a solution.

I came across recently retired doctor who not only had the same counselling interests as I did, but who had managed to set up the most successful counselling practice in town. He had not only been successful financially, but also by reputation, results with patients, and best of all, his practice was run as a proper systematized business.

He agreed to teach me what he did, and this was when I realized the importance of following a proven method so that I could turn the impossible into the achievable.

My skills in counselling were nowhere near his, but simply by his guidance in doing what had worked for him I was ready to give it a go.

In April 2000 I took the step that tapped into my passion for helping people live better lives. I set up my solo counselling practice.

With my mentor's help the business side of things largely took care of itself, and while I studied marketing and business to improve that side of my business, by and large it ran without me. I could focus on my passions of honing my counselling skills and helping people who came to see me.

Lesson Of The Proven Path: The single best short-cut to success is to follow a previously trodden path, particularly if you can go with a guide who has been there ahead of you.

This is the method that makes the impossible (for you at this point) into the almost inevitable.

It is the reason why a McDonald's or Subway is likely to be around after the first 5 years, while 80+% of non-franchise start-ups have disappeared.

Whether you call it 'modeling', mentoring, or following a proven path, it is THE most reliable way in any situation to produce success.

Life often gives you a nudge to wake up, and notice life in a new way. Sometimes in dramatic moments, but sometimes in quieter ones too...

When my first daughter was just one year old my I took my family on an around-the-world trip. As expensive as it was for all the the flights, accommodation, meals, taxis, touristing etc, that was not my biggest issue.

The money I had 'lost' by not working those 3 weeks in my counselling practice was even greater!

My success was still trapping me!

Like most solo professionals, I was the business.

All that income was totally dependent upon my ability to trade my time, training and expertise for dollars.

Let's GET REAL for a minute...

Is YOUR income limited to the number of hours you can work every day?

Is the majority of your income dependent upon trading time for dollars? And what would happen to your family if you were to suddenly suffer a crippling injury or failing health?

If you could not work... how long before you lose it all?

Heaven forbid.

Even if you never fall ill or suffer a tragic accident, are you going to want to hang your hat someday and retire? Do you have other things you want to do with your life. If so, let me ask you: "When would you like to be able to do them?" Two years. Five years. Ten years.

How much EXCESS money will you need per month to retire comfortably? $1,000... $2,000... $5,000... $10,000 or more?

What's your PLAN to create this passive income? (Remember, you are retired!)

One way to create passive income is to start investing.

So how much money will you need to invest at a 6% return to pull off your passive income goal? Simply take the number you selected above and multiply it by 200. For example, if you need $5,000 per month to retire comfortably: $5,000 x 200 = $1,000,000.

And that's not taking into account all the taxes, inflation, falling interest rates etc, etc.

So what's your PLAN to accumulate this excess money? Have you started putting your plan into action? Are you running out of time? When you GET REAL and take a long, hard, honest look at things... is there any way in the world, apart from winning the lottery or inheriting a fortune, that you can expect to escape the rat race and retire comfortably anytime soon? Ever?

Have you noticed it doesn't matter how many hours you work this week, next week you start all over from scratch? If you don't show up for work... you don't get paid.

This problem had been with me on and off ever since I had faced leaving my medical practice.

At first I didn't understand what the real problem was. I just thought I needed more dollars in the bank. If I had more income I could build up enough of a nest egg, stick it away in a safe investment somewhere and I would be set for life. Easy!

Then I realized how much of my life and my family's life I would be putting on hold while I waited to create that magical retirement lump-sum.

Welcome to the financially INSECURE world of earned income!

Lesson Of Results That Last: The key to lasting success, including financial success, is to develop a system wherein you put in some initial effort and you are rewarded for that effort again and again and again.

Making a sale, working a job, or even working for yourself, however high your fees, none of these create results that last.

Building a network of contacts (aka your Roladex), testing marketing methods you can use over and over again, creating business systems, improving your skills, developing professional networks, creating passive cashflow, building your word of mouth reputation, all these can last well beyond the work you did to create them.

If you concentrate your effort on producing results that last, professionally, personally and financially, your success is more stable, and more certain.

Think about it. How many senior citizens do you see working at McDonald's or greeting you at Walmart? Do you think they planned it that way? I don't think so. I think they planned to work hard, save for their future and retire comfortably. But it didn't work...

...because the plan is faulty.

Listen. If you want to retire above the poverty line, you MUST generate cash flow now (to pay the bills) and find a way to create a steady stream of passive income (to secure your freedom).

