Goal Girl’s Blog

Setting goals is find and dandy, but what if the goal conflicts with your values or life-purpose?  What if the goal is something that sounds good, is socially acceptable, but really doesn’t light your passions?

You want to get a tan.  Your friend Mike is a marine biologist, and he has a great tan.  So your goal should be to become a marine biologist, right?   Nope.   You slept through biology class in high school; it bored you to tears.  And you get sea sick. And you are deathly allergic to shellfish.  And the last time you tried to get a tan, you got a terrible case of sun-poisoning!  In your case, although the goal of becoming a marine biologist might get you the tan you crave, that goal is not a good fit for your preferences and limitations.

How can you choose the “right goals” for you?   The first step is to get to know yourself better:

• What are your values?
• What are your passions?
• What are your strengths?
• What is your life’s purpose?

The second step is to build a goal that you can believe is possible.  Now I’m not saying dumb down your goal until it’s something so miniscule that it’s not going to stretch you at all (e.g. “I’m going add $5 a month to my savings account”).   But if you can not honestly believe that you can learn to speak fluent Swahili by this time next month, no matter how much you meditate on that, it’s not very likely that you will accomplish that goal.   So pare that down until it’s just within the realm of belief, but still forces you outside of your comfort zone, for example “I’m going to learn to read and write 200 new Swahili words by March 1st.”    I am a firm believer in the intention-manifestation model of goal achievement.    Steve Pavlina wrote a good treatment on this several years ago. It’s impossible to form a firm intention if you don’t believe the manifestation (the goal!) is possible.   You’ll become your own obstacle.  You will subconsciously sabotage your efforts… ‘oh well, I can’t really fly an airplane, so why should I study for my flight school exams?’

So what did I do with the “frustration and discouragement” I suffered yesterday?   Today I brushed up four squidoo lenses, created a new one (content pending…), submitted three articles, submitted some rss feeds, posted some blog and squidoo page comments…

I feel a lot better.   I’m building a strong foundation for a towering success.   I’d have gotten a lot more done, but could only work on this during breaks in my normal work day.

Oh,  I also checked out the Lunar Electric Rover application on the NASA website, tres cool.   This was developed by a company in Virginia called AMA … http://ama-inc.com … excellent job guys!

Yes, road-blocks, speed bumps and long, long uphill climbs will come. Expect them. Prepare for them. How? When you set a goal, set your action plan. Then Act, act, act. Action plan implies action. You can’t steer a stationary vehicle.

I’m frustrated and discouraged with the affiliate marketing efforts this past week, hence the motivation for this post. Part of this is the lack of results thus far (in terms of money).  I had a great day last Wednesday, got a lot of stuff done on a new marketing campaign, but then… my daughter got sick, and when a four year old gets sick, they need attention, coddling, and occassionally, cleaning up.. they need all your discretionary time.   After a couple of days, K was feeling much better, but now I was sick, my mother was sick and my younger brother was also sick.   At one point my eyes were swollen shut from the cold and I could hardly read anything.

And also the frustration of marketing over a month without a single sale.    And not much traffic here either.  Even though I don’t expect to make money from this blog any time soon, saving my focus for One Week Marketing, I would like to see a little traffic…

Am I in “The Dip”?  Probably not yet… pretty early for that I think.    How do I deal with this frustration?  I act.  I push to finish my checklists for the campaign I started last week.  I write, write, write.  I try not to get to distracted by hundreds of things, though I do reserve an hour a day to read marketing papers, emails, ebooks, blogs, etcetera.   That said, I didn’t get a lot done today because K’s pre-Kindergarten was closed due to the ice storms.

Because my work-day job is pretty demanding, I am probably moving through the learning curve a bit slower than many would.  But I’m moving, grin.   Even unproductive campaigns are not a waste of time, because I learn from each one.

Motivation poster seen lately: “Optimism : Obstacles are just stepping stones to success.”

Do you cringe, run, hide when things get difficult? ‘Things’ getting difficult just might be an indication that you’re on the right path, if only you’d keep on keeping on! Read on…

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s book The Dip, and this short little book has changed my perspective.

What happens at around mile 20 of a 26 mile race (marathon)? Many non-elite runners experience what is called “The Wall”. Those who prepare for it either don’t experience the wall, or are able to push through it. “The Wall” is partly a physical barrier, i.e. glycogen stores are low, the aches and pains accumulated over the course of the race so far are talking your mind out of finishing. The Wall is largely mental though. At meeting the wall, you must decide: are the rewards of finishing the marathon greater than the cost of continuing?

How does the wall gives an advantage to the runners who can surpass it? It weeds out the competition, creating scarcity… in a market economy this is a good thing if you are doing the marketing. The bigger the dip you’ve pushed through, the greater your chances of being “The Best in the World.” There are incredible marketing advantages to being number one versus any other number. Market share may be linear from number two down, but the share number one achieves breaks that curve.

In The Dip, Godin also discusses when it is a good idea to quit and concentrate your resources elsewhere, coining the phrase “strategic quitting.” Want to know more? You can buy it here: The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

The Dip is a small book, only 80 pages, including blanks and title pages, but there is no fluff here; it’s all value. Thank goodness it’s not priced proportionally to the value within, or no one could afford a copy.

