When it comes to goals, I don’t set them. I know folks who set concrete goals (SMART!) and that works very well for them.
Personally, I like to set directional “sign posts.” These are things I hope to accomplish sometime in the next few years. They’re not necessarily goals, in the traditional sense (they fail the T in SMART), and they can move as I see fit. The way I think of them in my head is that “I want to go in this direction at a relatively quick speed.”
When I read this article by Darius Foroux, I was struck how I basically create his version of a 5-year plan, except I don’t think of it as a five year plan. I also don’t focus on the sign posts themselves and focus more on my output towards that sign post:
The Life Plan: How To Plan Your Days, Months, and Years [Darius Foroux] – “We have so many opportunities and shiny things that grab our attention that we’re likely to get paralyzed by indecision. So many of us just wander around without a clear purpose. With planning, you can avoid that type of time-wasting and aimlessness.”
Inside the Surprisingly Big Business of Spotify’s Secretive White-Noise Spammers [OneZero] – “Primarily through a shell label called Peak Records, Ameritz fuels hundreds of generically named Spotify artist pages, such as White Noise Baby Sleep and Relaxing Music Therapy, with literal static. There appears to be a real appetite on the platform for music to play while you fall asleep, with some of these artist pages reaching hundreds of thousands to millions of streams every day, according to data viewed by OneZero via Spotify for Artists. With Spotify paying around a third of a penny per stream, revenue from few of these top accounts can be comfortably estimated at upwards of $1 million per year, each.” Only a matter of time before Spotify cracks down and removes these – not sure why these people are agreed to get interviewed though!
10 Best Money Tips for 2021 From the Experts [Smart Money Mamas] – “When it comes to running a profitable business, most people think that if you make more things, you make more money. Not so. The million dollar business owners do one thing really well.” (that tip comes from Dana Malstaff of Boss-Mom and I love it.
Incidentally, “directionally correct” refers to a business consultant term that means “let’s not quibble over the details, this is roughly correct.”