Nobody ever said the unconventional life was going to be an easy one—running a business from abroad, seeking new clients (and paying rent) in a recession, and trying to get top-of-the-line infrastructure set up in a developing country are difficult tasks that have me feeling like I’m fighting an uphill battle. Most likely, you other entrepreneurs and nomadic souls understand the struggles involved with living life on your own terms too.

Because I’ve been focused on getting my business on track, I’ve been a poor steward and haven’t added any value for you here in a while. I needed some motivation, so I’ve collected some of my favorite quotes here to check back and get my ass in gear when rough times have me frustrated or down. Hopefully you’ll find these inspiring and useful as well:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

—Mark Twain

“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”

—Stephen Covey

“You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

—Zig Ziglar

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

—Seneca

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”

—Napoleon Hill

“Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.”

—Tim Ferriss

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

—Henry Ford

“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.”

—Tony Robbins

“Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you ready or not, to put this plan into action.”

—Napoleon Hill

“A good plan vigorously executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

—George S. Patton

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

—Lao Tzu

“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”

—Mark Victor Hansen

“Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, with the result we do nothing. The way to get ahead is to start now. While many of us are waiting until conditions are ‘just right’ before we go ahead, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, traveled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don’t know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait.”

—The William Feather Magazine (thanks to Steve Pavlina for this gem)

“First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.”

—Dale Carnegie

“It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better, the credit belongs to the man of the arena who’s face is marred by dust, sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who knows the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid soles who have never known neither victory nor defeat”

—Theodore Roosevelt (props to Andrew at Personal Hack for finding this one)

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

—Winston Churchill

“Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

—Tim Ferriss (Don’t be one of those people!)

“Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.”

—Wayne Dyer

“Reality is negotiable.”

—Tim Ferriss

“All achievement, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea!”

—Napoleon Hill

“Today, I have the opportunity to change everything. My whole life hinges on today’s actions. If I do not act today, if I do not grab control of my fate today, my life will take a completely different trajectory. One path leads to greatness, and the other path leads to a life where I will look back on today as the day where I could have spoken up, today as the day where I could have reached out. I will look back realizing that today was the one chance I had to change everything. I will not let this moment pass me by. I will act decisively, today.”

—Sid Savara

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

—Ayn Rand

What are your favorite quotes? What inspires you when you’re busy, frustrated, or need a boost in motivation?

Feature photo by Diego Cupolo

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 22 Inspirational Quotes for Living the Rockstar Life

Hyped-up concepts like The Secret, Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Workweek, and Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” in recent years all really boil down to one simple teaching: You can either sit around and wait for cool shit to happen to you, or you can take a pro-active role in opening your life up to possibility. This is something that traces back through most of the major personal development thought leaders throughout the last century: it is a central principle in all of my Most-Important Books (MIBs), in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, in Napoleon Hill’s work in the 1920s, and probably waay before that.

Create your own luck and open yourself up to opportunities.

It’s the same reason that I am so passionate about helping people use the relatively-new power of the web to build blogs and brand themselves. This is the first time in history when we, as individuals, can easily compete with the big brands to build our reputation and authority, build businesses, and create global communities of like-minded people. I love showing people how to use blogs and social media to cultivate opportunities for themselves because they are what have empowered me to be so successful. But the web is not the only way to open up your life to great opportunities.

I subscribe to the maxim which says there is no such thing as luck, but that rather you create your own luck. And you do it by being as prepared as you can for opportunity when it arises. The wider you cast your net, the more likely you’ll be able to take advantage of those opportunities that present themselves in your life.

If you find yourself unfulfilled, it’s likely because something—your job, your relationship, your friends, the place you live—isn’t fully meeting your needs. That’s not to say your significant other or your friends aren’t great people. But you need to go out there and find fulfillment. Unfortunately, no one else is going to ensure your needs are met—we’ve all got to look out for ourselves first. If you’re lacking, if you’re unhappy or depressed, it ain’t easy and it ain’t fun, but you are responsible for going out and getting your needs met.

