What's a goal for 2018 that scares you a bit?

The one and only Nick True (who, by the way, also lives in an Airstream) asked a super interesting question in the FinCon Facebook group the other day. He asked what's one goal for 2018 that scares you a little bit?

It occurred to me how awesome that question was, because it hits at the heart of what real, get-the-F-out-of-your-comfort-zone goals should be. A goal that you could knock out in your sleep probably shouldn't be a goal. It should be what you're doing now without even thinking about it.

Goals that have the most impact in your life probably are goals that scare you a bit. What if you fail? How am I going to achieve that goal?

Hard goals get our creative juices flowing. They knock us out of our comfy rocking chairs and light a fire under our ass to actually do something. Something productive. Something to improve our lives.

Imagine that.

What are your 2018 goals that scare you?

The comments to that thread were super cool to look through.

For example, J.D. Roth from GetRichSlowly.org wants to publish 500 posts in 2018 - which amounts to around 10 posts a week. Holy wow.

Hélène Massicotte from Free To Pursue wants to start a YouTube channel. And, as a budding videographer of a growing YouTube channel myself (we're almost at 6,000 subscribers!), I think that's an awesome goal.

Pete McPherson, the dude behind the DoYouEvenBlog.com website, is building a complete training course for bloggers called BloggerU. In Pete's words, "Building B.U. into an insanely valuable program and the single biggest educational resource for bloggers on the internet."

Some other really kickin' scary goals from that Facebook thread? How about paying of $100,000 in debt? Or, how about "going live" with your followers for the first time ever through video? I'm sure that "quitting my W-2 and going solo" is super duper scary, too. Huge step, though.

Others want to increase their Twitter followers and blog pageviews. Some want to improve on their one-on-one engagement with folks within their own communities. Someone also wants to bring in a coooool $100 Gs through their freelance writing business. