Before we start we need to know what we want to achieve. Seems reasonable? Let’s look at creating a set of goals for you.
These goals will be in two parts:
- Major Goals
- Milestones.
You’ll need to write these goals down and pin them somewhere where you can see them often, like on the door of the fridge or above the TV. You’ll need to be able to tick off these goals as you achieve them. And, you’ll also be sharing these goals on-line with like-minded individuals so they’ll know what they are and when you achieve them.
How do we go about setting realistic Goals for ourselves?
On any old piece of paper write down all the things you want out of life. It doesn’t matter what they are, we’re just brainstorming for now. For example, you might write the following:
- $1,000,000
- A house of my own
- A car
- a room of my own
- a holiday
- no money worries
- A new hairdo
- quit my job
- to be my own boss
- pay off my debts
- etc.
Now let’s take these goals and select the ones that are going to help you achieve most of the others:
- $1,000,000
- To be my own boss
Yes, there are only 2. With just these two, you can achieve nearly all the others.
$1,000,000 is an arbitrary figure, so it’s a good idea to change it to something like “Financial Freedom”, because, Financial Freedom means different things to different people.
Now these two goals are not very specific. That’s where the milestones come in. Milestones are the markers to show that you’re on your way to achieving your goals. So let’s look at some milestones:
- Research a name for the business
- Follow the training
- create a website
- 1st sale
- 10 sales per month
- 50 sales per month
- enough to live on
- Leave my job and work full time on the business
- 1st foreign holiday
- etc.
Here we’ve got just past the goal of “To be my own boss”.
For milestones to work properly they have to have a time limit. This time limit must be realistic but also challenging. It’s no good setting a time limit of 10 days or 10 years for 1st Sale. The first one isn’t realistic and the second one isn’t challenging.
So how do you go about setting these time limits?
Well, it depends on how much time you’ve got available to work on the business. The more time you have available, the shorter the time limit. Let’s assume you have on average 20 hours a week available (4 hours per day). We can now roughly calculate the 1st three items:
- Research a name for the business : 2 hours
- Follow the training: 1½ weeks
- Create a website: 2 weeks
So after a less than a month, with no money spent, you’ve got a working website and you’re ready to make money. You’re ready to rock and roll. So set a time limit of 1 month to do the 1st three items. This gives you some leeway just in case.
The rest is now up to how much effort you put into promoting the website. It also depends on how much each sale is worth. But based an average sale of 20 bucks, 20 hours a week promoting and updating the site, I would set time limits of:
- make my 1st sale 2 weeks after the website goes live
- 10 sales a month 2 months after the website goes live
- 40 sales a month 4 months after the website goes live
- enough to live on 10 months after the website goes live
- leave my job and be my own boss 12 months after the website goes live
This is achievable, it is realistic but it also involves hard work. You may get lucky and hit these goals earlier or it could take a little longer. If you’re not hitting your targets then there’s lots of help available and I’ll show you how to get it in a later chapter.
Now you see if you can create the time limits to achieve Financial Freedom as only you know what this means to you.
Based on these assumptions your goals could be:
- 6 weeks from starting to 1st sale
- 10 sales per month
- 20 sales per month
- 30 sales per month…
- to “Be my own boss in 12 months”.
- A really good holiday.
- Full Financial Freedom (no money worries) in 2 years.
- Buy a House.
Difficult but doable.
Now that you have your goals and time limits, write them on a nice, clean piece of paper and put it somewhere prominent where you’ll see it multiple times a day.
I want to help you so, if you have any questions about Setting your Goals, please leave them below.