If we’re talking about a close relationship or a job, it’s always hard to give up the time and energy you’ve put into something you care so much about. But if it doesn’t completely meet your needs, you’ll have to risk the comfort and the years you put into something in exchange for the chance at becoming truly happy and fulfilled.

The willingness to risk the comfort of the familiar to find your true happiness is the path to living a remarkable life.

The key to living remarkably—living according to your own passions and desires—is overcoming many of the fears and beliefs that are socially programmed into us. To embark on this journey of complete fulfillment, you have to examine and question your assumptions. For example, ask yourself questions like these:

• Who says you can’t talk to people you don’t know in the bar/club?
• Who says you have to hang out with people in your age/race/income group?
• Who says you can’t leave a 7-year relationship if you’re unhappy with it?
• Who says living abroad is more dangerous or difficult than living in the town you grew up in?
• Who says you have to do what all the cool kids are doing (or follow a conventional career path/lifestyle)?

Many of us have beliefs like these ingrained in us and may not even realize it, but we allow our social conditioning to dictate how we live our lives. Ask yourself what evidence there is to actually back up these assumptions. Most of these beliefs and social “rules” are unfounded.

Anytime you see a majority of people behaving a certain way, ask yourself if it’s really necessary—if it really aligns with your personal beliefs and passions—before you jump on the bandwagon. Are you doing this because of peer pressure? (Yes, peer pressure still exists when you are 35 or 65!) Or are you avoiding doing something out of fear? Don’t let social rules dictate how you live your life.

Here are a few principles I’ve learned from making some huge changes myself, overhauling my life, and moving abroad:

1. If you feel pulled toward something, race towards it. A friend of mine was recently telling me how she feels stagnant living in our hometown and has been thinking a lot about what it would be like to live in Boston. She likes the city and has extended family nearby. My advice was to recognize that she’s attracted there and embrace it!
2. Big life changes are not as scary as they seem initially. Before I left for Thailand, I was scared shitless! Pulling up all your roots, packing up everything you own (or selling it all!), and putting yourself at the mercy of the unknown is never easy. But whether it’s a move, a breakup, or a career change, we frequently make things out to be much bigger in our heads than they turn out to be in reality.
3. Human beings adapt to new environments really fast. Whether you want to leave your cubicle to start a business of your own, establish new social circles, or travel the world, one thing I’ve learned is that you will get used to a new lifestyle, routine, or surroundings incredibly quickly. Extreme example: I adapted to being surrounded by riots, soldiers and gunfire and overcame any initial fear much quicker than I would have imagined.
4. Even if your goal doesn’t pan out as planned, you’ll still experience valuable personal growth. I told my friend who wants to move to Boston, even if she were to end up completely lonely (and what are the chances she won’t make any friends) and it’s not what she hoped for, taking action to make a huge life change that you’re compelled to make will force you to grow and develop in ways you didn’t anticipate. That’s the most fun part!

Hopefully these principles can help you in your own quest for happiness.

There always have been and always will be a small subset of the population who lead remarkable lives. They choose not to allow social conditioning to hold them back from doing big things. They examine their desires, their passions, and their needs and ask scary questions. They take action. The question is: will you choose to be one of them? Will you lead a remarkable life?

NEXT STEPS:

• Steve Pavlina has a really interesting article on getting your needs fulfilled.
• I highly recommend Jonathan Mead’s awesome Reclaim Your Dreams ebook on Illuminated Mind.
• Finally, stay tuned to Thrilling Heroics for more about overcoming fear and living the life you want!

Featured photo credit: TuTuWoN

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Live a Remarkable Life

I’ve put together a primer on my media and entertainment consumption as part of the Media Diet internet meme. It’s a big post, but I highly recommend each and every one of the useful links contained here, and if you take just five minutes to read through this, I’ve included a few little gems on how I handle information overload. Since it’s such a link-intensive article, I’ve set all the hyperlinks to automatically open in new windows for you.

