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It’s really easy and fun to post goals in a blog and just brag about all the things we want to accomplish during the year, but when we are talking about making a self-assessment of our lives, towards year-end, that’s a different and difficult thing, but at the same time, it’s a very useful excercise as it helps us to put things in perspective and help us be more realistic about things we want to get done on the next year.

So here are the goals I set myself on January 1st, 2009, along with the results achieved:

Self-assessment of my performance

Now let me do some comments about these goals and the results I got.

Looking backwards, and to be honest, some of these “goals” are not clear enough and reflect a lack of clear vision of what I wanted to achieve during the year 2009. Some of these goals are more wishes than goals and such a lack of good visibility caused the results that I achieved. I guess that goals need to be driven by a vision of “who I want to become” rather than “things I want to do”. Now that I’m one year older, I realize that we achieve things based on what we become, first with our mindset and then with our actions, so it was obvious that back then, I didn’t have that cler in my mind.

Goal No. 2 “Work hard to keep my job this year”, was not a goal, it was more a wish, that I wrote based on the context I was living back then. Let’s not forget that at the time I wrote my goals for the year, we were in the middle of a recession, and I had serious concerns of losing my job, more if we consider that in year 2008, I had lost my job and it wasn’t easy to get another one. At the end, “work hard” is something I have to do anyway, and sometimes, depending of external circumstances, working hard in a job is not enough to keep it.

Goals No. 4 and No. 5, “Post everyday on my personal blog” and “Produce one video per month on my personal blog”, as I see it one year after, in reality creates a conflict with Goal No. 1 which was “Start, develop and run a new online business through an Authority Blog”.  Reason for conflict, is due to the fact that writing on a blog on a daily basis requires a lot of time and effort, which I could prove myself for the first 4 or 5 months of the year, where I devoted all my efforts to write a blog post everyday on my personal blog. In order to write a good blog post, we need to dedicate time to researching the topics of what to write about, and then spend some good time and effort writing the blog itself.

Towards the end of the year, I started to track the time I spend working for my day-job, and the time I have available for anything else, and I can tell you that if I can get three hours outside of my day-job, to do something else, like blogging or working on an online business, then that is a great day.

So, I guess I shouldn’t have tied myself to these goals in the first place, I should’ve spend all my energy into building an online business instead, and just write on my personal blog, when time permits, more as a hobby than to stick to a fixed schedule.

About Goal No. 6 “Manage to end the year with zero credit card Debt”, although I met this goal,  I must admit that I met it because I was benefited with a better job towards the middle of the year, and not because I was careful enough with my expenses. As you know,  Credit Card expenses it’s something that if we don’t track it on a daily basis, we run the risk of of losing control over them.

So the way I wrote this goal in January 2009, again, it was more a wish than a true goal, as I didn’t have a clear plan. But since I’m now tracking my credit card expenses on a daily basis, now I’m in a better position for year 2010. I guess that this goal must be reworded as “Don’t spend more than what I earn, and always pay total balance at month-end”

Now it’s time to do a quick evaluation of my first goal which was “Start, develop and run a new online business through an Authority Blog”. This is something I’ve been working all year, but I admit that when I wrote the goal, I didn’t have a clear vision how to do it.

Towards February and March of 2009, I discovered “Niche Profit Classroom”, which is the best online training I’ve ever got about how to run an online business, they gave me a clear visibility of a success path I could easily follow and that I’ve been following since then. But also, I discovered John Jonas and how he built his online business hiring Filipino workers. So I got very excited about having people working for me and I hired three Filipino workers towards April or May of 2009, and I spent 2 or three months training them, with the hope that they could run the business for me. At the end, working with these guys turned out to be a bad experience and a waste of time and money. Reason of failure is that I can’t pretend someone else would run a business for me if I don’t have a running business already. I let these guys go in October 2009. I’m not saying that Filipino workers are bad, it’s just that I wasn’t prepared to work with them. I need to walk first before running.

So in October 2009, I started to work in one niche website (finally!), based on the methodology of “Niche Profit Classroom”. I built the website, the ebook, the email autoresponder, sales letter etc. All I need now is traffic, so I’m currently working on that. The only thing I need to work on, is to work on a plan, so I can get at least three hours of dedicated work to my online business. With the workload I have in my day-job, it’s very difficult to achieve, but definitely something I have to do. I’ll figure out a plan in the next couple of days when I write my resolutions for year 2010.

Final Words

Although I didn’t meet all my goals, it’s obvious that my “goals” were not clear so, lesson learned is that I need to be more specific, and more focused in what I want to achieve, but more importantly, I need to define who I want to be, so what I want to achieve is aligned with that vision. Although I didn’t read all the books I wanted to red, the few I read this year, gave me useful information, that I hope can help me achieve my goals in 2010.