One Month and One Day ago, I wrote about starting up Ground Hog’s Day Resolutions, which are like New Year’s Resolutions except they start on Ground Hog’s Day, after you’ve had a chance to get the year started and get yourself put back together after another crazy holiday season. Because of the interesting 1/1 (Jan 1st) and 2/2 (Feb 2nd) pattern, and because I am a patterns dork, I had decreed that every date that follows the same pattern shall be a Day of GHD Resolutions Reflection on just how we’re doing on our goals. So here’s my self-assessment.

My Groundhog Day Resolutions

As I wrote before, I’d felt 2006 was a good year in terms of personal growth and finding some truly important patterns of effectiveness in my writing/thinking. It would rock to do this for a living, so I established the following 3 resolutions:

1. Commit to Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff — The motivation is that I like making things and writing, and would like to make money directly from those activities. I think I need to rephrase this actually…I’d like to be making money primarily from thinking about problems and expressing workable solutions to them through words and artifact creation. A more romantic way of phrasing this is to make money by mining insights and shipping them in usable form. This means I’m less interested in doing straight production work, so Id like to find people to work with to create a sustainable configuration of complementary talents. Progress made on this goal? I’ll give myself a +1; I have a couple leads on projects that may be just this kind of work. My expectations are that I’ll spend more time working in an area that I feel more mentally agile, which might be a more efficient (and therefore profitable) use of the time I have. I may even enjoy it…this remains to be seen.A hard metric to apply here: break down my current projects and put them either in the being paid for design thinking versus being paid for production. I’m mostly doing production type work at the moment…it pays the bills.
2. Build Sustainable Social Networks — The motivation is that I want to meet more people and have more friends locally who are interested in the same things I do. It’s also practice for understanding human social dynamics, which might come in handy if I start putting together teams of people. There are two kinds of social networks I’m involved with. The first one is the Nashua Friends Group on Meetup.com, and the other is a more informal Freelancers group that’s starting to take shape…in my mind, anyway. I’ve had some great conversations with people both local and on the Internet in the past few weeks about this. My expectations of social networks is that they’ll help me connect with the right people, and I’ll also be able to connect people with each other. I’ve written before that positive-minded, self-empowered, conscientious, and kind people seem to be one of my pre-requisites for happiness. Rather than wait to stumble upon one, I told myself, why not build it myself? Running a group is getting easier, and all you need to do is support an environment where happy random accidents of conversation are possible. Things are starting to happen…I’ve made some excellent contacts in the past year in the area, and there’s also the private freelance forum I’m still maintaining, which has been on hiatus also as my energies have been directed more toward work. I think I need to transform it into something that’s less a forum and more of a cafe + gift shop. We’ll see.
3. Sell a Product This Year — I’ve discovered that I have a peculiar affinity for authorship. I don’t like the act of making as I much as I like making things that represent myself. I’d like to be in a place where I’m making my money from selling tangible projects that reflect my principles of self-empowerment, positivity, and genuine utility. There’s no rational reason for it…I just want to make my own stuff. A first step would be to actually make and ship something, anything, and learn from the experience. Learn to eke a tiny profit out of it. Learn to intuit the supply and demand curves of a particular market, manage cash flow, etc. I have done some thinking about what that product might be, but haven’t made steps to actually have it produced yet. It’ll probably be something based on The Printable CEO™, perhaps a notebook or a journal. Even that might be too much…selling pre-printed CGT forms with a nifty instruction booklet might be more like it. I just need to get off my ass and make it. Ok, so that’s my project: CGT + Instruction Booklet, pre-printed, at the $9 – $19 pricepoint. By 4/4, I want to be ready to start pricing out the printing.

Wrap Up

Thus ends my first GHD Resolutions Review. I didn’t even remember my resolutions until I looked ’em up 45 minutes ago, so I guess this worked out great!