One Million and Beyond

2008 Goals

By Matt - Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

I wanted to start the year off with some goals that I have for the year. In the past I started off with some grand ideas about what I could and could not do. I’m sure a lot of people have the drive and start a great many things but the follow through is the issue. If you think about it most New Year’s resolutions end up broken within weeks if not days of being made. I think the biggest problem with a lot of these goals and ideas is the fact that they are very big. Often they are shifts in thinking which do not happen overnight. If you want to loose weight and you’ve been eating a lot and watching TV all year to all of a sudden expect you’ll be able to stop eating as much and hit the gym 5 times a week is a bit too much.

With that in mind I have some lofty ideas about what I would like to achieve but I am going to start off a bit smaller. I know that I would like to be in a completely different place this time next year from a financial point of view as well as from a personal one. So rather than say ‘I’m going to get rid of my debt and save X amount’ I would like to start off a bit more conservatively.

Some goals for the year include

• Cutting back on spending on unnecessary items such as alcohol and smokes
• Finishing my side project and registering it as a company
• Figuring out what I want to do about a job and a career (I’m up in the air and torn about this one)
• Concentrating less on the wasteful stuff and more on the meaningful things in life

I think I’ll start with those for the time being. Those are my short term goals and I will expand them once I see how I’m progressing. For example I am probably within a week of finishing up my side project and getting it into place. Once this happens and I’ve registered a business around it there will be a lot of work to actually start making money off of it. I’ve done the numbers and the business planning around it but I am not setting those as goals just yet; this project is an experiment. As with any experiment you know what you would like to see or even expect to see but trying it out gives you a better idea and in the case of a business if the idea isn’t successful you learn from this.

I don’t want to start the year off by saying I would like my side business to make me $20,000 by June because until it’s running I won’t have a clue what the potential returns will be. I’m going to start with the smaller pieces such as getting it up and running which is much more important now than mentally spending the money I haven’t made from it yet.

Cutting back on vices (such as smoking and drinking) is something I want to do anyways. I spend too much money on both and neither is an activity that has any real value or merit too it. But again rather than jumping in too far I’m going to set myself some smaller goals such as cutting back (on the drinking and shortly quitting on the smoking). These will help the financial situation but they will also help me with the final point, concentrating the more meaningful things in life. The consumer society we live in is extremely wasteful and although I personally don’t think I’m that wasteful nor frivolous I’m sure there are better things I can concentrate my energies on. Rather than watching TV two nights a week I can spend the time working on the side project. That would probably amount to 6-8 hours if I applied myself which might not seem like a lot but over time this adds up very quickly. It’s effectively a day of work. The rewards might be minimal at first but in the long run they might be substantial.

Overall I would like to say this will be the year of quiet change. I’m not going to try doing or taking on too much, but I would like to accomplish a few things. A slow quiet approach is probably the best way to do it for me right now. I think that knowing this is probably just as important as trying to accomplish the goals themselves.

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