“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.”

― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

With the year coming to an end, we all evaluate the successes and the failures of the previous year and set goals for the coming years. As December begun, few readers started to ask me about my goals for this year or if I’ll share it with everybody or not. To all of them, I’ll definitely share what were my goals last year and what all are the tools that have helped me achieve them this year, what are my goals for the year approaching ahead.

Let’s first understand the concept of Annual Goals. Do you think there is something magical happening in the beginning of the year that almost everybody starts taking resolutions and setting goals for the year ahead? Actually no nothing as such happens, it’s just a year is a reasonable time frame in which a person can process review and adjust their goals.

Though according to me every day is a measure of goal’s completion in a way. I look back at the end of the everyday whether or not I have done something contributing towards my set of goal to be achieved that particular year. I always get my to-do-list handy for the next very day to move one step ahead on to my skill sets required in order to achieve the goals. The next morning I get up and review my to-do-list and start working on them priority or hours’ allocation wise. This is the brick and gravel for cementing a good habit for me. After the week’s end, I try to run a checklist for nothing major have been left during the week which may hamper my productivity later on.

After a month’s time, I assess the progress made towards the achievement of whichever goals I have worked for the months’ time. I believe one months’ time is reasonable enough to have worked on a task and check if it’s working meaningfully for me or not. If it is working the way I had thought it to be, I’m on the right track. If not, I may need to alter something or the other to get it on track.

A quarter’s check is also required for the same to have a healthy notion of where am I heading with my goal achievement. A quarter’s period is high time to review and remove any thing that is not clicking as expected. In simpler words it is all about reviewing and adjusting time to time just how a cooking experience wherein we taste and adjust seasonings per our taste. And the period of a year is a very useful one for setting big goals and objectives.

Let’s have a look at My Goals this Year:

Goal #1 Better my Fitness Please don’t misunderstand me trying to get fit as trying to look thin. No, absolutely not. What I wanted since the beginning of the year was to bring fitness into my regular routine, which I think is the best routine to have for everybody instead of losing weight drastically.

I tried gym but to tell you the truth, gym guys are quite ruthless and they made me stretch my limits so high that I was broken sometimes and I quit. Alas! Next I moved to Yoga (because of my wife as she’s a Yoga freak). I kept on cancelling the classes some day or the other because the timing of the class could not suit me or God knows what but I quit that as well.

Then Jogging in the park came into my mind. I have a park near my home just 50 metres away, I plan on going there at least 5-6 days a week in the evening when I am back from my work. I seem to be successful at it I believe, as I am not negotiating with myself each and every day for not going to the park and not jogging. It is certainly going to be a long term healthy habit for me. I’m happy to share with you all today that I’m continuous at running and haven’t gained any weight further, though haven’t been able to reduce any. May be I need to focus and review my eating habits as well for getting myself into the perfect shape.

Goal #2 Upgrade my Skill-Sets Learning is said to be one constant thing throughout our lives and improvement in my skill by those learning is what I seek for.

These days I’m putting my 2-3 hours every day for learning new skill sets. For these I have subscribed myself to few courses on Coursera and Udemy. I take the lectures on the online course platform, do the exercises, think through the case studies and back those studies by reading similar line of content via books. This way I try to strengthen my knowledge on one particular topic that I have chosen to improve my skill upon. To name few, I’m learning to improve on my communication skills and my negotiation skills. The lessons taught are actually life changing if considered seriously and taken a note of thoughtfully. Suppose you happen to be curious of the courses that I have taken in the years passing by, here is the list:

1. Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content
2. Foundations of Everyday Leadership
3. The Complete Presentation and Public Speaking/Speech Course
4. Learn To Sell Anything
5. The Art of Evangelism
6. Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills

I also try to implement these new skills learnt in my daily life chores wherever appropriate, and many a times I feel it’s actually making a difference. The way I used to communicate earlier is no more the same, I’m more confident and well thought out while delivering something in front of others. I have many other skill courses to learn in my bucket list for time ahead, I’ll share about these as well.

