Postcards From Myself

Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance he could see a person going back and forth between the surf’s edge and and the beach. Back and forth this person went. As the man approached he could see that there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.

The man was stuck by the the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.

As he came up to the person he said, “You must be crazy. There are thousands of miles of beach covered with starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The person looked at the man. He then stooped down and pick up one more starfish and threw it back into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said, “It sure made a difference to that one!”

Have you ever thought about a personal mission statement? Recently I have been working on a mission statement for my up and coming business, and to tell you the truth I have been having a hard time with it. But, while at the dentist this morning, and yes under the influence of gas and Novocaine, I realized why. I am having a problem coming up with a professional missions statement because I don’t have a personal one.

This is of real importance since, seeing as this is my business and a sole proprietorship, the business’s mission statement should closely mirror my own. If I can’t communicate what I personally am trying to achieve and what is important to me, then how am I ever going to be able to transfer those values to a business? I must know where I am planning on going before I can ask anyone to share that path.

I also started thinking about the ever growing concentric circles of missions statements for self, family, community, business, greater community, etc… If you can start to define yourself it makes everything from choosing a presidential candidate to selecting a vacation spot much easier. I didn’t say simple, just easier!

So I am going to start working on my personal mission statement, and when I am satisfied for the time being I will post it here. I won’t say “finished”, because a statement like this should be reevaluated and evolve over time. As my life and those around me change, my beliefs and mission will change as well.

I would love to hear what you think about this. Do you have a mission statement for your life? Your blog? Or your personal business? Why or why not? Would you care to share?

And, if you care to work on your own, here are a few resources:

• FranklinCovey Mission Statement Builder
• Lifehack post on building a personal mission statement
• A GTD approach to personal mission statements
• Dumb Little Man’s excellent post on the subject

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?

I have been off work for the holiday’s for the past ten days. Tomorrow I have to get up on what will be the coldest day of this winter so far and drag myself to the office. Pure and simple, I don’t wanna go. I like the people at my office, well most of them anyway, and my job is not a bad one on the scale of things, but would much rather be doing my writing, and blogging, and web work that do what I have to do.

Sad thing is though, I am in that trap that most of us create for ourselves. It is a trap of our own success. You work for years to do well at your job, become a valued member of the team, and to climb your way up the salary ladder. The problem comes when you realize that you would rather be on a different ladder. It is very hard to get from this spot to that spot while you are juggling balls high up in the air.

But, I am working on it. Between this a few other blogs, my British car site, and a two commercial sites, I would hope that I can make a go of it some time later this year. At the very least it gives me something to occupy my not-so-free-time and some very valuable experience with the “new marketplace”, social networking, and Internet advertising.

So basically that, and of course the normal fitness and weight-loss, is my New Year’s resolve. What is yours? What is your plan for the coming 2008? And, just as importantly, what drives you towards that goal?