Bob Glaza (One Reader At a Time) tagged me last week for the Media Diet meme, a discussion that’s been propagating across the web since last year about our media consumption habits, to share with others how we get our information. I tracked this particular thread as far back as James Gordon-Macintosh and a few others at Seventy Seven PR, but I know that Jeremiah Owyang was also talking about it months earlier.

Everyone’s talking about information overload these days, so I figured I’d use this as an opportunity to share both 1) some of my personal interests, but also 2) how I filter through the vast amount of knowledge and media that’s available to us these days through the blogosphere and all the mainstream entertainment and news channels. Being a blogger, I like to follow a tremendous amount of information in this “Age of Conversation.” But, I like what Bob says: “Why NOT bite off more than you can chew?”

photo credit: drspam

Readables

When I was at my desk job, I used to read a few more newspapers and magazines (like the WSJ, Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and BusinessWeek), but I pretty much entirely get my fix through the Internets these days! To be honest, I rarely watch the news or read the papers, let alone visit the sites of any mainstream media directly these days because there’s just too much information, and much of it I find too hyped (fearmonger much?) and unbalanced for my tastes. I do highly enjoy Wired.com, and I’ll pick up a copy of FastCompany now and then. But I concentrate mostly on niches that directly affect me, like the personal development and web design blogs, and I tend to hear all the most important headlines through friends, family, and social media anyway (Robert Scoble was covering the China quakes on Twitter before the USGS reported them).

I get a few Google Alerts sent directly to my email account for certain search terms, so that I get a daily summary and know immediately when someone on the web is talking about me, one of my sites, my business, or a couple of key interests of mine, for instance.

I use Google Reader almost daily to sift through nearly 70 blog subscriptions (and a few other RSS streams like freelancer job feeds). That means there are usually about 250-350 new articles in there daily. How do I keep up with all these? Well, firstly Google Reader makes it easy to organize your feeds into different folders, or categories, so I’ve got them organized by priority and into groups like “friends,” “business opportunities,” “blogging tips,” “web design,” and “personal development.” Some of the feeds I check every day, but others are marked for just occasional perusal when I’ve got the time. I generally browse through the titles in List View to dwindle the number down to just those that seem applicable or interesting to me (I probably read about 10-20% of the updates that come through my RSS reader).

Some of my most frequent reads are blogs like Problogger, Web Worker Daily, Life Beyond Code, Freelance Switch, Real Social Dynamics, Zen Habits, and blogs from the Brazen Careerist network. One big secret: probably 50% of the useful knowledge I share with my friends and blog readers comes from Lifehacker and Tim Ferris’ Experiments in Lifestyle Design Blog (from the author of The 4-Hour Workweek).

Aside from what’s in my feed reader, I find that the social web does a great job of “filtering” the most important/useful/sometimes completely silly news for me, so when I’ve got the time to wander, I frequent aggregators like PopUrls and Guy Kawasaki‘s Alltop network. I’ve been using PopUrls as my landing page for the last several weeks to keep my finger on the pulse of the web, because it is customizable to your tastes (by source or category), and I like to track the most popular articles, recommended articles, and the top hits on del.icio.us, Digg, and StumbleUpon each day. Additionally, the extremely illustrious, bright folks I follow on Twitter are also a renewable resource for awesome content!

If you want to follow some of my favorites, please checkout my Google Shared Items page, or my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I do read a little bit “offline” too! I try to read about a book per month, but these mostly consist of business or personal development books. A few of my favorites have been The 4-Hour Workweek, Vagabonding, The BrandYou50, Now Discover Your Strengths, and Never Eat Alone. A nice, warm book is good for travel, or when I feel like pulling my eyes away from the computer screen for a bit and laying in my hammock outside. Right now I’m reading Blogging Heroes, which has interviews with 30 top bloggers from around the world. Stay tuned for a list of top-recommended books from me and my mentors soon.

