Another year

Another year has passed. Not a big deal, I’m 29 now, hardly a milestone. I joked through most of my 20s that I wanted to make my first million by 30. While that’s still a possibility, it’s not too likely.

Birthdays have become really low-key for me. I do tend to take birthdays as an opportunity to set a few goals for the year. I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, but I am pretty keen on setting goals, and there’s no better way to do that than publicly, so you all can mock (or applaud) me next year when I’ve either accomplished or flopped on these.

I didn’t post last year’s goals, but the big one was to get the heck out of dodge (aka. the University of Lethbridge). Mission accomplished there. Looks like others had similar goals. It was the single best decision I made this year.

This year, I’m aiming just as high.

1. I want to launch at least 2 or the products/services I’ve got in the works. Client work is my bread and butter, but I’m a big fan of diversity. I want Industry Interactive to be in the position to grow further by this time next year. What that means is it should be making enough to support me as well as at least one other employee. I’m not entirely sure what form that will take, but working alone sucks in a lot of ways. I do better bouncing ideas and having ideas flung at me.
2. In addition to launching 2 of the services, I want them to be successful — meaning profit generating. The online services, I would love to see over 1,000 users. The other, I’ll be happy with a 10% on-island adoption rate (I’ll clarify that more at launch time).
3. Fitness-wise, it’s time to get this monkey off my back. I’m not a smoker, I’m not a drinker. I deal with stress by eating. That’s been problematic for my waistline over the past few stressful years. Life’s better now, I’ve paired down my bullshit quotient a great deal; it’s time to tackle that waistline. I figure that I can comfortably lose 50 to 100 pounds and be within my ideal weight range. I think that 100 pounds in a year may be an unhealthy goal, and probably isn’t achievable anyhow, so I’m going to set the goal as “weight loss” and back that up with “developing a healthy lifestyle and improving overall fitness”. If I lose 5 pounds this year, I’ve failed. If I lose 10, I’ve failed. I don’t know at this point what the magic number is at this point, but it’s probably safe to say that 30+ will make me happy, as long as I see additional improvements in fitness too.
4. The last goal, which piggybacks the first two, is to get back into the real-estate market. Rachel and I have fallen in love with the west coast. We’re ready to call Mayne Island, or one of the other Southern Gulf Islands home. So we’re going to check out the other islands over this coming year, keep our eyes on the listings, and try to find a great deal on either a piece of land, or a piece of land with a house. I’ve learned that I love being really close to home for work, and setting my own hours, but working in the house is a huge challenge. Our dream is to find something with enough land that can accommodate some sort of detached office (but of course, that’s far in the future — unless we luck out).
5. I’m going to finish my bloody Master’s degree.
6. I’m going to finish the textbook and get that out on the market.

That’s probably enough for a year. I’ll try to post updates as I go along. I’m adding in the standard disclaimer of surprises happen, and things can change quickly, so if one of my web projects gets bought by Google, and the family and I need to move to Silicon Valley, I won’t be considering goal 4 a failure — and I reserve the right to change everything at a moment’s notice.