Setting Goals for the New Year

This is a time when you’re probably reflecting back on the past year and forming your intentions for the coming year. Here are some articles to help you get into the right mindset for setting fresh and achievable goals for the New Year:

• How to Set Goals You Will Actually Achieve - Why you should abandon the idea of S.M.A.R.T. goals
• Do Your Goals Conflict With Your Personality? - How can you tell if you’re setting goals that make sense for YOU?
• How to Order - Avoid the trap of setting fluffy goals that you’ll never achieve
• How to Achieve Stretch Goals - Tackle those really big desires intelligently
• Broadcast Your Desires - Attract strong social support for your goals
• Goals Into Habits - Break larger goals into simple daily actions

Remember that all of my online articles (over 1200 of them), podcasts, YouTube videos, and social media updates are uncopyrighted. You’re free to share them, republish them, translate them, and even turn them into products and sell them if you wish.

Trello #

For help keeping track of your goals and projects and breaking them down into action steps, I recommend that you check out Trello. It’s a free online service that I’ve been using lately to manage a group project as well as some personal projects. This 6-minute video will give you a basic overview of how it works. I’ve only used it for about a week, and so far I’m impressed. It’s very intuitive and flexible, so you can start using it productively with a few minutes. And it’s free. They have a paid version ($5 per month), but I think the free version is more than adequate for most people.

So check it out if you’re looking for something along these lines, and if you come up with some creative ideas for using it, please let me know what you’ve done with it.

I have to give a big thumbs up to Fog Creek Software for including a color blind friendly mode in Trello, which adds stripes to some of the color labels. As a color blind person, I really appreciate this attention to accessibility. Now I don’t have to avoid using blue and purple together. Thanks a bunch for including that, Fog Creek. I wish more software developers would include such a simple feature.

How Two Brothers Out-Competed the Experts of Their Day #

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Wright brothers, who are credited with inventing the airplane. But do you know the story of how they succeeded?

In the early 1900s, there was lots of competition to develop an airplane that could take off and stay airborne for more than a few seconds. The Wright brothers’ competitors were more educated, more experienced with design and technology, and better funded. The brothers were outsiders who owned a bicycle shop. No one at the time considered them to be serious contenders in the field of aviation, except perhaps the brothers themselves.

The Wright brothers succeeded by leveraging their experience in another field. As part of their bicycle business, they’d made many iterative improvements to the bicycles of their day. Their approach was highly experimental. They’d come up with an idea to improve a bike, test it cheaply, and see if it worked. If the idea improved the experience of riding the bike, they kept it and further refined it. If the idea failed, they dropped it and tried something else.

Even though they didn’t know much about airplane design, the brothers understood the process of trial and error experimentation. So whereas their competitors were investing in expensive and complex designs and iterating infrequently, the Wright brothers did the opposite. They had to keep costs down because they had little money to invest, so they made cheap prototypes and tested new ideas frequently. They kept tweaking their designs and retesting. For their test flights, they used an area with high winds and soft sand dunes, so they could test their designs without killing themselves.

Interestingly, the brothers also applied this approach to designing how their planes would be piloted. The competition was trying to make their planes fly as straight as possible, so the pilot didn’t have as much control. But the Wrights, once again, did the opposite. They gave the pilot much more control with a 3-axis design, making it easier for the pilot to adjust the plane’s trajectory while it was in the air. And that made a huge difference. While the competition was basing their plane designs around the stability of a boat moving through water, the brothers modeled their designs around a bicycle that requires a skilled rider to keep it in balance.

By transplanting these success patterns from bicycle design to airplane design, the Wright brothers not only achieved a major coup in out-competing the experts, but they also transformed an industry’s thinking. To this day if you ride a bicycle or fly on a plane, you’re enjoying some of the benefits of the Wright brothers’ test-and-iterate-frequently approach to design.

How Can You Compete? #

How can you compete with the entrenched experts in your field? Perhaps they have more education, more expertise, more money, and a huge staff to leverage. Ahhh… but they may also be stuck in the old patterns of thinking that got them there. And therein lies your golden opportunity.

Entrenched experts have a tendency to stick with what has worked for them in the past. If it works, they keep doing it. They’re often slow to experiment and to try new things because experimenting as an expert entails risk. So one of your leverage points is to be more experimental. Make small bets on simple ideas. Test and iterate frequently. Figure out what works and what doesn’t work by trial and error. If you’re just starting out in a new field, take advantage of the fact that you don’t have much to lose.

