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As I have mentioned many times, including just the other day, I need to write some goals. Some personal goals for me to focus on and for you to police me on. I’ve determined that goal setting works for me when I’m passionate about it and when I have something to prove…usually to those who don’t think I can. It didn’t take me long to write out my goals. In fact I wrote them down on January 15 in about 10 minutes but I’ve been sick, so haven’t had a chance to post them. But today I’m feeling better. At least good enough to sit down in front of a computer and type out some words, so here goes.

My 2010 personal goals are:

• Raise $20,000 for the Tom Baker Cancer Centre & Alberta Cancer Foundation through the 2nd Annual Tight ‘n Bright event to be held March 20, 2010.
• Generate $80,000 through legal online activities like affiliate sales, products & services by September 15, 2010. Roughly 236 days remain, so that would equate to $338.98 per day…if I start making cash NOW!
• Run a full marathon under 4 hours by December 15, 2010.
• Launch BlueBinder by March 1, 2010 with full e-comm capabilities.
• Launch Phase 1 of OoberScoop by February 1, 2010.
• Launch Workshops Everywhere by February 1, 2010 to the Calgary market as detailed in Phase 1 of the plan.
• Travel to three new destinations by December 31, 2010.
• Speak at a minimum of one conference by November 30, 2010.
• Support and love Monica, Ava and the other members of my family on a daily basis.
• Help Monica launch her site to the best of my abilities around her timeline.
• Blog a minimum of five times per week through to June 30, 2010.
• Live everyday and enjoy and appreciate what I have.

So as you can see I’ve no doubt got to get some things going. Couple the above goals with daily life and there’s not a lot of time left to actually do things…but the goal in the end is to free myself from the day-to-day to allow me to have the time to do those things. All of this will be completed in full by December 31, 2010. I look forward to sharing my success, and no doubt failures, with you along the way.

Is there anything I’ve missed? Do you think I’m completely crazy? Wanna know more about something I’ve put in the list? It’s easy, just leave me a comment below.

Thanks to Lyndon for the inspiration and the graphic.

For those of you who know me, you’ll know that I rarely have a shortage of what I consider my “million dollar ideas” to build on. In fact, I fairly regularly add to the list. A while back I wrote a post about thought vs. action. It seemed to me it was a turning point in my thought process…one of turning it into action. Fast forward a little over 6 months and where am I now? For starters, I’m off on leave (that’s really hard to say and hard to talk about). A long story short, I’m a big ass ball of stress. In addition to that my “million dollar ideas” list is larger and not a single one has been checked off anywhere near complete. There are some tiny modules that are working here and there, but nothing impressive at all.

I consistently find myself in a position where I’ve got a great idea and don’t act on it. Years back when the whole Napster vs. RIAA thing was coming to light of being illegal I was chatting with friends and telling them about a different, legal way to do MP3s on the internet and ensure the artists continued to make money. Well that idea is essentially what is now known as iTunes (and many other online music stores). At the time however, there were none…not a single online shop doing it. I’ll stamp that with a big FAIL on it as well.

Last week I was watching episode 9 (second segment) of Dragons Den on CBC. I love the show. There’s something fascinating about watching people do stupid things. But at least they’re up there doing it. I had been chatting with my brother about an idea I had which we were calling BlueBinder (@BlueBinder) and how cool it would be to pitch it on Dragons Den and get some capital, but more importantly the expert knowledge of these highly successful dragons. All five of them would be a valuable asset to the business. Well just the other week, GrubCanada pitched (successfully too I might add) and the thought of BlueBinder flickered and almost died. Then a friend forwarded me an article from TechCrunch about GrabyMyTable and it knocked another dent in the side of BlueBinder…though I’m sure OpenTable will give them a good run. Luckily there is still at least one USP (unique selling point) I have with BlueBinder and I’m hoping to capitalize and honestly competition is a good thing…it gives you someone to target. That being said, action is imminent and required IMMEDIATELY. This idea, is honestly on life support right now but can definitely be revived for huge success. I’d love to find out some information on patenting the idea/process that I have for BlueBinder’s USP.

Referencing these recent ‘insights’ I went back to have a look at the list of “million dollar ideas” and started going down the list:

• SPRY: While not a million dollar company right now, at least it’s in progress and slowly making some income. Most would consider that a good thing and I’m definitely in that boat.
• uPlay: I guess you could make this similar to Pandora—at least from my understanding of Pandora. Since I’m in Canada I have a hard time accessing it to actually test drive it.
• BlueBinder: As mentioned above, similar sites exist out in the market place that are doing certain components and other various concepts but none are actually doing it the way I think it should be done or how I want to do it.
• Community Connection: This one was a huge learning experience. Over $20k of personal cash invested in it (and still trying to pay that off) and a huge education as a result. The publishing industry is definitely an interesting one. The product was ahead of its time and I have no regrets for doing it. There’s a slight twist I’m planning to put on it that will hopefully have it making some revenue when I decide to revisit it in 2010.
• Back 2 School: I can’t take full credit for this one. A lot of the basis of this idea was from my fiancee. A mother in Ontario has done something similar (it took me forever to find in Google), though not the same concept. I even had contacted various people at Staples, Grand & Toy and Office Depot to get communications going. It’s definitely a little bit of a challenge to get high up enough into some of these organizations.
• Hotel Reviews: Again, not a complete idea of my own but the guys at Oyster are doing something similar. This one is moving forward slowly and will hopefully launch in Q1 of 2010.

