Welcome to June. What Are Your Goals?

Why Is Goal Setting So Important?

Ask anyone who is successful if they set goals. I guarantee every person will tell you that they set both short and long-term goals. Goal setting is not difficult – anyone can do it. The difficult part is following through on your goals and not getting discouraged when you do not meet them.

Ankesh Kothari recently posted an easy trick to achieve all of our goals. What’s the trick? It’s simply writing down your goals. Ankesh says:

“Writing down goals is nothing but a filtering device for your brain. You will focus more on the things you’ve written down as your goals. And you will jump on them when they present themselves as opportunities.”

Set a Timeline For Your Goals

Goals are just dreams if you don’t give them a timeline. That is why it is so important to set both short-term and long-term goals. I like to set weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. If you can, write down the exact date you expect to accomplish your goal.

Of course, you need to be realistic when setting a timeline for your goals. You can’t expect to become a a millionaire within 6 months if you have no plan of how to do it. Many goals, due to their incredible magnitude, require their own detailed action plans in order to accomplish them.

Several of my goals have ten or more steps I need to take in order to accomplish them. Several of those steps have several additional steps, and so on. The more specific you are, the more you are increasing the chance that your goal is not just a dream, but a plan of action.

The Power of Blogging About Your Goals

There is a lot of power when you combine goal setting and blogging. First of all, by blogging about your goals, you are effectively writing them down, which is the necessary “trick” in order to ensure you are taking your goals seriously. Secondly, by sharing your goals with the blogosphere, you are opening yourself up to a whole world of encouragement and support.

Of course, another plus to blogging about your goals is that you are putting some pressure on yourself to accomplish them in order to prove to your readers that you not only set goals, but you accomplish them. Setting and accomplishing goals is a process of progress, so what better venue to document this than your blog?

Additionally, there are not many topics more exciting to read about than a personal journal of someone’s journey success. Isn’t that primary reason we are all here, to learn from each other? What are blogs, really? They are personal journals of our trials and tribulations. Your blog probably is the best place to be chronicling your progress and goals.

What Happens If You Can’t Meet Your Goals?

There are always reasons why we can’t accomplish our goals. However, if you are serious about being successful, you better have a good reason why you didn’t meet your goals.

That being said, I have a confession: I didn’t meet one of my goals last month. These were two of my main goals for May:

1. Hit 200 RSS subscribers. I surpassed that goal. My count is at 300, currently.
2. Send out direct-mailings for infinFX. I did not accomplish this goal. The reason being that, currently, I have more projects on my plate than I can handle, including a new business venture which is taking up 80% of my time.

If you didn’t meet your goals, sit down and figure out why. Maybe the goal was not timed realistically, or perhaps something else more important came up, such as in my case. Whatever the goal is, if you are serious about accomplishing in, do not stop at anything until you do.

My Goals for June

Now that it is June, I am ready to set a few new goals for the month:

1. Hit 400 RSS subscribers. I think this is absolutely possible. At the beginning of May, I only had 150. I ended up doubling that last month.
2. Host another blog contest. My 1000th Comment contest was a great success. I will be hosting another contest at the end of this month. I expect a lot more people to enter this time.
3. Make my posts even more readable. In my recent post, 5 Ways To Make Your Posts More Readable, I talked about several ways to improve the layout of your posts, thereby making them more “readable.” I believe that by making your posts more readable, you are helping to ensure that more people read each one of your posts, despite whatever the topic or length might be.
4. Finish all of my current work for infinFX. This is going to be the difficult part. Between my work for the new startup, infinFX, and blogging, I have no life. It will a difficult task to make this happen.
5. Develop 500 Websites. I know what you are thinking, “Nate, are you crazy?” The answer is yes, but not for that reason. Recently, in my How Blogging Has Changed My Life post, I told you about a new venture I was starting to work on. Part of my job at this new startup is to develop 1500 search engine optimized web sites. I will be explaining this more in detail later, but, yes, 500 websites this month is my goal. Thankfully, I will have some help.

Conclusion

Everyone loves to dream about becoming successful. How many people actually turn that dream into a reality? Imagine that feeling – you did it. You set out to accomplish your dreams and you did. Those that “do it” say it is the most incredible feeling you could ever imagine.

So, what are you waiting for? Stop dreaming and start planning. The world is your oyster. You need to plan out every detail and give it a date. I want to hear about your goals. Tell me, and let’s see if we can help each other accomplish our goals, and ultimately, make our dreams come true.

Everyday more people are living out their dreams. It’s time to start planning.