2018: A Year in Interview

So you want to talk about your 2018 New Year’s Resolutions?

I’d rather skip the stereotypical screeds about resolutions and jump right into the goals that I’ve set for 2018 and why.

But what about the goals from 2017?

2017 was a reset year for me. I only shipped a few small things (a prototype app for a friend and a few t-shirt designs that weren’t well marketed. I did some contract work for a few months and tried to launch a few other projects without success.

Why do you think that happened?

I lacked clarity of purpose. You should boil an endeavor down its essence. What is the most important thing? For most of the year, I was lacking that in the products that I was building. It’s primarily what stopped me from shipping. By focusing on the essential thing that a product does, I’m less likely to get distracted by feature creep or gold plating. Does it do the essential thing? If so, ship it! It’s never going to be finished anyway.

So how will you tackle this in 2018?

For me, it starts with transparency. I was apprehensive in talking about what I was building because I’d bought into the idea that talking about things impeded me from actually doing them. But there is also a benefit to doing it as well that I was ignoring. By being transparent, I can induce others to hold me accountable. For example, when I announced my plan to read 6 books in one month, someone unexpectedly followed up with me and asked how it was going.

A virtual “Accountabili-Buddy”?

Exactly. And by publicizing it, the onus isn’t on any one person and it’s completely voluntary.

Great! What’s on tap for 2018?

• Ship 10 Apps/Frameworks
• Complete at least 1 month of voice over work with trainer
• 52 Blog Posts
• Fluent in Spanish
• Conversational in Portuguese

Depending on one’s perspective, that’s either very ambitious or very easy

True, yet it encompasses what’s essential for me. Weekly blogging about building the apps/frameworks fulfills my need to be transparent and underlying all of these goals is skill building in areas that I’d like to improve: speaking, writing, design and marketing.

What about those monthly income and expense reports. What happened to those?

I stopped doing them because there wasn’t much revenue to speak of from apps, tees and Amazon. I never felt comfortable including consulting income because the referee in me felt like that was “cheating” and those “points” shouldn’t count. However, I am working on an alternative outlet for the disclosure of expenses, as I still think there is value in sharing the cost of living in the places I visit.

C’Mon Man. It takes money to live and travel. You can’t act like it doesn’t count.

It does count but is it a good metric of success for these goals? Let’s take a look at my first goal: ship 10 apps/frameworks. If each one hits its target: doing the essential thing and existing in the world, I’ve already succeeded in regards to the goal. Sure there’s an ancillary benefit, the aforementioned skills I’ve built in doing so have increased my market value and I’ll be able to make a living from that. But regardless of whether I set goals or not, I’d still have to make a living. That’s table stakes.

So are you saying that you don’t care about the money?

I’m saying that if I’m successful in achieving these goals, I’ll be quite pleased looking back at 2018. Using income from these endeavors as a metric can muddy those waters, especially since it’s something that I can’t control. And why waste a year worrying about things I can’t control?