Information Sells

What's Your Goal?

Are you the type of person who likes to jump into a project with no planning? Are you impatient to start and see where it leads?

Or do you want everything to be perfect before you ever touch your keyboard? Do you need to map out all the possible problems (and the solutions), understand the software, and feel like an expert from Day 1?

Or are you the person who starts 15 projects at once, with no real plan or goal? You just start and then stop in a few months when you get bored.

We all have some quirks. We all prefer to work one way instead of another. What’s right for me may be wrong for you. But one thing holds true no matter how you organize your day – you need clearly defined, attainable goals. And then you need to act.

Goals and Actions

“I want to make money on the internet” is the sort of nebulous goal that can keep you from achieving anything. If you want to prosper, break your goal down, step by step.

• I want to be an eBay Power Seller
• I want to have an Amazon Web Store up and running by Sept 30
• I want to have 20 blog posts by the end of September

Reachable targets will keep you motivated and they’ll help you move on to the next step.

If you love the adrenaline rush of jumping in without planning – ask yourself, “Now that I’m up to my nose in alligators, what’s next?” If you just downloaded a Joomla template and opened a web store all within 24 hours – and good for you if you did! – is your next step to sign up for a merchant account? Or to buy AdWords? What will drive your business forward? Stick with the project you started and try something new with it, rather than just looking for a different challenge.

If you need to know every detail about how shopping carts work before you are comfortable enough to start accepting credit cards, how will you get that knowledge? How long can you wait? Will hiring someone else to design the web site move the project forward, even as you continue to read and study?

Perhaps you just threw a pot of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. That’s OK – something is bound to work better than everything else. But don’t wait a month to get bored and then move on to something new. Instead, analyze what works. If listing 10 new items a day on eBay is making you money, but you would rather stick a fork in your eye than spend all that time listing instead of product sourcing (which you’ve discovered that you love) – can you hire someone to do the listings instead of abandoning them?

No matter how you work, you can be successful if you just know what you want and keep pushing towards it.

What’s the key?

• Goals that are concrete and achievable.
• Actions that move you closer to your goal.

Photo by keylosa Released under Creative Commons License

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Tags: goals