Setting Goals: The Brass Ring

by Sapphire (December 20, 2005)

For years, I’ve been setting realistic goals and plodding along toward them as best I can. Like:

I will build this site.
I will generate X pages by this date.
I will submit it to 250,000 directories.
I will buy it an ad on this other site.
Etc.

The other day, I did some thinking about my life, and Bill Gates’ life, and people who have it much worse than I ever did, and Saudi oil barons, and I thought: life’s too short. Better to aim for the brass ring and fall short than aim for a slightly better parking space, get it, and wonder why you’re not really any happier.

It’s not just about feeling good or having fun either - although the older I get, the more I think those matter. It’s the fact that in falling short of the brass ring, I’ll probably still end up somewhere much more fulfilling than the slightly better parking space.

My new goal planning is going to be a little more like this:

I will build this site so it’s one I’d come to every day.
I will tell my friends about it, online and off.
I will use blogging-type software so that it SEO’s itself, and I can just get on with making it wonderful.
It will magically become an authority site in its niche.

It’s that last one that’s the kind of thinking I never allowed myself to do before. I can’t do anything to assure my site will become the next big thing, can I? Thousands of people can take all the same steps for their sites, but only a few will make it. Why? Because of things like timing that no one can quite predict. Trends that change on you. Look how the World Trade Center bombing upset something as strong as the insurance market. No one’s invulnerable.

Online, we can afford to set these goals because we don’t really have to give up anything to do it. It’s not like the offline world, where you might have to quit your job or move to a new city to bait the really big fish. This is a whole new world, and as much as I’ve embraced it, I still haven’t gotten it through my head that the limit to online possibilities is basically: my imagination.

Posted in Staying on Track
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