Setting Goals – those two words are almost like a burden to me. The action they describe is essential for success, yet as simple as the task sounds, I find myself almost paralyzed in the fear of what is to come.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Lifehacker did an article about setting goals. They talked about the reasons that people don’t like to setting goals and I talked about how I felt like they were talking about me.

The act of setting goals is difficult for me for a few reasons. I always carry small goals around in my head. They’re usually small and insignificant goals that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes I feel a sense of accomplishments when I meet those goals. Other times I wonder who I’m kidding because I feel that they’re not really goals at all.

Fear of failure – I would say this is the number one reason that I have a hard time plotting out my ambitions. I’m not superstitious, but perhaps there’s a small part of me that thinks that if I write something down that want, somehow I’ll make it not happen. Maybe it’s not so much that writing it down will make it not happen as much as it is that there is a HUGE fear that everyone will see me as a failure if I don’t meet those goals. Maybe the problem is that when things are written down, there’s PROOF that the goals were set. There’s no room for dancing around it later.

I think that’s one of the reasons I hesitate to make my new internet marketing journey public (I mean to the people who know me in real life!). If they see what I’m doing and go and look at my goals then there are people in REAL LIFE who can see me if I fail. But – to the strangers who exist in pixels (as Anna so eloquently put it!) if it all goes to Hell, I can always log off and step out of the Matrix.

Well, now there’s a problem. Perhaps it’s less a problem and more a solution. The problem is that I have befriended some people in the Matrix. These people (as far as I can tell anyway!) are interested in seeing me succeed. These people have offered up their time and advice and I cannot let them down now. I cannot let myself down now.

So I’ve made a decision. I will be setting goals. I will be writing them down. I will be posting them for the world to see. I have no idea what these goals will be just yet, but I hope to have them posted soon. I guess in a way I’m setting a goal now. I hope to have my goals posted by the end of this week. I would go for sooner, but this is actually going to be quite an arduous task for me and I need time to think about it and put it together.

What I would ask of my more experienced friends is do you have any advice you can offer up to help me with this? How do you go about deciding what your goals are and the time frames you give yourself to meet them? I have some ideas in my mind about where I’d like to go, but I really feel like I am very unqualified to set reasonable goals. This is where internet marketing starts to get difficult for me (at the beginning???).

For those who are interested. I have finished reading Holly’s book. I will be going back and figuring out where I need to start. But I have met that “goal”. Now it’s time to start REALLY setting goals.

After a relatively busy “personal day” I sat down in front of my computer anxious to blog about something. I had done a lot of blog reading before I had to go run some errands and it seems to me that I had a few ideas come to mind that I thought I could expand upon. Unfortunately when I sat down in front of my computer and actually pulled up my blog, I lost EVERYTHING that I had been thinking about earlier.

First of all, this made me realize the importance of having something with me at all times to record my ideas so that I don’t forget about them later. As I get older (and I’m still young!) I learn more and more that I should rely on just my memory less and less!

Secondly, I wasted an unbelievable amount of time just sitting here trying to come up with something that, again, could be meaningful and beneficial to my blog and to future bloggers who might happen upon my site. Finally, I made a decision. I decided not to blog.

I know that sounds odd now because I’m writing a blog post, but hear me out.

So I decided not to blog anything. I decided that I was going to close my laptop for now and just stop thinking about it for a bit. If something came to mind, then maybe I’d open up my laptop and start writing, but for now, I needed not to force something that wasn’t coming. I needed to avoid trying to make something from nothing.

That’s when it hit me. In making that decision, I realized my decision could once again be useful advice to other newbies getting started. Trying to force creativity can be just as frustrating as forcing yourself to do some work when you really just need a break. Not only that, but if you’re just manufacturing something for the sake of having something to post, it could very well turn out being content that works against you instead of for you. The key here is to post useful and meaningful content, right?

Before I close, I will pose a question to the more experienced bloggers and Internet Marketers that are reading my blog. Is my following conclusion worthwhile or is it something that could prove to be counter-productive to other newbies? Be brutally honest! It’s part of the learning experience.

Having asked that, I guess that makes two pieces of advice that I would say are coming out of today’s post. First, make sure to record your ideas in SOME way when you have them. Write them down, type them up, use a voice recorder, heck, call yourself and leave yourself a voicemail, but keep track of your ideas! Secondly, don’t force content and end up with something substandard that could result in disappointment not only for your readers, but more importantly for yourself. What’s the use in posting if it’s not going to be fruitful?

It’s truly amazing when something really does come from nothing…but in my newbie and humble opinion, it should not be forced!