Goal #3 Invest More My investment goal is very simple that I rarely associate it with small term goals. For my small term goals, I have my businesses that take care of the small term needs and requirements. This way I get ample of amount to be invested for the greater cause and for longer term of course. Each year I try to elevate my target of money invested and this helps me reach to newer heights too.

This year my target was to reach a level wherein I can think of starting other business and looks like I may be able to do it this year on. My aim always remains to create something which can earn me monetary benefits in return. And such that a good circulation of my money is maintained.

Goal #4 Start a New Blog I love to share my thoughts via the platform of blog. It gives me an opportunity to connect with millions and trillions of people whom I could never have thought of connecting, had the medium of blog not been there.

It is said that sometimes things take time for better reasons. I think for my second blog to come across it has taken good amount of time now, and is due to be live in January 2019. The blog is going to be insightful for people who have keen interests in Business and Investments. Since I read a lot about businesses and investments in equity/mutual funds etc., it gives me an immense knowledge base to share with you all. And it is not just reading stuff on investment and business, it’s about actually practicing them in real life. I have 3-4 businesses running (some full-time in collaboration with my wife, some part-time) and investments kept in place that demand a lot of knowledge base to gather for a wide range of industry.

I would love to share all this knowledge on my new platform in a brand new shape. I’ll soon update about the launch of the new blog here. Do keep a check for the same on this thread.

Goal #5 Take my business to new heights I hail from a Marwari family where business in in everyone’s blood, when does it spur to its fullest that only makes the difference of it all. My business of a Preschool had begun in the year 2017, it’s been around 2 years since I am running it. I want to take the same to a new height along with inception of few new businesses.

One year’s time has gone in the same for understanding the business nuances and operations. We did mistakes, learnt from them and this cycle kept repeating itself till the time and we’re still in the learning process. But, one basic thing which I have learnt throughout this time is that keep working hard and never lose hope in the good doings (in qualitative terms).

Let’s talk of the quantitative terms of the business also here. 99.9% of the times I keep thorough and exact records of every transaction that occurs in my business. This may include anything like each and every payments received and payments made to vendors, salaries or advances drawn for my employees, and everyday expenditures. In addition, I plan my business’s expenses by creating an accurate budget and I try sticking to it as well keeping some emergency funds for the inevitable occasional setback. I try not to overspend with the ease of credit card facilities as I have several of them and choose wisely when to use which one keeping in mind maximum points gained.

Goal #6 Read 24 books they are my new found love (after my wife of course). I have had a target of reading 24 books this year and happy to share that i have done it. In case you want to check and know more about the books I have read lately and recommend, you may click on the link below:

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/8702783-vikas-agarwal

My favorites among the lot are these:

1. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (Scott Adams)
2. The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results (Gary Keller)
3. Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind (Yuval Noah Harari)

You may find a similar taste when it comes to choose books genre as my blogs because these two large segments of Investment and Business interest me a lot.

Looking back at my goals of the passing year I feel all of these goals were regularly brushed up as the year passed along, and my approach to them has definitely changed as the year end nears. I picked up what was functioning in right direction and stressed on it and gave careful thought to what wasn’t working right and tried to come up with their solutions. I believe like my life is in a much better position because of these tiny steps of mine.

So, what are my goals for the coming year? Let’s start off first with their listing and we’ll review them next year in details:

#1. Making Fitness a Habit

#2. Creating two more Sources of Income

#3. Gifting myself the freedom of Time

#4. Investing 70% of my income into Equity

#5. Read 24 Books

#6 Improving another two Skill Sets

I can practically share with all of you that whatever I have achieved till date is because of the goal setting approach of mine. Goals were fragmented into smaller steps and actions were taken for completing those smaller steps. In your life nothing matters more than the choices you’re making in the moment. Your whole life can be moving into an entirely new and better direction, if you’re constantly making the “GOOD” choices. This fundamental logic is applicable in everything you do in life, but particularly strengthens the spending habits rather investing habits and a lot of personal discipline as well.

Hopefully my article would have inspired each one of you to get into the moment and decide on to your goals if not made one yet OR be firmer on the goals that you have already set your path onto.

Good luck!