My 2009 New Year Resolutions

Unlike last year, that I set my goals for 2008 at mid January, this time, I want to start the year right and I want to write them right on the first day of the year. Also this time, I’ll try to be as specific as possible and I’ll set something up that I can honestly commit my effort to on making them happen. If you check what I wrote last year, in reality, my goals were just derived from events that I already had a certain degree of certainty they were going to occur so not so much real effort involved on them from my part.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was visiting my parents, I had the chance to read a chapter of a book written by Napoleon Hill entitled “Master Key to Riches”. It is really an old book that I read while I was around 12 years old, and the chapter I read was about “Clarity of Purpose”. Basically the book describes examples of how clarity of purpose or “a clear goal”, set the path for success for several people, and I do actually agree with such theory as I’ve seen it happen countless of times in real life situations, so that chapter I read, encourage me to be more specific and more serious about them.

So without further due, here are the goals that I’ll be setting up for 2009:

1) Start, develop and run a new online business through an Authority Blog

2) Work hard to keep my job this year (very critical due to recession)

3) Post everyday on my personal blog

4) Produce one video per month on my personal blog

5) Buy and read 1 ebook per month and post a summary of it in my personal blog

6) Manage to end the year with zero credit card debt

All the goals are quite simple to follow except No. 1 which is building a new online business via an authority blog. This goal is so critical and so complex that tomorrow I’ll post a very lengthy post explaining the details of it.

The reason I want to post the details of the plan for the online business, is to sort of setup a system that I can follow the rest of the year without distracting my attention and efforts about the how to of doing things. I know this by personal experience, as I always get distracted with something and lose focus and I believe that the best way to overcome this problem is to have a plan beforehand. This has proven to be very helpful at work, where there is already a system of the things I have to do and when, so I focus my efforts in doing the tasks the best I can.

Someone might question, why if I like my job, I’m looking to start an online business, and the reason is that as much as I love working for my current employer, nobody guarantees that I’m going to keep my job forever. No matter how hard I work, there are countless of factors outside my control and the control of my bosses that always leave a degree of risk out there. I already have some experience on this as in January of 2008 I lost my job due to a merger, but who knows, this year recession might last longer than expected or something else might happen in the Industry and last thing I want is to repeat the same process of seeking a job again.

I just need to make sure I meet two conditions: one is that my day-to-day job has top priority during office hours and the second, is that I don’t have to compromise quality time dedicated to my family, as any failure on any of these to aspects, could hurt the business sooner or later.

I think this time I did a better job laying out a plan for the rest of the year, so let’s see how I end the year. Good luck to everyone on this year

PD: I found the image on blog: “Ask Melvin Ng” and “Publishers Weekly“