Postcards From Myself

Today is World Book Day! Much bigger in the UK and Ireland than it is here in the US, the website says, “World Book Day moves into its second decade in the UK and Ireland in 2008. Over this relatively short period World Book Day has become firmly established as the biggest annual event promoting the enjoyment of books and reading.”

What could be better? With the ever decreasing number of readers and, at least in my mind, the ever decreasing literacy and intelligence level in this country, we should really get behind this. In fact I am going to do my part. This evening I will take both of my kids to either Barnes And Noble or Books-A-Million and buy them each a book. And then I will somehow make sure they both read those books. I would much rather go to a small local bookseller, but unfortunately those are drying up faster than the Georgia water supply.

So, do yourself and us all a favor and promote World Book Day. Go to the library. Buy a kid a book. Pick up some inexpensive books and donate them to a school, church, or civic group. Or better yet, sit down and read a book to a young child who has yet to find the joy. No that would be a gift worth giving.

I don’t do coffee. Just generally don’t like it - though I do occasionally enjoy those iced Starbucks Frappuccino things. So the problem is that I drink Coke. Diet Coke actually, and lots of it. Most of the time I drink decaf Diet Coke, but at least a few times a day I drink the straight stuff. I know it isn’t good for me, but I am just not a big fan of plain water. It is just so, so… plain. But now I hear from British researchers, of course British, that tea may actually be healthier than drinking water!

I occasionally try to have tea, and here in the South we are supposed to drink iced tea, but I have never been a big fan. Usually I end up doctoring it up with lots of sweetener and lemon just to make it palatable. But maybe I have been doing it wrong. Maybe I have been trying the wrong teas. Of course, being the cheapskate that I am, when I go to try tea I know that I may not like it so I get something cheap. Hey, don’t want to waste money if you are not going to drink the whole thing, right? Wrong. I need to approach it, like we should approach most things, with the idea that I will like it and will enjoy it. In that case I want to purchase something good that I will want around. Maybe it is that preconceived notion that I don’t like tea that is keeping me from enjoying it.

Then I started thinking, isn’t that the way with a lot that we do? If you were to go on a date with someone you thought your probably wouldn’t like, you wouldn’t put much effort into it. You would take them to a lesser restaurant, maybe not waste money on flowers, etc. But by doing that you have pretty much insured that you won’t have a good time and that you won’t want another date. Whereas if you had approached the date with enthusiasm it might have turned out differently. And even if you still didn’t want to go out with that person again, at least you would have had a more enjoyable evening.

Again, if you approach a task at work with the attitude “this is going to suck so I am not going to give it my all,” guess what? It will suck. And the job you do on it will suck. And most likely someone will notice, call you on it, and make your life suck even worse. Deal with it - you caused it. Now, if you go into it with the attitude of “this may not be my favorite thing, but if I hit it hard and do it well then I can move on to better things”, then you might actually do a good job on the task and get assigned better more interesting task. Attitude, yes, but also just a way of approaching things.

So, back to the tea. Can someone give me some good recommendations? Matthew Stibbe over at the Bad Language site says that tea is a great tool for writers and even has a few recommendations such as Breakfast Americana Mighty Leaf. Don’t know if it is a good one for a newbie, but sounds as good a first step as any!

Goals are wonderful things - well they are when you make them. And thanks to the help of many of you reading this I met my goals for February. Honestly I will attribute meeting my goals to two important things - the choosing of reasonable goals and some hard work. OK, there may be a little luck in there too, but not much.

One of the things I really want to do in 2008 is get my blogging and websites to “work”. To do this I decided, or was convinced by some great articles that I read, that I needed to establish goals and work towards consistently toward those goals. That makes sense since it is what you should be doing with any endeavor that you care about succeeding at. Since December is an anomaly in many ways and I was already towards the end of January when I made this decision, I formed my February goals based on my January numbers. I also looked at where I wanted to be at the end of the year. Finally, I based all of my goals on three distinct metrics - simple hits for all my sites, the number of RSS subscriptions to my blogs, and income from all sources for all of my sites.

What I decided was that I needed to double January for February. Then in March I will need to add on again the numbers I had in January. Basically, at the end of the year that will leave me with monthly numbers that are exactly twelve times what I was doing in January of the year. And here is the cool thing - I met my goals for February! That means I had twice as many readers, twice as many subscriptions, and twice as much income as in the first month of the year.

Now I will be honest and tell you it is all still pretty small, but if I can keep this same growth going forward then by this time next year things will be going well. Will I be able to quit my job and live on a beach somewhere? No. But I will have a nice little bit of additional income and a whole lot more expertise and experience. Those last two things can translate into many more opportunities and outlets in the future.

So tell me, do you have goals? Are they written down and do you work on them daily. And on a personal level, how are you doing with them, and what can we do to help?