Viewables

I do have cable at home, but the only show I’ve watched religiously for the last four years has been to tune in to “Lost” when I visit my folks each week (it’s been slow to answer all our burning questions, but it has the best character development of anything I’ve ever seen on the tube). I use TV more for the very occasional break from work—since I work from home, it’s fun to completely disengage for an hour or two and enjoy some pure entertainment once in a while. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only news/politics I can tolerate these days—faux news with plenty of comedy and satire mixed in for good measure (and Stephen Colbert has the biggest stones of anyone on television!). Otherwise, I’ll watch some pointless drivel on E! or MTV for an escape when the opportunity presents itself.

For trends in technology, entertainment, and design, I’ve enjoyed the inspiring TEDTalks for a long time, which you can subscribe to as video podcasts through iTunes.

And I do enjoy the occasional movie! (Looking forward to seeing Indiana Jones today!)

Audibles

Ah this is key: I pretty much have some sound going at all times! I listen to a tremendous amount of music. I live and breath music! (I even have a sleep playlist!) But I hate the radio (ever notice how ALL the stations go to ads at the same time!?), I always listen to iTunes at home and CDs in the car. I have a huge MP3 library, where a few of my favorites are Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, and Kings of Convenience, but I also listen to a few great online radio stations that you can stream directly into your iTunes, like Soma FM‘s Groove Salad and Beat Blender, Ibiza Sonica, and Ibiza Global Radio.

For good business and personal growth information, I highly recommend several podcasts: Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, Escape from Cubicle Nation, iinnovate, and the FallingFruit.tv podcasts. Listening to podcasts on the iPod is a great way to leverage your time if you’ve got a long commute on the bus/train, or a plane trip somewhere, or if you’re just doing chores around the house.

When I was at this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, I was motivated to buy the first three albums I’ve bought in probably years: Dark Side of the Moon, Kraftwerk’s live Minimum-Maximum, and Portishead’s first CD in a decade, Third. All highly recommended (you can sample below with my fancy new Amazon widget).

Other Resources

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of my interests, and about how I filter through the static. That’s it for me, but here are a few recent posts from other great writers in the blogosphere that might give you a few tips on dealing with information overload and productivity in this high-bandwidth media world we live in.

• Chris Brogan, a huge voice in the blog community, shares his tips for processing information effectively and turning out awesome content in How I Do It
• Maki shares how to get through too much information in too little time on DoshDosh with Managing Information Flow: How Prioritization Will Improve Your Work and Learning Efficiency
• Leo does an Exclusive Interview with Stephen Covey on His Morning Routine, Blogs, Technology, GTD and The Secret at Zen Habits

I’m gonna tag Ryan Healy, Ronnie Nurss, Meg Roberts, Erik Folgate, Jamie Harrop, Susan Johnston, and Holly Hoffman, my fellow bloggers in the Gen-Y conversation, to participate in the Media Diet meme! Anyone else who’s got 2 cents to throw in can jump on board too!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Filtering Through the Static: My Media Consumption Habits

My favorite positive affirmation is that there is NOTHING you cannot DO, or BE, or HAVE! I like to repeat that to myself daily. But one must do some dedicated goal-setting, and a lot of goal-getting to get there!

This was supposed to be a New Year’s post, but unanticipated changes due to my travel schedule forced me to postpone writing it. That’s okay though, travel will teach you a few valuable lessons about embracing change and rolling with the punches. The nice thing about resolutions is that New Year’s Eve isn’t the only time you can make them!

In fact, you can set positive new resolutions for your life anytime you choose! New Years just gives us a great opportunity to reflect on our achievements in the past year and set some meaningful new goals for the year ahead. But you can do this anytime you choose—you can make yearly goals on your birthday, or on tax day, or you can set resolutions every six months, every quarter, or you can even set monthly goals! You get the picture…

It’s already three weeks into the New Year, why should I set resolutions now?