If I were starting over today and wanted to break into the personal development field, would I still get into blogging? The answer is no, I seriously doubt that I would. Blogging is a much more mature field now than when I first started in 2004. At the time I started, there were hardly any personal development blogs to speak of. Mine seemed to be one of the first; it was fairly unique at the time. The entrenched competition in the personal growth field mainly relied on traditional book publishing and public speaking to build their platforms. Some relied on radio shows or TV. Others use direct mail marketing. They didn’t understand blogging or see its potential. They were late to the game, and their lateness created major opportunities for people like me to quickly build a large following.

Blogging, as opposed to book publishing, has the advantage of rapid iteration. I’ve written more than 1200 articles so far, which has given me many cycles of sharing ideas and receiving feedback. Imagine how long it would take to do that by having 1200 books published. In this manner, bloggers like myself have been able to test new ideas and learn from results much more quickly than the previous generation of personal growth experts.

Blogging also has another serious advantage — the chance to be more authentic than is possible in other media. Many books can’t get published, and many speeches can’t be delivered to big audiences because of gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the editors, meeting planners, and other intermediaries who may filter what content gets shared, and the major players tend to be conservative. But individual bloggers? We can share the truth as we see it. No gatekeepers get in the way. This is one reason so many people appreciate the expressive nature of blogs. Bloggers can be deeply honest in ways that other media can’t. Many of my best articles would never have made it past a typical publisher’s gatekeepers.

If I were starting out today in the field of personal development, I’d probably get into YouTube videos or iOS/Android apps. Or I might wait a bit and get into Google Glass apps or iWatch apps. Another option is that I might get into online services like what Fog Creek Software is doing with Trello. But that’s me. You may go in a totally different direction. The point is to choose a path that allows you to test and experiment with short, rapid cycles.

Go Beyond Your Comfort Zone and Experiment #

Suppose you decide to build a following with YouTube videos. To apply the Wright brothers’ strategy, don’t worry about trying to create that one perfect or polished video. Just do a lot of fast, cheap experiments. Take some risks. Notice what other people are doing, and do what they aren’t doing. Figure out what works and doesn’t work via trial and error. See what provides value for people, what generates referrals, and what bombs and should never be repeated. Be willing to fail. Fail as quickly as you can.

My friend Fred Ligaard, for instance, posted a YouTube video of himself approaching women naked on the street. As in completely naked. Who else would do that? Well… Fred’s video is at 2.2 million views and counting, and his YouTube channel has more than 50,000 subscribers. That’s already a viable business, and I’m sure he’ll continue to grow it. Fred only started his YouTube channel 5 months ago. At this rate imagine where he’ll be in a few years. Fred takes a lot of risks and does some crazy experiments, and he’s quickly learning what builds subscribers and what doesn’t.

One of my most successful articles is 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job. I originally wrote it as satire — a silly joke. It was also an experiment since I wrote it in a different style than what I was used to. I couldn’t have predicted that it would convince hundreds of people to quit their unfulfilling jobs and start new businesses… or that it would become one of the most referred articles of my website.

And then there’s How to Become an Early Riser. That was also an experimental piece. I took a stab at exploring a new topic that I hadn’t previously covered. To date that article has generated 1.7 million referrals just from StumbleUpon, not to mention thousands more from other outlets. Not bad for an experimental piece that took about an hour to write.

An experimental attitude can do wonders for you, especially in business. Don’t keep rehashing the same drivel over and over. Don’t get fixated on what worked in the past. If you want to innovate, you have to experiment. You’re going to fail a lot, but don’t worry about it. Do you care about all the Wright brothers’ experimental airplane design ideas that didn’t work?

This month one of my experiments was to co-create a collaborative audio program on relationships and personal growth. Five friends and I recorded about 9 hours of material over 3 days together in Santa Barbara, California. We continue to collaborate online using tools like Google+ hangouts (i.e. video conferencing) and Trello to move through the editing and launch process. I’ll be sure to let you know when we’re ready to release it.

Three days to create a 9-hour audio program is not a huge investment or risk. We probably have around 90,000 words of content recorded, and it’s really deep and amazing material. That’s more than my book, which took 2.5 years of research and 3 months to write. And we did this with no advance planning or research. Because we’re able to create a new product so quickly, we could easily repeat the process and iterate many more times using this approach, testing different variations of the idea each time.

Thoroughly planned projects have their place, but don’t overlook the value of rapid experimental iteration. Take a stab at something new. See what works. Like the Wright brothers did, you may stumble upon something truly amazing.

How are you going to experiment this coming year? What small bets could you make? What experiments will you try? How could you use an experimental trial and error approach to overcome a current challenge or achieve a new goal?

Happy New Year! :)