I can totally buy into the premise of this book. I started my professional career as a marine biologist. I loved it, but there were so many kids coming out of college who wanted to be marine biologists that the market for that skill set was flooded. I looked at my supervisor, who had been in the field for something like fifteen years at the time, and he was only making maybe $15,000 more than I was starting out, and I figured the stress-level and experience differential between his job and my job was worth a heck of a lot more than that. Through a series of fortunate opportunities, I ended up leaving the marine biology field and entering the IT world with both feet. The initial jump doubled my salary off the bat. In the nine years since, my salary has continued to increase to the point where I’m now making roughly 2.5x’s what my old boss was making with 15 years’ experience, and at roughly the same stress-level. And I haven’t had a hard-head catfish spine go through my boot and arch of my foot in nearly a decade now. Well worth it!

A little about one of my goals.  I make a pretty good salary as a database administrator.   A heck of a lot more than i made as a  marine biologist.  But not nearly as much fun.   Because DBAs tend to be expensive, folks don’t usually hire enough of us… which, coupled with the fact that most maintenance activities must happen after normal business hours (and in some 24×7 shops, in the wee smalls, when traffic is least if there is any downtime required).   We’re not known for sleeping a lot.   We take our crack-berry phones with us on vacation.  Our kids learn to amuse themselves while we tap away at our keyboards.  

It’s the last one that gets me.   Don’t get me wrong, I actually like being a DBA… it’s a job that really challenges the mind, the organizational skills, the diplomacy skills and endurance.  Never a dull moment, really.   I have a four year old daughter, however, and the number of hours I have to work for my <mumble> salary isn’t fare to her.  It breaks my heart that I don’t get to spend more time with her than I do.   I want to work fewer hours and spend more time with my sweet daughter, without compromising our financial stability.   That sound suspiciously like a goal, doesn’t it?

Replacing $<mumble> of income while reducing one’s hours-worked is a very large task (hence the Elephant reference in the title).   As the old saying goes though, regarding how one eats an elephant… “you do it one bite at a time…”    As I am still very new at the web marketing thing, I doubt that I can do this in one income stream at the outset.   I am fairly sure this will take multiple income streams as I grow and learn.   Also, as I still have daycare, mortgage, etcetera to pay, I will have to continue to work my day job, so the amount of time that i can devote to this new endeavor is necessarily limited to no more than a couple of hours a day if I squeeze hard.    I’ll continue to discuss this as I continue to grow my business(es?).  

It’s midnight here in Irving now, and my darling child will wake me up, no doubt, sometime around 5am.  Time for me to head for bed.  If you are still itching for some good reading, check out my latest lenses on Squidoo about Kids and Karate and about the coffee shop I’ll be visiting about seven hours from now.  

G’night y’all…

In this first article of (hopefully) many,  I’ll be talking about structuring your goals to increase the likelihood of a triumphant outcome.   Of course, everyone knows that the first step is to define said goal. 

For example: 

 I want to make more money!

This is what many people would put forth as a “goal”.   Well, if that is the goal, to split hairs, mission accomplished… most of us already want to make more money.    Even if we rephrase this to say more specifically:

My goal is to make more money!

Now what?

Fine to have such a goal, but defining the goal this way does not buy you anything (so to speak).  You probably don’t need to do a whole lot to meet this goal, as stated, as eventually you will gain seniority at your present job, or the value of a dollar will be so low that you’ll be making three times what you are now in terms of how many dollars you put in your bank account each month… so more money, but less spending power.  You can’t complain, because you have achieved your goal as stated…   but what if we put a time-limit on it?

I want to make more money within 12 months!

We’re getting warmer… The chances of the spending power of a dollar being cut by 2/3’s in twelve months is much less.   This way of stating your goal also tends to light a bit of a fire under you in terms of working toward your goal.  You don’t feel like you have forever to reach the goal, so you’d better start doing something about it now (if you are serious about the goal, and if you are not, why are you wasting so much valuable time defining it in the first place?).   Hmm… twelve months can zoom by pretty quickly.   Not a lot of time to dabble in one money generating method.  I’d better really work several methods and hedge my bets! (starting to see the advantage of setting a time limit yet?). 

Perhaps you bring home around $5000/month in your current situation.   Not a bad take-home, depending on your liabilities and life-style.  You’re grossing probably around $7200/month (will vary according to what insurance, retirement, etc. that you have taken out before you get your $5000).  Based on a 40 hour work-week, you’re earning about $45/hour.   What if you’re salaried and typically work 60 hour weeks?  Now you’re only earning $30/hour.    Assuming it doesn’t get you fired or cost you a raise, simply by cutting your work-week back to 40 hours, you’ve increased your hourly wage by %50!    So you are technically speaking, “making more money,” but you really don’t have any more money in your bank account than before.   Maybe a fewer ulcers in your stomach though, and that is certainly worth something!

Within 12 months, I want to replace $2000 of my take home pay with residual income so that I can work less!

 

A-hah!  Now there is a goal that just might get us somewhere!    

Now, how can I do that?  Personally, I’m on a quest to do it myself via online marketing, squidoo, twitter, etcetera, but that’s another article.

Welcome!  I will be discussing anything related to goals, goal-setting, and occassionally specifically regarding my own goals.    I invite you to comment freely, add to the discourse, as long as you respect me and other subscribers/commenters, etcetera.