And the sooner you get started creating passive income, the sooner you will escape the rat race so you can truly have the choices you want for your life.

So again, what's YOUR plan for passive income?

Is passive income all you need financially?

Hopefully passive income is not news to you.

You may in fact already have some income that comes in without you working. If so, well done.

You may even have more than one form of passive residual, but let me ask you this...

Have you noticed that all too often...

There are some forms, like owning property that you rent out, that can usually increase in cashflow as the years go by. On average they at least keep up with inflation.

However, other common sources of passive income like book sales, affiliate sales, tail commissions, royalties, even online sales, etc all tend to die away. You can go back and reinvigorate them, but then that isn't entirely passive is it.

One common response is to create "multiple" streams of passive income.

However this is only a half solution.

Sure some income streams will do better than others, but overall they can still tend to fade away.

Even worse, having multiple streams can mean that you don't look after them properly. So they never give you as much return as if you had just focused on one and ramped it all the way up.

With "Word of Mouth Magic" I was forever starting over again. I would get some affiliates to sell for me, and they would slow down. Then I got trained up in paying for ads on Google, and within 2 years the number of people who bought this way halved, despite me doubling my advertising budget.

As fast as I created the income streams that gave me good returns, they would drop away and I would be scrambling again.

Yes it can. The upgrade is called...

Leveraged income.

Leveraged income is where the work you do is added to by the work of others. If this keeps happening then it gets to a tipping point where there are so many others doing so much work that your contribution to growing the whole system is relatively very small, and then even if you stop, your income keeps increasing with out you.

This means that rather than your passive income dropping off, or staying steady, over time you get MORE income, more security and MORE freedom.

In fact a friend of mine calls it "Legacy Money" because the income can be willed your children... and their children... and their children.

Seems like a wonderful idea. Maybe it seems unbelievable.

But in fact one of the commonest forms of leveraged income is well known to us all.

It's a business.

If a business owner grows their business to the point where they have employees run the business profitably without them, then they can step away from it. At this point they are earning passive income.

If the business keeps growing its profits, then the owner's income isn't just passive, it grows too. This is leveraged income.

Wouldn't everyone want their passive income to grow over time?

In fact, why isn't everyone working for leveraged income?

Well first of all many people don't know leveraged income exists. More people than ever are aware of the benefits of passive income, but far fewer have extended that to thinking about leveraged income.

Even if they are aware of the idea, many people dismiss leveraged income as something that can only be done by entrepreneurs who are building huge businesses to sell or take onto the stockmarket. They imagine it takes huge sums of start up money, a whole heap of risk, the time-devouring 80 hour weeks of a workaholic, and a big chunk of luck too.

That's what I thought, and that's what held me back from leveraging my skills for so many years.

Fortunately leveraged income can also be available much more cheaply, more simply, with less risk and even on a part-time basis. That's what interested me.

Because leverage was a key to my other plans too.

One day after I built up my practice, I was sitting in my office and wrote out some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

I worked out that if I continued as I was in my city of a million people over my career I was going to end up seeing a little under 1% of the population.

And suddenly I realized... that number wasn't big enough!

To help more people I needed to find new ways to get what I could offer out there. I needed to reach beyond my city. I needed time freed up to do this. I needed people, connections, business skills, marketing skills, and yes I needed access to alot more money. All in all I realized I needed leverage to achieve my goals, and financial leverage was one part of that.

I had already moved to having sufficient passive income to keep my family secure. The remaining step was to now use leverage so that I truly could go after all that I had discovered I wanted to contribute to the world.

Your future is waiting, as is mine. I have my skills and resources, and I'm sure you have yours. I've told you where I'm at and how I'm building.

Let's work together build an incredibly profitable business (a system designed to create income without us having to spend our time working the system) that will benefit us both, not just with passive income, but also leveraged income, starting from today.

If you are ready... click the link below. Follow ALL of the instructions. Check out the video. Spend some time browsing around, playing with the buttons and fiddling with the dials.

Then, if it makes sense for YOU - pick up the phone right away and call me. We'll chat, get to know each other a little bit, and we'll take the next step.

Oh, and if you do DECIDE TO JOIN - I will GIVE YOU access to my Private Email for as long as you stay active. After all... we're partners, right?

PS - Call any time. I work internationally so you can reach me in the US on 408-426-5500, in Australia on 08-8121 5981, or on Skype: martinwrussell. I may or may not be available. Leave a voice mail if I don't answer.