At an event for business executives I attended earlier this year, the facilitator shared something that is a bit of a myth in the business world.

The short version is: in a room full of nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs, when asked how they track and check in daily with their goals, it turned out the that four wealthiest people in the room all carried a paper with their goals in their wallet on somewhere else on their person.

Let me say this again, because it bears repeating. In a room full of people who had successfully started their own businesses, the ones who made the most looked at their goals regularly.

Checking in, each day and each free moment, with the rallying cry for your life has incredible effects.

Everyone has a goal (or more than one). Everyone. Everywhere.

It might be to graduate college. Or to get through today until tomorrow. Or to buy a house.

Goals are everywhere!

But people who regularly meet, exceed, and generally kick the butts of their goals are not. They’re outliers. And the reason is simple.

We are biologically wired to do things that bring quick increases in pleasure. People who do big things have designed a way that works for them to resist that automatic process.

It’s not our fault that we have a hard time keeping our eyes on a big goal in the future that takes a long time to reach and has a lot of bumps, set-backs, disappointments, and obstacles along the way.

And the simple truth of running one’s own business is that it’s especially littered with these things that make the more basic parts of our brain seek pleasure and comfort (a.k.a. anything but continuing to work hard).

Thankfully, the right goals are both the end results and the solution.

The overwhelming majority of folks seeking to make a career out of travel writing are operating like it’s an all or nothing game:

  • they get a clip or they don’t
  • they make enough to leave their job or they don’t
  • they get people contacting them through their blog to ask them to do a paid writing assignment or they don’t

I remember a few years ago when my husband said he was going to run a half marathon with some friends, and I said I’d join them, because I was already playing a sprinting-oriented sport for several hours most nights a week, and I thought it couldn’t be that much harder.

But I did not just show and run the half marathon.

I googled training schedules, like the one below, adapted it to my needs, and did the longer runs as scheduled in addition to the running I was doing:

Setting appropriate goals on the way to running the actual half marathon did something very important: it gave me “pleasurable experiences” or “wins” along the way as I checked off milestones on the training program.

I worked toward something large, looming, and difficult on the horizon by giving myself something each week that was achievable for my skill level at the time that also instilled confidence that I could reach my eventual goal while making me proud of what I had done that week.

There are three key things in what I said above that are missing from the formulation of many goals that folks fail to achieve:

  • achievable for skill level
  • instilling confidence
  • making me proud

That’s why, in Taking Control of How You Track and Reach Your Freelance Writing Goals, we may be talking about the single most important aspect of a freelance travel writing career. In this webinar, you’ll learn about the systems you can put in place to make sure your travel writing income is growing year over year (especially when you’re just starting out and need it to grow exponentially ;)).

This week, it’s our weekly special in our on-demand webinar library for 75% off the usual price for the webinar bundle, which includes:

  • steamable and downloadable video
  • streamable and downloadable MP3 audio
  • full slide deck as image gallery or PDF download
  • full transcript viewable on-screen with infinite scroll or plain text
  • downloadable PDF transcript

Grab your webinar bundle for just $5 now!

The sale ends end of day Sunday, December 9, after which time you can grab it for regular price in our library, or as part of our Dream Buffet.