Take Action and Achieve Your Goals Part 1

OK, so you’ve been working your side hustle for a while, and you’re thinking

“how can I make a living from this” or at least “how can I make Starbucks money from this?”

The good news is earning a sustainable income from your writing is totally within the realm of possibilities.

It just takes work.

And determination.

And a lot of other things.

What you don’t want to do is go after your dream willy-nilly or you’ll end up with frustration, not results.

You want to be strategic and focused. That calls for a plan. A business plan.

I know you’ve heard the cliché, “Failing to plan, is planning to fail,” and there’s a reason you’ve heard it. Because as trite as it might seem, it’s true.

The business plan is simply a series of steps regarding how you’re going to achieve your dreams. Your plan tells you how you’re going to reach your goals and keeps you on track to them, which is much better than having a nebulous idea of where you are and where you want to be.

You also need to measure results or the lack thereof, and without goals and a plan you can’t accurately do that.

The first step of writing your business plan is to set goals. What is it you really want to accomplish here?

I’m a firm believer in writing down your goals to make them a reality. I think this step is very important. You may have heard of the Harvard Business School story about writing down goals:

“A study conducted with students in the 1979 Harvard MBA program stated that in that year, the students were asked, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?”

Only three percent of the graduates had written goals and plans; 13 percent had goals, but they were not in writing, and a whopping 84 percent had no specific goals at all.”

Ten years later, the members of the class were interviewed again, and the findings, while somewhat predictable, were nonetheless astonishing. The 13 percent of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all. And what about the three percent who had clear, written goals? They were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97 percent put together.”

The moral of the story is it’s not just enough to dream it, but you MUST write it down, imagine it, and believe it can happen, for a better chance of it actually happening. I’m not trying to get all new-agey on you but the mind is a powerful thing, and if you don’t focus your mind on the goal by envisioning your dream as a reality it will have a less likely chance of happening. If you think I’m crazy, then read The Secret or The Law of Attraction. Being positive and focused gets you closer to your dreams.

This is the 1st of a 3 part series on writing your business plan. Between now and next week I want you to write down your goals, using this worksheet, then next week we will talk about putting them in a plan.

Need more direction? I can help. Read more to find out how.

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