2 Months into 2011, What Have You Done?

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February is fast approaching the end. Your 2 months of the year is almost up. Have you started accomplishing the tasks on your New Year resolution list? Or is it just a distant thing of the past that has now been left at the corner of your room, waiting for the next New Year before you start doing something (hopefully) again?

Now let’s talk specifically about the things you want to do for your online business. There are really heaps and heaps of things on the internet that I’m sure you must know already. But are you stuck in the cycle of going through all of that again?

Back To School

I’m digressing a little here but let me talk to you how it was like at school for me. Now you see, when I was in school there were heaps and heaps of subjects to learn. Everything from Maths, Language, Physics to Biology was part of my curriculum when I was in Secondary School. Obviously I’ve known that I wanted to do something related to science and at that time if you were unsure what you wanna do in your life, taking the science stream is the best choice.

But the problem with that is I don’t quite enjoy the way things were taught in school. Everything was based on how well you perform. Grades and academic achievements were the order of the day and if you don’t score X number of A’s, people won’t even blink an eye on you. I hate that! It completely defeats the purpose of learning. To make it worse, it’s about how much you know rather than how much you can apply what you learn. It’s trying to memorize as much as you can and then regurgitating it. Every student was in the rat race of attending tuition classes, scoring excessive number of A’s and those who made it are celebrated and cheered upon. If you are good enough you might even score an interview with a newspaper reporter. Oh how proud you “should” feel for your achievements.

Strangely enough, a lot of those students with strings of good grades and “As” don’t actually have good jobs later on.

There are plenty of things to learn about in school. Likewise, for an online business, there are heaps of things to learn about but there’s no point learning all of that if you don’t apply it or if you don’t do anything about it. I liken a lot of what we read on blogs, websites, ebooks to what I learn in school because it’s spoon-fed. It really feels like some blogging master is standing in front of the class telling all of the students what systems he put into place to earn a living from there. It’s didactic learning. Sitting in front of your laptop reading ebooks without applying what you’ve read is worthless and unless you experiment with those ways, you won’t know if it will ever work.

Didactic learning may be old school but it really isn’t helpful for an individual to learn anything by just sitting down and passively absorb the information. Unless you are a sponge, then yeah probably you could learn better. But I can assure you even if you can absorb information like a sponge, you won’t be successful online.

You’ve Got An Idea???

Let’s say you have an idea but you are pondering over it. Wondering if it would work or not. Let’s say you’ve put all the puzzles together and you have a perfect system to make it work. You are really sure it will work but… you are still questioning yourself over and over again if it will work.

Yesterday I came across a very interesting article on execution and ideas. Derek Sivers says this:

Idea and Execution

AWFUL IDEA = -1
WEAK IDEA = 1
SO-SO IDEA = 5
GOOD IDEA = 10
GREAT IDEA = 15
BRILLIANT IDEA = 20

NO EXECUTION = $1
WEAK EXECUTION = $1000
SO-SO EXECUTION = $10,000
GOOD EXECUTION = $100,000
GREAT EXECUTION = $1,000,000
BRILLIANT EXECUTION = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

By Derek Sivers

Derek Siver knows his stuff so yeah and I totally agree with what he says about and idea and executing it. Obviously from his formula, the value of an idea is significantly less if you don’t do anything about it.

I’m sure there’s more than enough knowledge to help you get something up and running, like a niche site or a website for your wedding cake business. It’s just a matter of IF you want to do something about what you know.

Let’s Vote…

So what have you done so far. I’ve started a poll below. Vote guys. This whole poll thing is a new thing I’m trying out. It will be interesting to see the poll results too!

N.B PLEASE BE HONEST

Tagged as: goals and achievements, new year resolutions