How to Make $1 Million

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Will Edwards — No Comments ↓

You may recall that at my new blog, I have embarked on a major challenge. The idea was to create a brand new site on a brand new domain and to show people what they need to do to get it into profit. The blog is about three months old now and the first results are already in.

Originally, I had set my goal for the blog as: to take the site from zero to significant profit. But, after reading Kylie Ofiu’s challenge about making one million dollars, it inspired me to be a little bolder in the statement of my goal. I wrote a Guest Post for her about it. The odd thing was that, even though I did not have the plan together, I immediately felt a lot better about the project having set myself the goal of making one $1 million – and that really surprised me.

As I said in the article, it is as a result of having already accomplished two really big goals – a career change goal and a financial goal – that I feel able to set my new goal so high. Without the experience of having already achieved two very large goals, I am not sure I could have thought about the prospect of making $1 million as at all realistic, for me. But that is one of the benefits of goal-setting i.e. that the accomplishment of major challenges expands your belief about what is possible for you.

So, I changed the wording of my new goal and got it properly quantified. In the back of my mind, a little voice was saying ‘so your new goal is now specific and measurable – big deal – what about the time-frame? Come one Will; are you going to wimp out on this?’

You remember that we have talked about goal-setting many times in the past and we have looked at the old SMART acronym before. We know that goals should be Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic and TIMETABLED! Well, with regard to this particular goal, I think I have explained, above, why I now think the goal is possible for me. So that takes care of the ‘achievable and realistic’ parts. But, as the little voice inside my head was saying, I had still not put a time on the achievement of the goal.

Thinking about this, there are probably a few reasons. Firstly, I reasoned, if I were to set a time-frame and did not achieve my goal within it, I would simply expand the time and continue working towards it – you see, that is my nature; I am tenacious, persistent and determined to achieve my goals. Second, something inside me – another voice that is a bit more of a chicken in these things – was saying something like ‘what if you set the time-frame and don’t achieve it. You are going to look pretty silly aren’t you?’

That has been a bit of a dilemma for me and I have been thinking about it for the past few days. Thinking back to the two big goals I told you about. The first goal – the career change goal – I did put a time on it when I set the goal. The time I chose, back then, was three years and I actually accomplished it (fully) within 18 months. The second goal – to create an online income – I did not set a time for it because I was determined to just keep going until I had achieved it. It took me seven years!

You see, I know that I can achieve goals whether or not I decide to put a time on them and it is true that I will continue to work on this goal, whatever happens, until I have achieved it. But those two little voices have been debating the issue for a couple of days. By the way, I don’t normally hear voices in my head – not too often anyway.

Where does that leave me? Well, I have finally decided to be bold enough to attach a time-frame to that goal. The reason is quite straightforward. I have the $1 million goal already on the home page of the blog, so I feel I might as well go the whole hog and attach the time-frame too. So that was the reasoning process that brought me to the place where I needed to decide upon the period.

Again, thinking back to the career change goal, I thought to myself at the time, that five years seemed too far away to be too concerned about it, and one year did not seem realistic to me. That’s why I decided upon three years. As I said, it actually took me about half of that time. In fact, there was a major development just about three months after setting the goal that put me on the right track.

For this goal, I now think that further away that one year is too far away and closer than that scares the pants off me. So I have finally decided – the date is going to be December 2013. That will give me one full year to work on it and produce the result. That is my goal for next year. I am going to give it my all and, if you are interested in seeing how I get on, do pop over to the new blog and follow the challenge.

Oh yes, just one more thing: I hope this article has inspired you to think big. Forget about New Year’s resolutions this year. Ask yourself what really big goal you are going to set for yourself, then take it through the SMART test. You may struggle with it – like me – but you will emerge at the other end of the process with remarkable clarity of thought … and that’s a promise.

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