The advent of a new year simply serves as a good reminder to reflect on all the progress you’ve made over the last 12 months and take what you’ve learned, and build a roadmap for the coming year and beyond.

It’s actually better that there has been time for the hype of the New Year to pass by. A lot of people intentionally avoid setting new goals on January 1st because they see New Years “resolutions” as oh-so-cliche. Or perhaps you set a traditional resolution and already fell off the wagon. Revisiting what “resolutions” mean now might give you an opportunity to set more meaningful goals this year. So, stay with me here and embrace the change. Don’t think of this as a New Years post. Instead, we are going to focus on goal-setting for this year.

We’ve already seen how powerful it can be when you set goals for yourself. You won’t succeed at every goal, but review your personal development progress at the end of each year to see how much you do accomplish! Simply setting the goals for yourself will greatly increase the likelihood that you’ll get much closer to your dream lifestyle in all these areas of your life.

But I can never keep my resolutions anyways. Why should I care?

So, as you can already see from my experience getting this post out much later than I intended, embracing change means that you don’t always get to do things exactly when you planned. But that’s okay, just because the timing changes doesn’t mean you should throw away the whole plan! Just having made the plan in the first place makes you about sixty percent more likely to follow through on the action than if you hadn’t made plans and set a time in your head in the first place. So the timing has changed. So what? You can still follow through. That’s what goal-setting is! It’s setting a plan—not a commandment set in stone. Don’t give up on your goals if you miss your timeline.

Another thing about your goals is that they may change over time, or things may happen that prevent you from achieving them. Or you may simply not put in the effort to complete all of your goals by the end of the year. But what matters most is that you set them. The act of making meaningful, clearly-defined goals, and writing them down, will put you ahead of 95% of people out there, and it will certainly point you much closer in the right direction toward attaining the lifestyle that you desire in the year ahead. I guarantee that if you set ten goals for yourself in 2008, simply the act of setting goals for yourself will put you MUCH closer to achieving your dreams! As Abraham Lincoln said, “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” Get clear on what you want to accomplish in the next year, and focus your energy towards those ends, and you’ll likely achieve many of your goals.

Okay, okay. So how do you actually do this?

Now it seems to be a popular thing to try to create 100 life goals or 100 goals for the new year. (Just do a Google search for “100 goals” and you’ll see how many communities there are out there talking about the number 100!) Maybe it’s just that the number ‘one-hundred’ has so much appeal… There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go about it that way I suppose, but I think that’s going about it backwards. You’ve already started out by adding another goal to the top of your pile of things to do: To create 100 goals! But does having any particular number of goals really objectively have any value to you? No. In fact, the number is fairly meaningless, so don’t start out with any particular number to reach.

Instead, try starting with the bigger picture in mind. As Stephen Covey said in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” To do this, we will examine what roles we play, and what we want those areas of our life to look like in a year from now.

Brainstorm your personal Roles & Areas of Focus

The necessary first step is to brainstorm your life roles, and other important personal areas of focus. Some goal-setting systems will tell you what categories to set goals for, but I believe you will come up with much more meaningful “categories” if you reflect personally about what roles you play and what areas of focus are most important to you. This is the system that Tony Robbins uses in his Personal Power seminars, and many other professional coaches (like my friend Tim Walther) use successfully in goal-setting workshops with thousands of people every year.

Think about your work, your family, your hobbies… What roles do you play? For example, when I brainstormed, my roles included freelance web designer, business owner, professional networker, peer mentor, writer, traveler, and artist. But perhaps you are a mother, a CEO, an accountant, rock climber, church member, or amateur filmmaker. The roles that we play are different and unique for each individual. But what “hats” do you wear? What roles are important to you that you want to improve upon in the next year?

