Gain staging

I've been a Sonar user for a very long time, and I've been struggling with getting my mixes to sound the way I would like them to...
Any way, tonight I had a friend over and he listened to some of my mixes and he asked me how do I go about performing my gain staging, I told him that I pretty much just record and mix, so he then showed me the proper way to go about doing gain staging....
I tried it and man , what a difference, I got my levels to where they were supposed to be and my sounds are just popping out of my monitors, and that's without any eq or effects....So all I have to say is gain staging is important, I'm pretty sure most of you guys already know this, but I just learned a very good lesson...So you can teach an old dog new tricks....lol....

When I mix, sometimes I lower all the volumes.  Then I raise this one and that one.  Before I know it they are all raised and need to be lowered again!!!  This is my biggest hurdle.   I sometimes get there and I sometimes screw it up.  The key seems to me to make everything lower than I really want it to allow some buffer.