Goal Disoriented

Well, it certainly has been a while since I posted last. To be honest with you and myself, this has been a lot harder than I thought but not necessarily for the reasons that I thought it would be. I find myself 1.5 months into my hiatus from the working world more confused than when I left it and still struggling to establish concrete, actionable goals. I think this is a dark hour in this journey and I think that it is one that is commonly experience among my fellow would be entrepreneurs.

The most disheartening thing about my current predicament is that I feel like I haven’t accomplished much to speak of. I shy away from telling people that I am unemployed because I despise their next question of what I have been up to for the past month. I can easily come up with a long list of things that have kept me busy: beginning and ending a business venture with some friends, running, making my first business pitch, stretching, researching internet marketing, researching a book idea for people suffering from Rheumatoid Arthritis, starting a few blogs, etc. When I think about this list, it is clear to me that I have actually been busy but I have not been productive. My activities lack focus and I quickly abandon my ideas not long after I convince myself that they are my ticket.

So, here I am seriously contemplating going into real estate for a variety of reasons and thinking that this is just another idea that I will contemplate for a while and ultimately discard like all of the rest. After only 6 short weeks, I have inherited a defeatist attitude that any idea that I have is not worth pursuing because I will ultimately be wasting my time. This is not a good trend and one that I need to correct immediately. But how?

The problem that I have realized is that it is very difficult to “work smart” when your goals are not clear. My husband and I have been agonizing over this question over the last few weeks and as we change our minds, so do the ideas that I am pursuing. So rather than being goal-oriented, I have been goal dis-oriented and have found myself chasing a variety of angles without tackling the key question of what my goals actually are.

So, what are my goals?

Goal 1: Rewards for my labor are commensurate with my work.

One of the biggest crimes of the corporate world is that the amount of work that you actually do has a very small and sometimes inverted relationship to your rewards. No matter what I am doing, I want to make sure that the effort that I am putting in will be reflected in my rewards for that labor either in my immediate compensation or longer term aspirations.

Goal 2: Have a flexible work schedule so that I have the ability to pursue other interests.

I do not want to be completely defined by my job or how I generate income. While this may seem fairly obvious, it actually took me quite a bit of time to figure out. I spent the majority of my thinking hours over the past two years trying to discover what job I wanted in order to make me happy. What I didn’t realize was that I actually don’t think I will ever be completely satisfied with a job. I think that there are actually very few “career-minded” people who do anything else except grow their career, socialize in their peer groups and spend a few weeks a year on a beach. This type of life will never fulfill me and I needed to be honest with myself about that.

Goal 3: To have enough savings that I (and my husband) never feel tied to a profession or a location.

This is really the important one because it is necessary for the other two to be possible. At the root of all of my crazy business ideas and dreams of entrepreneurship is the idea that I want to have what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “F@#$ You Money”. While it is legitimate to say that I want to live in Brazil for at least 6 months, the more important is that I want the choice to live in Brazil for 6 months and that means having some degree of financial and location independence. I am beginning to realize that there are a variety of ways to achieve that goal and that pure entrepreneurship may not be the answer. Getting the highest paid job I can find and living frugally could easily achieve this goal.