The best part about ALL the ideas above is that they’re similar, not the same (with the exception of the iTunes one from the mid-90s). What does this mean? Well it means I need to take action. The only way to become successful is by taking action. It goes back to the wonderful grade 11 physics class with Dr. Flint and the whole “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” theory. I never realized how that would actually play over into life as well as the scientific realm.

Of course the list of “million dollar ideas” above is not complete. It also doesn’t give more then a 40,000 foot high-level view of a few of the things I’ve been thinking of. Have you got suggestions on things to add or features you’d like to see on them? Simply comment below.

My thought around this for a moral of the story is take action. And more to the point, why not take action today. Tomorrow is not a promise.

I look forward to hearing about your lost “million dollar ideas” from sitting around with inaction. More importantly I look forward to hearing your stories of success. Please, leave a comment.

Yes it’s true, I’ve been thinking. Often this is something scary as the end result and it just may be in this case. As you may or may not know I’m off on a bit of an Eastern European tour. I’m sitting in the small town of Hostinée, Czech Republic right now. It’s beautiful here and so I plan to take a lot of photos. Of course, there was the connecting flight in London’s Heathrow airport that I got to spend a little too much time in as I missed my connect flight by mere minutes. Well, I missed the chance to check-in for the flight by about three minutes. I was not happy at first but took the opportunity to spend some time taking some photos and thinking. I haven’t had a chance to upload the photos or come up with a complete post around it but I’ll definitely give you a bit of a preview. It’s basically Canada vs. UK (or even Europe for that matter) and things that I know I’ll miss about this part of the world or that they’ve done right.

Honestly something as simple as actually separating the toilet and the shower/washroom makes perfect sense. I’ve yet to be in a home out here (and I’ve already been to a few) where the sink & toilet live in exclusivity alongside a bathtub or shower. To me it makes sense because it works. Just like low-flow toilets. Back home in Canada we’ve got this Americanized sense of entitlement that there will always be fresh water and a bit of a “who cares” mentality. One other thing I love…people are polite. Not only are they polite but they dress nicely too. Hard to find ‘scrubs‘ over here, unlike home…even in the office some times!

Of course I do my best thinking on my runs and finally had a chance to get out for a quick 3 miles today (or I should say 4.8 km). Everything here is metric…and I mean everything. I can’t tell them I’m 6′ 2″ (188 cm) or they look at me like I’m on drugs. Though the elevation is lower here then back home in Calgary, it’s a little more challenging as I have to watch for cars (pedestrians are truly seen as obstacles) and there’s quite a mountain climb initially. I’ll be updating my runs page off and on. The plan is to not spend a lot of time in front of the computer while here.

Oh and definitely one last thing I’ll miss that I’ll write about later would be the awesome selection of dirt cheap local brews! This country definitely knows beer!

Some might say I tend to fly a lot — my daughter does too. Working for Canada’s number two airline definitely helps me do that. Tonight I’m off for a couple of weeks to Prague, Czech Republic and the surrounding area. I’ve got my passport, some money in the bank, standby tickets on British Airways and am counting down the hours until I hopefully (cross your fingers) make it on their Boeing 767-300ER to London Heathrow.

This past Monday I was flying back from Winnipeg to Calgary on one of WestJet’s aircraft equipped with live satellite TV. The unfortunate part was they were INOP so nobody could watch anything. What was I to do? Oh no…what would I have done 4 years ago before live TV on the aircraft? Well I reached for my iPhone that had some podcasts on it that I’d not yet listened to. There were some from the Get-It-Done Guy that I’d downloaded a while back based around a certain level of interest. One of them was about packing wrinkle free clothes and it mentioned OneBag.com as a resource. Last night as I was packing probably too much clothing, I wondered if there was a better way. I rarely simply fold my clothes and stuff them in a suitcase (error number one according to OneBag). I often thought I was smart by simply rolling them. There’s no doubt that compared to folding, rolling saves A LOT of space. I decided to try the bundle wrapping method detailed on the OneBag website. Luckily they even have a nicely illustrated guide displaying how it’s done.

I was hesitant at first as I was laying out my clothes in this funny stack on the bed. But as I managed to add more and more to the pile it started to hit me that yes, this might actually save more room. So I continued laying items out. Then came the fun part, the actual bundling. I followed the guide and created this nice little bundle that, quite honestly, fit perfectly inside my Samsonite carry-on bag. HOLY SMOKES…there was room to spare even!

Now the fun part is I’ve got to undo the bundle tonight when I get home to add my jeans to the mix and another pair or two of underwear. I’m definitely using the bundle wrapping method as well when I do it again. Since I’ve not got to worry about my clothing being all wrinkly (though it will be because it started out that way), I can focus more time and effort on enjoyable things like shooting some photos. I’m definitely looking forward to this trip.

It’s no secret the other week that WestJet jumped into the Social Media game officially re-activating it’s Twitter account. The first to go off was a Twitter only promo code used in conjunction with a contest offering followers a FREE flight from anywhere in Canada WestJet flies from, to anywhere in Canada where they fly.

Last week I managed to stumble across a few clips that aired on Saskatoon’s News Talk 650 – CKOM radio station. I’ve added them in for your listen below.

I find it interesting that Mr. Bartrem indicates they took a unique approach using traditional media to get the new media noticed. A method that more companies will most likely exploit. In just over two weeks WestJet has more then doubled it’s follower account (currently sitting at 4,484). Still a far cry from Southwest Air or JetBlue.

On a separate note, last night JetBlue decided to begin its segregation plan and launched a new Twitter account for specific ‘Cheep’ deals (obviously a play on the word tweet).