My 2009.1 Goals

That’s not a typo. I just read over the last couple years of goal posts and realized something—I need to be working on my goals in smaller chunks because my life changes too quickly for yearlong goals.

As one guy said in the comments last year, I sorta suck at goal setting. So this year I have a new idea.

First, let’s get to last year’s goals:

1. Hold myself to a very high standard and accept NO excuses from myself. If I do accept an excuse I will write it down and post it publicly for others to judge.

2. Focus on output. Every day I will make a list of my daily output. I will also make this public.

3. Work harder than I’ve EVER worked. Every day I will grade myself on a scale from 0-3. I will publish this daily. My goal is a weekly average of 2.75 (I’m not trying to eliminate fun, just useless and unproductive activities). I will only count time that I SHOULD be working.

#1—I held myself to very high standards and publicly shared all excuses for around six months. After that the no-excuse habit became totally ingrained and I stopped writing them. I can still definitely hold myself to higher standards, but I achieved my goal.

#2—I focused on output big time. With a few exceptions, I really shifted my behavior to learn things as needed and create a high amount of output.

#3—I have worked harder than I ever worked. I can still work much harder, but I am happy with progress this year. I don’t think I actually maintained a 2.75, but I know that it was very close—around a 2.7 or so. I also stopped publishing my output and rating every day after about six months.

Overall I give myself a B+. Hey, high standards, right?

Here are the other things I did this year that I’m proud of:

• Did my first Life Nomadic trip, which was one of the best things I’ve ever done (in terms of fun as well as life experience and learning)
• Improved my Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese (only a little) and learned a good chunk of French.
• Learned all 2000+ common use Kanji (okay, I won’t actually be done with this for another 4 days, but it’s as good as done)
• Learned about THE DIP
• Got rid of all of my businesses (still transitioning)
• Published Make Her Chase You as a paperback
• Switched to Dvorak typing
• Became an Alcor member
• Was interviewed on TV for the first time and got on a movie set for the first time
• Trained a squirrel to climb on my shirt and eat from my hand
• Learned all countries and most capitals on the world map
• Met a great girl whose idea it was to learn the countries and capitals
• Increased my net worth (not by a super impressive amount)

There are a lot of other smaller Life Nomadic related things that I could include, but I think that would make the list a little boring. All in all, I had a fantastic year.

So for the first half of this year, here are my goals:

#1—Become THE authority (along with Todd if this is his goal too) on the Nomadic Lifestyle.

Some measurable subgoals:

• Become the #1 writer on Gadling (measured by average # of comments, other factors will be taken into account)
• Build Life Nomadic into a top 50,000 web site on Alexa.
• Write at least 70 high quality posts for Gadling.
• Have at least 300 people involved in the community aspect of Life Nomadic

You know what? That’s my only goal. Everything else in my life is just about perfect, and it’s time to focus and push through a dip.

Some questions for you:

What are your six month (or 1 year) goals? How did you do last year? What is the MOST important goal for the next 6 months?