Oh Snap! I forgot my 2017 Goals

bychristianWA

623 followers

7 years ago

Happy new year!

I know I'm a little late, but I've been a little laid up. Every New Years day, I get together with a group of other motorcyclists for breakfast. We always meet at the same restaurant which is located about an hour and a half from my house. Sometimes the ride is really cold, sometimes it's wet, sometimes it's really nice. This year, the weather was really mild for a Virginia January so the ride up to the restaurant was really nice.

On the way home I was leading a pack of seven other guys. We were on the interstate and traffic was heavy but moving at about the speed limit which in that area is 65 MPH. We were in the left lane on a stretch of highway that was under construction with a jersey wall blocking the left shoulder off. I saw the car in front of us swerve and saw a dead deer against the jersey wall. We indicate objects in the road that might be dangerous to riders with our legs, so lowered my left leg to indicate the deer.

Unfortunately, I misjudged the distance between myself and the deer and caught it with my foot. Hitting a deer with your leg at 65 MPH, is not a pleasant experience and I don't recommend anyone try it. I wound up breaking my leg in four places and dislocating my ankle.

Now, it could have been much, much worse. Through the entire impact and after, I was able to manage to keep my motorcycle upright and even managed to cross three lanes of traffic to get to the right shoulder and come to a safe stop. At that point, one of my friends helped me off my motorcycle and to the guardrail to wait for an ambulance. Had I not managed to maintain control, I could have been skipping off the asphalt at a high rate of speed.

One of the things that I had planned on doing when I got home after our breakfast was writing out my professional goals for the year. I always do that on January 1st. Needless to say, I was not able to complete that task and have neglected to circle back around on that task since.

I'm doing much better now. I had surgery to have a large plate put on my fibula, which was snapped. The plate is held in by eight screws. I also had a small plate put on my tibia and two screws put through my ankle.

So being laid up (and doped up), I've slacked on a lot of my responsibilities for the first part of the year. Well, it's time to get back to it. Without further ado, here are my goals for 2017.

I'm going to somewhat follow the S.M.A.R.T. goal guidelines. If you are not familiar with what those are you can read about them here https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/smart-goals.php, but I mostly just want mine to be realistic and measurable.

Get 300 Referrals and go to Vegas!

I mean, who does not want to go to Vegas? Am I right? This goal is probably my loftiest one, being as that it is already mid-February and I don't have a single referral yet. That is in part because I have ignored my site that I use to promote WA in favor of a niche that my wife and I really enjoy and work on together. Right now, my wife is focusing on that niche, which will allow me to free up some time to focus more on promoting WA. I'm looking forward to the challenge.

This goal is easily measurable and I also believe it to be attainable, but it is lofty.

Improve traffic to two of my sites by 20%

This is something that I think we should all do every year. An old mentor of mine had a saying, "If you're not growing, you're dying." That's a little morbid, I'll admit, but the sentiment is very accurate. So how do you measure growth of a website? Traffic! We can always find a way to generate more traffic. This goal is again, easily measured.

Improve my social media footprint

My social media promotion has been lackluster the past 4 or 5 months. I've already renewed my effort in this area earlier this year. This one will be tougher to measure, other than by referral stats to websites. I suppose it can also be measured in social media follows.

I like to keep my yearly goals to around three or four, so I'm going to stop there. I'm one of those weird birds that does monthly and quarterly goals, some of which are centered around achieving my annual goals, some are not, so stay tuned for those next month.

Did you set your yearly goals yet? Let us know in the comments below.