"YOU DON'T HAVE to be great to get started, but you do have to get started to become great!"

Smart advise from an associate and well-known motivational speaker Les Brown. You cannot become great if you're doing nothing about your greatness. And if you do nothing about your greatness, your dreams, desires, passions seem to slip away.

Greatness starts with the first attempt and is built from there. As a child, as you were crawling around the room, going to one person then another, you thought you were doing great. You thought you were the best crawler in the room. Then, one day you decided to try this walking thing that everyone else was doing. So, you crawled up to a table, grabbed onto it and pulled yourself up, only to wobble around and fall on your bottom.

You tried it again and again and again, and after each attempt you got better and better. You didn't try it six, seven, eight times and finally, after failing on the ninth attempt, throw your hands in the air and say, that's it, I'm not a walker. No, you didn't do that. You kept on trying until you got the walking thing down. Which became running. Then bicycling, roller skating, ice skating, skiing, surfing, gymnastics, ballet, baseball and all the other sports or activities that began with walking. You became great!

So how do you become great today?

First, know your why you want to become great. Knowing your why or purpose to becoming great will give you the strength to overcome the following:

Failure. Be prepared to fail and fail often. However, embrace your failures as a success on how not to do something. I say to my clients to "fail forward fast," get it out of your system and learn from it.

Advice. Well intentioned advice will come from friends, family and casual acquaintances. They may say to stop killing yourself, you gave it long enough. "You know this is not your calling." "What's you Plan B?" Remember, they are not you. They do not have your vision, desire, determination and purpose to make your dream happen.

If-only's. If only my desk was clean, I had more money, I wasn't so old or young, my kids were out of school. If only I went to a better college. Or, "When I get a new computer, when I get a better job, when I get a raise" and on and on. These are the stalls to your greatness, not the reason for lack of greatness.

The only thing stopping you from your greatness is you. Your greatness lies within you, and you hold the key to the manifestation of the greatest life on Earth. Yours!

Peter Remington is an executive at Houston CityBook and also a business consultant and life coach. For more information on him and his Prepare 4 More, visit here.