My Plans and Goals for 2018

What’s happens now?

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I spent a lot of time and words in talking about the year past. However, I didn’t say anything about what happens next.

So without further ado, let’s look at 2018!

My big picture 2018 goals

I’ve landed on four big-picture goals for 2018. These are:

1. Diversity: Have at least one more project generating some passive income
2. Growth: Get to $20k total or $2k monthly passive income by December
3. Sustainability: Make $80k of total income (including salary/freelance work)
4. Dynamism: Continue to reflect and iterate on my life regularly

The first three are part of a big-picture plan of getting to truly self-sustaining passive income — maybe by 2020 if I’m lucky. The last one is meant to ensure that whatever lessons I learned in 2017 stay with me through the course of the coming year and I don’t get stuck in a rut of doing what feels “normal” without questioning why.

I’m not totally sure why self-sustaining passive income is the priority.

I know that my personality is such that even if I achieved complete financial independence I would keep working. So why bother, then?

I suspect the biggest reason is that I want to prove to myself that I can do it. It’s notable that taking a more traditional approach to passive income — e.g. through building a nest-egg and investing, or earning through real estate — is not at all appealing to me. For whatever reason I specifically want to do it by selling things online.

Stated differently, I think the goal is the journey, not the destination.

That said, arriving in a place where I don’t have any obligation to work would also be perfectly fine by me.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My Q1 plans

My largest goal for the first quarter of 2018 is to figure out what new project is going to get my attention for the rest of the year. I have three high-level candidate areas I’m considering:

1. An info-product like a book or course
2. A B2B (business-to-business) SaaS product
3. A new B2C (business-to-consumer) SaaS product

There are pros and cons to all of these. An info-product is likely the safest option in terms of being able to generate some revenue, while a B2B SaaS likely has the highest long-term ceiling. B2C apps are the most fun to work on — but least likely to succeed.

So, rather than commit myself to one of these today, I’m going to explore all three with the goal of making a call sometime around April 1. I’ll also aim to keep things progressing with Place Card Me.

My January goals

So with all of that background information, here’s my target goals for January.

Looking at this list and the time available to me, it seems like it might be a lot to achieve, but let’s see how it goes.

That’s it for now! Time to hunker down and get to work. Moving forwards I’ll be putting these goals in my weekly/monthly retrospectives.

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