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First 2012 Goal Accomplished!

February 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Achieving

Cliched but totally true!

If you recall my goals for 2012, one of them was all around health.  Well, today I accomplished the first goal, a set of 10 bench presses with 305lbs!  Feels awesome to reach this point, especially when, 8 years ago, I was unable to do 10 reps of just the bar (45lbs).  I’m going to repeat here what I said in the 60 in 3 post:

Please note that I’m 38, I’m not a professional body builder and I spend less than 5 hours a week at the gym, and some of those are spent on cardio.    I have no secret training technique, no super duper bench press method, I don’t use high priced muscle supplements and I don’t use a personal trainer.  Also, I only started going to the gym when I hit 30 (and 30 hit back!).  I say this because I keep hearing people tell me they’re too busy or too old or too tired or too lazy.

Trust me folks, it’s not that hard and you don’t end up looking like a body builder who uses too many steroids either.  What you do end up with is a healthy body that will keep you mobile and independent well into old age (plus some impressed looks from your fellow gym goers).

All it takes is hard work and dedication.

Filed Under: Drive, Goals, Health Tagged With: , , , ,

Procrastination Kicking Your Ass? Kick Back With Controlled Rewards

February 8, 2012 By 1 Comment
Angry Face

This Is Your Inner Procrastinator. He Doesn't Want To Work, He Wants A Nap!

Gal’s Note – This post started out as another part in the Diamonds or Dogs series, but it became something a bit more than just about that.  Specifically, it became all about how I deal with my inner procrastinator and handle two blogs, a start up and a full time job.

First, let me be clear, procrastination isn’t something you are dealing with alone.  Every one procrastinates.  In fact, I would say that the natural tendency of the human brain is to procrastinate.  Why?  Because we’re short sighted creatures more interested in right now than in tomorrow.  It’s not our fault, evolution has made us this way.  Evolution has taught us not to spend energy that we don’t need to spend. That’s really good strategy for a creature that lives day to day, minute to minute and needs to think about short term survival, not long term success. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Introspection, Procrastination Tagged With: , , ,

Starting My Own Business – Quick Update

January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Quick update on Diamonds or Dogs.

I added the “Diamonds” side of the site over the weekend, set up the landing page and moved a few blog posts over. I also added more posts and a few new female reviewers.

A few points:

  • I’m actually not an engineer, I learned most of this just by doing. The things I didn’t know I hired people to do.
  • Hiring people is easy these days. You can find qualified folks all over places like eLance or just by asking your network. My graphic designer was a girl I dated a few years ago and my developer is someone I’ve never met who I hired through a website. Total costs for both of them so far are around $700.
  • Total costs for the rest of the site are less than $100. That includes domain registration ($50), hosting ($10 a month), WordPress CMS (Free), Outbrain recommendations (Free), various Google tools (Free), Share This plug in to allow people to “like” posts and share them (Free), Feedburner plug in to allow people to subscribe to a feed of new items (free) and pizza for my first feedback session where my friends told me what they thought of the site ($30).
  • No complicated business issues so far. The only relationship I had to form was an affiliate one with Amazon. They’ll take care of actual ordering and fulfillment and then pass along a share of the profits. Sometime in the future I might work directly with drop shippers but that’s too complicated right now.
  • I’ve gotten amazing support through my network of friends and family. I’m about to publish my dad’s profile and first review plus one of my close friend just got his mom to sign up as a new reviewer.

Next!

My next goals are to start marketing the site.

  • AdWords campaign
  • Facebook campaign, which I’m hoping you, my readers, will help me with
  • eMail campaign
  • YouTube video. Yes, I have a good idea for a YouTube video about gift giving.

###

Best of all, this has been a ton of fun and I’ve learned a lot.

Special thanks to my wonderful wife who keeps testing things, making sure what I write makes sense and giving my great ideas for how to improve the site.

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

How Do I Start My Own Business, Part 1

January 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment
light on

No, this isn't me

Gal’s Note – Unlike other blogs who’ll tell you that working for someone else makes you a brain dead wage slave, I’m going to tell you that starting a business is not for everyone.  It’s risky, takes a lot of work to start and requires a lot of time to maintain.  There are no easy solutions here and no easy alternatives to a day job.  Some people will like this choice and some won’t.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working a standard job for someone else and if that’s what you like then by all means, enjoy.  In fact, if that’s what you want, I have a few other posts you may be interested in.

Gal’s other note – This was originally meant to be a single post.  However, due to the increasing length of the post and my own time constraints, I’m going to make it part of the whole Diamonds or Dogs series.  I’ll explore more aspects of starting my own business in the over the new couple of weeks.

So you want to create a business? Here’s a few things I’ve learned over the years, starting up both successful and unsuccessful businesses.  The basics of starting a business consist of:

  1. The Idea – What is it that your business will do?
  2. The plan – How are you going to launch your business?
  3. The communication – Who are you talking to about your business and why?
  4. The execution – Putting you plan into action.
  5. Adapt and evolve – What do to after it turns out that your plan was wrong. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Goals, Perfectionism, Starting A Business, Starting Out Tagged With: , , , , ,

Products Don’t Need To Be Perfect, They Just Need To Be Good Enough

January 18, 2012 By 1 Comment
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Steve JobsPerfection sucks. It’s the enemy of invention, it’s the thing that holds you back. Trying to reach it might be an ok goal but never finishing a project until it’s perfect is the work equivalent of dry humping, it feels good but you never really get to the point. Sorry, but perfection can go to hell, I’ll take good enough any day of the week.