Roles tend to sound like titles or jobs, even if you don’t get paid for them! They are how you relate to other people. But besides your roles, what other areas of focus are important to you personally? For most people this will include things like personal finances, health and recreation, social life, and so on. But maybe your areas of focus include nutrition, or spirituality, or professional development and training…

Take some time to brainstorm and reflect on what roles and areas of focus are most important in your life, and once you have them all written down on a piece of paper, imagine one-by-one what each of those areas of your life could “look like” in a year. This is called visualization, and it’s an important tool in attaining your desires. Visualize how much progress you could make towards positive relationships with your family. Or how much you could improve upon your strengths at work. Imagine yourself in a new profession, being paid to do something you love. Or even picture yourself on vacation to some beautiful exotic location! But don’t imagine these things passively—visualize yourself participating in making those changes…in experiencing those improvements and accomplishments. Write down a sentence or short paragraph next to each role and each area of focus about what that “picture” looks like.

Now set some goals!

Now that you have your big picture and you’ve thought about where you’re going with each of your personal roles, you finally have some direction. Visualizing what each of those areas of your life could look like one year from now should give you vivid images of what you want to DO, BE, and HAVE. So the final piece of the puzzle in making meaningful resolutions this year is to break those visualizations down into smaller steps you need to take to get there. What are the next actions that will get you closer to your desired outcomes? If you want to buy a new laptop, how much money should you set aside each month? If you want rock-hard abs, how many crunches are you going to do each day?

The best way to set goals that are longer-term than your weekly To Do list items is to start practicing SMART goals. SMART, in this case, is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. You can review these questions in your head as you set goals, or you may want to write them out for each major goal you set.

Specific — Is it something concrete, that you’ll know when you’ve completed it? This is one big reason why “resolutions” fail. People often set ambiguous goals that are too broad to be actionable or too unclear to know when you’ve fulfilled the requirements. For instance, a popular New Years’ resolution is “to get in shape.” But how are you going to achieve that? That is only a very murky version of the visualization that we’ve already practiced above. Now make it specific!

Measurable — How will you measure your progress at the end of the year, or how will you know when you’ve achieved your objective? Think about what specific criteria you’ll have to fulfill to reach the specific outcome you want. And a good way of measuring may be to keep a notebook of your progress toward the goal, or involving your friends in keeping you on track.

Attainable — Is it realistic and possible for you to achieve this in the year ahead, or are you reaching too far? Do you have too much on your plate already? Set goals that will make you stretch, and learn, and grow. But don’t set unrealistic, far-fetched goals that will only discourage you when you don’t meet them.

Relevant — This is actually my favorite of these questions to ask when you’re doing these mental exercises, and it is the first one that I ask because it is the best filter because I think it is the most important. Put simply, is the goal important? Is it really going to get you closer to your dreams, and is it really worth investing your energy in? Or should you focus on other, more important goals?

Time-Bound — When will you complete this goal? Specifically? By October? In Q1? On your birthday? Remember what I said about being flexible with changes in timing toward the beginning of this post, but attaching a time to your goals makes them immediate and important. Remind yourself regularly that you have a goal to meet. When do you plan to start, and what is your target date for completion?

You may come up with a hundred goals for 2008, or you may come up with just two or three really important goals for the year. I go through my list and eliminate all the non-SMART goals, and I try to focus on the ‘attainability’ aspect of my goals and think about how much I can realistically accomplish in just one year, so I have about 3-4 top concrete goals for each of my 10 roles/areas of focus.

Examples of My Personal and Professional Development Goals for the New Year

In my own brainstorming, I found that my most important Roles included Web Designer/Consultant, Entrepreneur, Blogger, Peer Mentor, Traveler, and Artist. And other Areas of Focus for me included things like Social & Relationship-oriented goals, Health & Recreation, and Financial goals. After I settled on these nine top areas of importance for my life, I visualized how I’d ideally like to see each of those realms in a year from now… What sort of progress would I like to make? What things would I like to learn? How successful can I be in a year? And I not only asked these questions, but I tried to actually put myself in that future reality—what will it feel like? How will I get there? Is it truly important?

