thaBadDawg’s Musings

This is what we need:

It’s funny how things change of the space of two years. (Well… almost two years) For example, me dreaming big in a Facebook post:

I have a goal. I want to personally earn $1,000,000 by the end of 2009. So in the spirit of public declaration I’ve decided to post both my concepts of how to accomplish said goal and what I want to do with that scratch when I get it.

Consider for a minute the insanity of that statement. I was making $50k a year from a programming/media job, I was doing a couple of side gigs with personal projects and home theater installations and I had the insanity to believe that it was possible for me to sell enough home theaters and do enough programming over the space of 2 years that I could bring in $1M in the space of 30 months. We actually weren’t off to a bad start because Acero (our home theater operation) had sold a couple of major systems ($100k+ each) and we had a couple large deals in the works, including doing 20 units out in Roosevelt and 100+ units in Cedar City. At one point I figured out that Acero’s profit on all of those would be close to $200k. While that wasn’t all (or even mostly) end up in my pocket, the fact that we had that all lined up was making me feel pretty confident. What would happen if we expanded our reach?

It turns out, that like most dreams, the goals weren’t well thought out because it didn’t take into account a huge problem looming from the sub-prime mortgage failures. We had no contigency plan and when our easy way to get rolling fell apart, so did our motivation to push things further along. Was it dumb to have that dream? No. I still think it could be done… even in this market. The problem is finding the motivation myself, the time to make it happen and the additional man power to make the machine work. The same thing goes for all of my other ideas, like the ez tracker and the custom web sites and everything else I can actually do. It’s all a function of time and energy. Time seems to be on short supply lately because of work. I love APX, but it’s sucking every available minute away from me right now. And I’ve learned more in the past 4 months worth of programming some of these APX sites than I have in my previous 8 years of programming. (PS… I always used to say that I hate Microsoft, but I’m coming to the conclusion, largely because of .Net  in general and Linq in particular, that they really know what I’m looking for.)

But speaking of goals… I wanna drop 65 pounds in the next 12 months. It’s a relatively easy goal in that I know everything that needs to be done. It’s just that I can’t seem to get my fat ass up off the couch and into the gym. Or I can’t seem to avoid that 4000+ calorie intake days. Sounds easy enough until you actually have to sit down and plan out when to work out. A failure to plan is a plan to fail. And it seems lately that I have LOTS of plans to fail.

And the sad thing is that I should be able to accomplish all of these goals. None of them, by themselves, are so hard that they can’t be done. It’s going from dream mode to action mode. Realistic goals are nothing but dreams if there isn’t any action put into place.