Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo, is someone whom I highly respect in the online marketing industry. The guy is a total badass who has worked for some of the most influential and successful companies on the web (e.g., Facebook and Mint), then went on to establish what I consider to be the best ‘daily deal’ type website for geeks and online marketers.
AppSumo is one of my most favoritest websites of all times, and I can honestly say I’ve snagged nearly a hundred deals from that site over the past 3 years — a few of them were free, some of them I paid for, but the majority of them I bought with my . . . ta da . . ! Referral commissions!
AppSumo offers so many amazing and worthwhile products it’s just stupid. I love that site, and if you haven’t discovered it, or if you have discovered it but not yet looked at this week’s deal, please head there right away. You’ll thank me later.
In addition to all of the kickassery going on at AppSumo, Noah has also been delving into the WordPress plugin market with two other projects: SumoMe, which offers a powerful suite of free WordPress plugins, and KingSumo, which is another WordPress plugin start up business – only these plugins are very premium. In addition to all of the goodies I’ve obtained from AppSumo over the years, I use these products as well.
Anyhow…while resurrecting my Twitter profile, I happened to peep this video in my feed and figured I’d share. It’s spot on with my new mind set, which involves creating a detailed map before trying to reach your destination. In the past I’ve always just done what I thought would work, then hoped for the best.
That’s not a good recipe for success, however. Although there are those that get lucky and stumble upon a gold mine, most successful people will tell you that you need to determine what it is that you want, then work backwards from there – formulating and planning the steps needed to reach your goals.
Anyway, here’s a video interview with Noah Kagan where he shares some of the wisdom he gleaned from Mark Zuckerberg and his associates during his time at the Facebook…
Why goals are important for growth
I like Noah’s idea of setting one simple goal. My intention is to do something similar, but with some collateral goals as well. I have a definite goal in mind, but I’ve also set additional goals for myself which I feel I can’t help but obtain if I work towards the primary goal.
I also think that the daily, weekly and monthly approach to goal-attaining is a fantastic way to look at things. If you’re going to clean your garage you don’t just go in there without a plan – intending to clean and organize the place in one day (at least not in my garage you wouldn’t). You create a plan that involves a few Saturday afternoons and you break it off in chunks. That’s the way things get accomplished — in clearly defined actionable steps.
In case you haven’t noticed, one of my goals with this site is to publish 365 posts this year. I most certainly will have days where I won’t be able to maintain this commitment – either due to a bad cold, family emergencies, getting behind with work, vacations, etc…but I will make it a plan to schedule out posts for the days where I know I’ll be unavailable. I’m also going to work towards maintaining a series of posts that are queued and ready to be dripped in – that way I won’t be struggling for content ideas on those ‘off days’ that are bound to happen.
And mind you, I don’t intend for any of these to be thin ‘filler’ posts. Each and every article I post here will be a minimum of 500 words. If there’s anything I believe in – it’s quality over quantity; however, I’ll be going for both. 😉