Why You Should Set Goals

If you're a person like me, you like to procrastinate every now and then. I'm not one of those anally retentive type-A personalities who feel the need to constantly occupy their time with something to do. Maybe it's because I'm very independent minded, but I can entertain myself and do "nothing" all day if I wanted to.

But if you live in the real world, you'll know that this doesn't fly. It would be very easy to just spend the day surfing the net, or watching TV, or having illusions of grandier. I know this from experience. One of the best ways to deal with this, is to write out your goals.

It's one thing to have goals floating around in your head like popcorn, it's another to write them out, have them stare back at you everyday like an un-wavering reflection in the mirror. It's preferable to do this on paper, like a stick-it note because of how it stands out at you, but electronically could work too. When you see these goals, make it a routine to check on them everyday.

For example, at the start of the day write out your goals, rank them in order of importance, and start working. When you're done that particular goal for the day (e.g. "Call Mr. Smith about the appointment by noon" or "Finish working on the second page of the document") then you can cross it off.

It's possible you might not finish everything you wanted to. That's fine, just learn from it. Was it too many goals crammed into one day? Or should you put in more time tomorrow? You get the idea.

The great thing about this is accountability. It's very objective on whether or not you are being productive. It won't let you day dream or procrastinate and waste valuable time. If you make listing out your daily goals a routine, this will be very effecient for your time. You can put weekly, monthly, seasonal goals on another piece of paper too to supplement this.

The Power of Ideas - Nintendo

Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, the founder of Nintendo, one of the most profitable companies in the world defines an idea as the following: "something which solves multiple issues at once". His entire business is based on ideas. Using quick-fix schemes to focus in on one issue at a time usually yields side-effects and even more problems that weren't there before. An idea should fix multiple things at once. Miyamoto's ideology is that everything he comes up with should fit this criteria for an "idea".

There is always a trade-off, whether it's one person or a company, there is only a limited amount of resources of time or money that one can give. When everybody does the same thing, there is no competition. In order to succeed, you must have these ideas, which are solutions bringing together different problems that can be solved at once. This is what produces uniqueness, and gives value.

I would say that most psychological disorders stem from lack of confidence. When you have depression, or anger management issues, or avoidant personality disorder, or panic attacks, it comes from a place of non-faith in oneself.

I have frequented different types of messageboards or forums with mental health, and the one thing I realized, struggling myself at times, was that most of these problems are not going to be fixed by attacking it individually. When a person solves other aspects of their life, such as being grounded, or learning about themselves in a meaningful way, or enjoying a new perspective on what life has to offer, then everything else will fall into place.

Some of My Role Models

There are lots of different types of heroes. People in our family who we admire, people we've met in our day-to-day life who we respect in some certain way; but I'm not talking about them necessarily. I'm talking about people who truly motivate you because they are living the dream--your dream. They don't have to be people who are in your field of interest, but people who you identify with and in turn, encourage you to work hard for your goals.

I feel it is important that people have heroes--not to put them on pedastols, but to have them as guides on your journey in life. Briefly, some of my heroes include Walt Disney (very successful entrepreneur in animation, themepark design, and the entertainment industry), Lance Armstrong (cancer survivor and winner of a record 7 Tour De France's), and 17 year old girl who is an internet millionaire who does what she loves.

There are certainly more, and I will talk more about all my heroes as this blog progresses.

Main Goals In My Life

My first goal is financial freedom. To be able to be free of all the non-sense of doing monotamous office work and just be able to enjoy life to the fullest would be wonderful. I would like to live without any fear of paychecks, listening to what an over-controlling supervisor wants me to do, and all that other B.S. A person's life should be about doing something that they love, and having the flexibility to go on vacations or doing a leisurely activity without rigid rules about when and how long that can be achieved.

The second goal, less important at the moment, is to be more social. I have battled and battled with social anxiety (a topic which I'm sure to cover a lot more on later) and finally feel like I have won. The only thing is that I still would like to make more friends and become a social butterfly.

Blogs vs. CMS

In a lot beginners for websites, there seems to be a question that many people have of whether to start a blog or a content-management system. I personally don't like CMS systems because they require you to know quite a bit of html and css if you want it to look a certain way, although you can pay to get people to professionally do them for you. I guess CMS typically have a higher potential for growth because people generally would rather visit a "normal" website as opposed to a blog.

That being said, I find it a lot easier to post on blogs. It's like writing in a diary, quick, and easy. With CMS's you have to constantly fiddle around with some pretty annoying things. You will literally waste dozens and dozens of hours if you do not know what you are doing, and I'm all about efficiency. I've learned the hard way in the past that time efficiency is probably one of the most important things you'll ever need.

CMS's like Joomla, Drupal, Mambo are all good if you have a group of people submitting articles. Otherwise, I would say blogging is better because of the user-friendly interface that makes publishing a sinch, which in turn makes it much more likely you'll be spending the time writing as opposed to figuring out the miriads of things that would occupy your time inefficiently. If I really wanted a true website, I'd probably try to find someone to design it for me, instead of spending all that time pulling my hair out with a CMS.

Comparing Wordpress to Blogger, I really give the advantage to Blogger/Blogspot when it comes to user interface. They make the site and menu very easy to use and clean to look at which makes everything a lot more inviting. Wordpress is more powerful, but I don't really need much more than a fast and easy blogging system. Perhaps later on, when I, for some reason, have some need to use a more sophisticated product then I will use it.

Microsoft Joining Facebook = Megatron

So in the news is that Microsoft wants to buy 5% of Facebook. 5% might not seem like much to you, until you take into account that Microsoft has valued Facebook at a net book value of $10 billion. Yes, that's not a typo. Five percent of that would be an astonishing $500 million.

Is it worth it? I guess it is. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of Facebook, I have to admit it has a lot of people on there who go on atleast once a week, and even more for the college crowd. People who never even got into social communities are even logging into Facebook just so they can tell people they have an account.

The advantage of these online communities is that once a person registers, they are more likely to stay than compared to other websites where users feel little sense of commitment to them. For advertising purposes, Facebook could probably make billions.

I still find that amount to be ridiculously high. Facebook turned down a $1 billion buy-out from Yahoo last year. This happened right after Google purchased Youtube for $1.6 billion.

The problem with Facebook is that I think it will always target a very young crowd. People will not grow old with it. Teens and young adults like to occupy their time chatting back and forth, but I find that older people are too busy with their lives and raising kids and getting their mortgages paid that it becomes to cumbersome to log on to see what your friends are doing this weekend.

Personally, if I was Bill Gates (ha!) I would use his billions of dollars to try to beat Facebook at their own game. All you'd have to do is start a similar community and attach it with Hotmail or MSN. He would certainly have enough capital, but I get the sense that in his older years, he's less competitive, willing to give away much of his money to 3rd world countries. I guess when you can buy everything and have that much power, you start to reflect on how you can give it all back to the under-priveledged. Kudos for that.

My First Post

Hi, I really like this platform. A lot of people recommended wordpress over blogger, but this seems as good as anything. It's free, clean looking, very user friendly (anyone without any computer skills can use this), and fast to set up. I hope to use this blog to not only inform people of what my thoughts are, but used to keep track of my own progress for myself in the many goals that I am sure to have...