Every smoker wishes they were an ex-smoker… at least every smoker I've ever met. Sadly for most of them, those wishes will never come true. The reason for that is simple: They don't know how to do it and they probably aren't aware that quitting smoking is a learnable skill.

When you think about it, learning how to do something before you try to do it is how we accomplish just about everything we have ever done in this life. Yet when it comes to the issue of quitting smoking, I have never heard that approach taken by anybody… except me.

After failing to quit on over 70 different occasions during my 40 years as a smoker, learning how to do it before I tried to do it was the only way that worked for me. The first step a smoker needs to take in learning how to quit smoking is to understand why you do it. Here are six major reasons why you are smoking today:

1. You are smoking today because… you are addicted to the drug nicotine. You do not smoke to relieve tension. You do not have a "smoking habit." You were not "born to smoke." The only reason you do it is because lighting and smoking a cigarette makes the urge to do it go away, but only for about 48 minutes. Ask yourself this question: If you didn't get regular, overwhelming urges to smoke a cigarette, would you do it?

2. You are smoking today because… you have rationalized doing it. You do this so that you can come to terms with the fact that you are doing something that you know full well makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and is, in fact, extremely dangerous and very expensive. If you didn’t personally deny the real reason you smoke by rationalizing your smoking and coming up with a, "good reason" for smoking, you would be wondering every time you lit a cigarette if this one was "the one," the cigarette of no return, the cigarette that would make an early painful death irreversible. Try rationalizing that.

3. You are smoking today because… the cigarette industry has been successful in "recruiting" you into its ranks. They probably got you at a pretty young age since almost 90% of all smokers start before they turn 19, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The tobacco industry has done—are still doing—and will continue to do anything and everything they can get away with in order to get you and our kids addicted to nicotine.

4. You are smoking today because… the government wants you to smoke. Now, they have a good reason for doing that. They want your money. They don’t really care what happens to you. If they did, they'd do something about it and stop providing the tobacco industry with new "customers."

5. You are smoking today because… you did not fully understand what would happen to you when you took your first drag. If you had known that you were going to take 7 to 15 years off your life and that there was a 50-50 chance you would die because of it after years of indescribable pain; that you would become addicted to the toughest drug there is to kick and would need to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep your addiction satisfied, you probably never would have taken that first drag. That’s why they had to get you when you were young, just as they get most of their victims. Once you learned what happened when you stuck your hand in the fire, you stopped doing it, unless you were addicted to doing it.

6. You are smoking today because… you do not know how to quit! Like I said at the beginning, if you don't approach quitting smoking as a learnable skill, you will probably never learn how to do it and the odds that you will be able to quit will remain stacked against you.

Learning how to quit smoking is not rocket science. It's a matter of learning what you need to do, doing the work and then making it happen. You may fail—maybe even more than once—but if you learn from that failure and adjust your skill set, you not only can do it, you will do it.

Just picture yourself two months from now: you're not smoking, you've made it through the first two weeks, sure there is still the odd "moment," but they are beginning to fade and they are much less intense and your plan for dealing with them is working. You are winning. You are getting healthy. You are saving money—big time! Just thinking about it feels good doesn't it?

Brian Keelan, quit smoking after smoking over 400,000 cigarettes and failing to quit smoking over 70 times during his 40 year addiction to nicotine. He finally quit smoking forever—over 90,000 cigarettes and $45,000 after-tax dollars ago. He is the author of "How To Quit Smoking and Save Your Life." It is available in e-book form at Amazon Kindle, Smashwords and at iTunes. It is also available as an audiobook at Audible.com and iTunes. For more information please go www.thequitsmokingguy.com.