Click play below to hear part deux…

Hi! It’s Shawn Casey! Happy New Year! Remember, the future’s so bright you gotta wear shades. In fact, I’m wearing my shades today because; it’s New Year’s Day as I’m recording this and the day has dawned bright and sunny here in Atlanta, Georgia.

Absolutely gonna be a gorgeous day outside. Hope the weather is great wherever you are when you’re listening to this right now. If not, really simple: move! See! There’s your first new year’s resolution. Nah, I’m just kidding.

You don’t have to move, stay where you want to, live where you want to, that’s the whole point of being in charge and in control of your life, right? To live where you want, to be where you want. But, part of that target, aiming, goal-setting; is if you wanna live someplace different, you can also put that as part of your goal. When I talk about that, my own new year’s eve?

Man, was probably the quietest night. My wife and I have spent out New Year’s Eve in at least a decade, maybe longer, when we go to either big parties at our country club or we’ve been to many big parties in Las Vegas, in Atlantic City over the last few years; seen some great acts there. But, it was fascinating last night, because, we’re watching the Fox News countdown thing and there’s Toni Braxton on the stage and on TV chattin’ away and two years ago at our country club new year’s eve party which is a big black-tie bash there was Toni Braxton and her sisters and her husband hangin’ out with us at the party because she’s actually a neighbor or ours, has a house just down the street from us, and of course, has now got a great sold-out show in Las Vegas.

So, it’s kinda neat to say. Oh, you know? A couple of years ago, there we are hangin at the party together and then bham! On TV you’re watching your neighbor. Really kinda of a cool thing.

So, we enjoyed that and wound the night down with chocolate and champagne at midnight and then pretty much like us older folks do, that was pretty much it for the night. Yeah! So, not too much excitement here in the Casey household for New Year’s Eve. But, we’re excited about 2007.

It’s gonna be an awesome year here.

We wanna make it an awesome year for you and so that’s why we’re going through this series of messages to work you through the ideas, the concepts, the thoughts where you need to get your brain, so that this is the most awesome year of your life. Every year for me gets better and better and it’s not by accident folks. It’s not by accident! It’s not a twist of faith, it’s because that’s my plan. Because I sit down and make plans and organize and schedule so that the next year is better than the previous year and so on and so on and so on…

You know one of the most frightening phrases I’ve ever hear and I hear this from people a lot of times talking about high school or college days and stuff like that. When people go; “You know! You know, those were the best days of my life.” How sad is that? Come on! If the best days of your life are gone…what’s there to live for? I mean, it’s pretty much all over, right? That’s crazy. That’s just crazy. So let’s not be like that, the best days are yet to come. As good as this is, it only gets better from hear. It’s only gonna get better.

What an awesome feeling, what a great way to look at things. So, let’s talk more about setting goals. The specific targets at which we can aim ourselves so that everything will come into alignment and we can achieve those goals. Two kinds of goals in what you think about setting; big goals and small goals, and the big goals are where we’d really like to be.

They might be a longer term rather than a shorter term goal. They might involve lots of money or complete change in lifestyle or a lot of weight loss or something big, k? And we need to have big goals. What Mark Victor Hansen calls BHAGs; a big hairy audacious goal. I mean, they’re kinda really big. But the problem inherently in thinking really, really big is that you gotta actually get moving towards that goal and so that comes back to the age-old question of; “How do you eat an elephant?” and the answer is one bite at a time.

There’s actually a gentleman, who I actually think was in Germany, I can’t remember now for certain who ate a Volkswagen, and the answer to “How you eat a Volkswagen?” is the same, it’s one bite at a time. The way he did it was, he ground the Volkswagen up into small, small metal flakes, just like pepper. Then whenever he had a meal, he would sprinkle it on the meal and it took him a very long time, many years to eat the Volkswagen, but he did actually eat a Volkswagen. You might ask yourself, why did he decide to eat a Volkswagen? No idea, none. But then, maybe he thought it would be a most unique record unlikely to be broken, and he is probably right about that. But if you’re can eat a Volkswagen folks, you can accomplish huge goals? One step at a time, one bit at a time.

So, along the way to a big goal, we need some smaller goals and the smaller goals become what we call an action plan. Now, I know this is not just a plan, it’s an action plan, that’s a plan to take action? First of all, most people don’t plan to fail. They just fail to plan.

See, because if we have no target, we have nothing we’re aiming at then we’re in real trouble. So, we need to make a plan and then we need to take action on that plan. It’s like a Nike commercial ‘Just do it.’ So, we need to write out a plan; “For 2007, I have a plan. I know all my big projects. I know who the players are in them. I know approximate time lines for the first six months of the year laid out. I know a lot of it will change, so I haven’t got anything really definite in the second half of the year, and I’ve got massive projects rolling out this year. You know, it’s gonna be an exciting year. You know, we just started with the domain projects, with the domain profiteer, with Matt Smith, we’ve got a huge, huge new thing from Jeff Paul, Jim Fleck, and I, a new franchise company that we’re gonna start, that’s gonna be exciting for many of you to be involved in. I’ve never seen anything like it, especially the level of marketing and training and everything else we’re gonna bring into the franchise world.

We think it’s going to be absolutely extraordinary, and one of the, I think, most exciting thing about it is how easy we’ve made it for people to get started in the franchise business. We’re looking for something turnkey they can take and do. You know, that’s been 6 months in the making and still a couple of months to go before we actually are live with that, but that’s gonna be just huge, and a couple of other big, big project in terms of my business with some other partners. It’s gonna be an amazing 2007.