So, once I had the broader picture of where I’d like to be in a year (yet still very specific mental images), I worked backwards to think what smaller steps I’ll need to accomplish to get to that point. I tried to frame each of my goals into the three areas of things I want to BE, DO, or HAVE, and I tried to frame them in the affirmative, to reinforce to my own brain that I will accomplish these things this year! I also tried to phrase my goals positively, focusing on what I should do to get there, not what I want to do less of. Here are the 24 major goals I’ve set for myself this year, broken down by my Roles and Areas of Focus:

I. My goals as a Web Designer & Consultant

• I WILL HAVE a dedicated portfolio site for my web development work.
• I WILL HAVE a new Apple desktop computer.
• I WILL EARN $60K as a freelancer this year.

II. My goals as an Entrepreneur

• I WILL BE the owner of my own web consulting business.
• I WILL HAVE multiple streams of residual income (through products, training materials, and partnerships).

III. My goals as a Blogger

• I WILL WRITE at least one high-value article each week for Thrilling Heroics (52+).
• I WILL REDESIGN ThrillingHeroics.com.
• I WILL DO one interview each month for Thrilling Heroics.
• I WILL COMMENT on other relevant blogs for one hour each week.

IV. Career Development and goals as a Peer Mentor

• I WILL CREATE a dedicated Mastermind group website with forums to enable remote discussion of personal & professional development.
• I WILL COMMUNICATE with Mastermind members monthly to follow up on their goal-setting and career planning.
• I WILL READ one personal development book each month.

V. My goals as a Traveler

• I WILL COMMUNICATE with international friends once each quarter.
• I WILL PARTICIPATE in online traveler communities like The Thorn Tree Forums and The Couch Surfing Project.
• I WILL LIVE in Thailand for 3+ months.

VI. My goals as an Artist

• I WILL SELL my photography professionally via an online gallery or stock photography community.

VII. My Social and Relationship-related goals

• I WILL CONTACT old friends on their birthdays.
• I WILL ATTEND Burning Man.

VIII. My Health and Recreational goals

• I WILL DO 30+ pushups each day.
• I WILL DO 3 half-hour cardio workouts per week.
• I WILL HAVE a great road bike.

IX. My Financial goals

• I WILL ELIMINATE any credit card balances.
• I WILL HAVE a $2000 emergency fund.
• I WILL HAVE my own self-employed medical/dental/vision insurance.

Remember, the more specific you get, the more likely you are to actually achieve your goals! I went through all of my goals to see if they were each Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely, and if they weren’t, I’d throw them out. I won’t include each step for ALL of my 24 goals here because I don’t want to bore you! But, I’ll demonstrate with my first goal how I answered these questions in my head:

GOAL: I WILL HAVE a dedicated portfolio site for my web development work

1. Specific: I will create an online portfolio with client testimonials, service & product offerings, and business contact information.
2. Measurable: I’ll know this goal is completed when I have a freelance site on its own unique URL that directs potential clients properly to my pipeline.
3. Attainable: I have built numerous websites in the past, so I will easily be able to build myself a business site (it doesn’t have to start out perfect!)
4. Relevant: This is important in order to establish an online home for my business and build instant credibility with potential clients.
5. Timely: I will complete this project before the end of February, 2008.

Now that you’ve seen my own detailed example of brainstorming Roles & Areas of Focus, visualizing outcomes, and SMART goal-setting for 2008, what are your personal resolutions for the new year? What goals are important for you to achieve this year? If you haven’t already spent time thinking about meaningful resolutions for the year, brainstorm on this and let me know what you think of my process in the comments.

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Please hit that comment section below and share your thoughts… Good luck goal-setting!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Set Meaningful Personal & Professional Development Goals and Make Progress Towards Your Ideal Life