I say all this because I’m struggling with finishing up Diamonds or Dogs, my gift site. There are so many things I want to do. I need more reviewers, more reviews, a better landing page, a better “about us” and more information on why the site is the way it is. That’s just the beginning of my to do list. However, the more I try to get the site perfect, the more I push off the important task of starting to drive traffic to the site. Yes, I want the site to look good but I also want to start doing marketing for it. I want to start linking to it, telling people about it, running an AdWords campaign and the dozens of other things I will need to do in order to get people to my site. I’m not doing any of those things because I’m working on the landing page… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Making More Money, Optimization, Perfectionism, Step 1 - Priorities Tagged With: , , , ,

Starting A Business

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

lemonade stand posterWhen I was a freshman in college I came back home for the summer and my dad and I started a business selling chia pets. We made them in our garage and shipped them to stores around California. Actually, they weren’t Chia pets (because that’s someone else’s trademark) so we called them Green Heads, but they were essentially Chia Pets. We bought pantyhose from Target, filled them with saw dust from a lumber mill close by and grass seeds from Home Depot and then sold them to gift shops. It was fun and it made us a few hundred bucks. I also learned a lot about retail and manufacturing.

My senior year in college I started a comic book shop with a couple of friends. Actually, to give credit where credit is due, my friends did most of the work since they weren’t actually in college but I helped with everything from manual labor to business relations. It was pretty rough but doable with a minimum of resources and a lot of hard work. The store did well and you can still find Alternate Realities in the Lincoln Mall in Rhode Island (thank you Sue and Howie so very much for the wonderful experience). Again, it was a learning experience for me and I came out of it with a healthy respect for the power of accounting and inventory management. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Family, Friends, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan, Step 3 - Communicate Tagged With: , , , ,

The Plan For 2012

January 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

2012 !Earlier I wrote about my plan for 2011 and how that went, this post will be devoted to 2012.

Each of the items below is something I want to do or accomplish this year.  I’ve gone ahead and created a project for each one of these (nothing fancy, I just use tasks in Microsoft Outlook to track these).  Each project has various items under it that represent to do’s or tasks.  Accomplishing these tasks may lead to more tasks.  For example, when I figure out what I want to build from scratch I’ll have more to do’s around buying materials and making blue prints.

Each of these projects has measurements attached where possible.  These measurements are used to indicate success or failure.  for example, the blogging goal has a measurement of 1000 users per day to indicate success.  I then take this measurement and figure out what I need to do in order to achieve it.  Some goals, like children, have no measurements attached but in such a case I usually make a note to myself about why is it that I’m tracking this goal.  For example “I want to be a good parent”.  This will help me figure out what I need to do.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my grand plan for 2012! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Family, Goals, Losing Weight, Making More Money, Starting Out, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Did I Do On My 2011 Goals?

January 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Happy new yearBack in January I posted these goals as the things I wanted to accomplish in 2011.  Looking through them now, I’ve accomplished a lot.  Yes, some of these goals failed and some only partially succeeded, but I aimed really high in 2011.  I also learned a lot about setting goals and creating plans; information which I am going to apply to 2012 goals. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Finance, Goals, Health, Jobs, Life Lesson, Perfectionism, Relationships, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

What Do We Have To Be Thankful For? 7 Reasons Why This Is Indeed A Wonderful World

November 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

Earth - IllustrationI know it seems like the world is in trouble these days.  The Euro is collapsing, congress is paralyzed with stupidity, the environment is going to the dumps, house prices are crashing, fuel prices are soaring and Black Friday shoppers are now using pepper spray on one another.  So yes, it’s easy to get depressed about the state of the world and it’s easy to fall into that mode of “everything’s awful” and “we’re all doomed”.  However, this isn’t just unproductive, it’s also untrue.  I look at the world around me and I see wonders.  I see incredible people doing amazing things and I am in awe of where we are and how quickly we’re moving forward.  So today, I’d like to write down a few of these things I’m grateful for, a few things to remind myself that this is indeed a wonderful world. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Happiness, Introspection, Stress Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How Can I Change The World? Or At Least My Country

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Darwin - Very gradual change we can believe inSo, if I think both the OWS and the Tea Party movements suck, how exactly would I go about changing the world?  It’s an interesting questions because one of my goals in life is to leave this world in a better condition than I found it.  Whether or not I have kids, I want my impact on this world (and on my country) to be positive.  I don’t need to be the next Abraham Lincoln or Tim Bernars Lee, but I would like to have a net positive impact.  This is especially important to me these days when the world seems to be in a bit of trouble all around.  We have environmental issues, economic collapse, political instability, leaders who seem clueless and politicians who seem completely out of touch.  In the face of all this, it’s easy to feel powerless and just give up.  However, there are still plenty of ways in which one person can have an impact and I’m going to use this post to list a few. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Decision Making, Goals, Honesty, Responsibility, Step 1 - Priorities, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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