Just an amazing 2007, and I know where I’m going, what we’re going to do, what we’re going to achieve, where our goals are for everything that’s going to happen, and this is where you need to be. So, you set a big goal. It could be a 5 to 10 year goal, a big hair audacious goal, right? And then we break that down; what’s your goal for 2007? Where do you wanna be at the end of the year? You know, you can’t just say, well, “I wanna have a million dollars in the bank.” We’ve gotta be really specific what we wanna do and then what steps can we take to get there?

First of all, don’t let your income numbers be knocked back by worrying about how your gonna get there to start with. You know, let’s get set up with how we wanna lay all that out. What we wanna do is back up from there, and create some intermediate goals. You know, where I wanna be at the end of a month, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, a year. So, if we break this back down, so we have more immediate goals, then we’ve gotta get started. Say, if by the end of the month, I’ve gotta do X, then that means I gotta get started today. I can’t wait 60 days to get started ’cause I’m gonna miss my 30 day target. So, we need shorter goals?

Now, the other thing we gotta do is break down, for instance, let’s say I wanna sell a million dollars of your stuff. Well then, how do you do that? Well, let’s say you’ve got a 50-dollar product you wanna sell. Well, if you wanna sell a 50-dollar product you start figurin’ out “Well, a 50-dollar product and you sell 20,000 of these, the year,? So, how do you do that? Well, you start breakin’ back down, I’m gonna do this,

I’m gonna break this down, I need to do this many a week, a month, whatever. You know, you start down and go, “Well, you know, I wanna do a 1000 dollars a week.” What’s that, 20, ? Well that’s pretty good. So, you start doing 20 and then you say, I wanna double that to 2000 dollars a week, so now you’re gonna sell 40. And you work your way up from there. So, you wanna sit down and make a concrete plan. See, it’s much easier saying “Well, I wanna sell 20 of these a week.” ‘Cause then you can get your hands around that, and that’s good if you can sell 20 a week, you know you can sell 40 a week. If you can sell 40 a week, you can sell 60 a week. If you sell 60 a week, you can sell 80 a week.
So, when you work your way up to the numbers that you’re looking for by doing that, right? One of the biggest problems of people that talk about, motivating and goal-setting and things to me is that in the real world you could set huge goals but you gotta have a way to get there, and you need a starting point.

Now, first of all, if you haven’t made your first dollar online yet, then I think your first goal should be the next week I’m gonna make a dollar, any dollar, any way, any how. Run a pay-per-click ad. Do something that make’s you a buck. Because, I’m gonna tell you there’s an immediate change in your psyche; the moment you make the first dollar, even the first dime.

I remember, my sister started her internet business and she was selling an ebook and still does and sold the first one because she ran a test order, and she ran the test order, gets the test order and calls me up and she goes “I know it’s only me, but the whole system worked… people could order my book.”, and shortly thereafter people were buying her book and she was very excited. When she starting building up some ad sense websites to get some residual income from Google’s ad sense program, shortly into this, the first day, she made like 19 cents or something, and she calls me all excited again. And my wife was laughing at us for getting all excited, she’s like buy a postage stamp and I said “Yeah, but here’s the point.” The point is we now know the system works, where we can make 19 cents, we can make 19 dollars, we can make 190 dollars, we can make 1900 dollars, we can build the numbers up. ‘Cause now we know a system and we know it works.

So, we gotta get that first thing goin’? First thing goin’, get some short goals. So, big goals, long-term,? Short-term goals, now, we need some action steps. What’re we gonna do to get there? If your saying “I gotta get a product launched …” let’s get some short-term steps for products. Now, part of having an action plan is that you set deadlines, and deadlines are mother natures’ way of making you get stuff done.

Those of you who went to college know that one of the reasons that people, student’s end up staying up all night, was why? Were there were deadlines. Gotta deadline of an exam, deadline of a term paper , whatever it was. What made them stay up all night…all of a sudden and work hard, a deadline. If you will set deadlines for yourself and stick to them, you’ll find you accomplish a great deal, but you have to make those deadlines.

See, a lot of people I talk to they say, “Well, I’ve been working on an E book now for a while.” and I say “How long is awhile?” and they’ll tell me 6 months, a year, two years, and I ask them, “What’s taking so long and they say, “Well, it takes a long time to put this together.”

Now, you see if you gave it to a college student and said “It has to be done by Friday or you fail.” When would it be done. You got it, it would be done on Friday wouldn’t it? See! So we gotta go back to setting deadlines for ourselves, to forcing the issue, to forcing ourselves to move forward and succeed, because if we don’t do that, then we don’t get anything done, right? I’m fanatical about deadlines, I make myself crazy with them sometimes.

Trying to lose sleep, because I shouldn’t have to do that to hit my deadlines but if I needed to I would, and so, build in deadlines. You know, you’re drop dead date “I gotta have it done by this.” Thirty days from now, I’m gonna have my E book, done, and ready to sell.

Fifteen days later, I’m gonna have my marketing system ready to go, a sales letter, somethin’ online, runnin’ pay-per-click ads, gettin’ some search engine traffic, tryin’ some joint ventures, whatever it is? I’m not here to talk about the specifics of how you’re gonna accomplish this as much as, first you gotta have the plan, the target, the goal of what you wanna accomplish.

If you get that part of things together, then you can kick but on the rest of it. Then you can really kick butt on the rest of it. So, that’s the way I want you to look at this, right?

I get excited talking about this. I’m passionate about it, because it’s a lot of fun and I think it’s one of the huge keys to succeeding. It’s not just knowledge, it’s taking that knowledge, focusing in a direction and taking action. I’m gonna be back tomorrow. I got another great message planned for you to get 2007 kicked off great. This is Shawn Casey.

Remember, the future’s so bright you gotta wear shades!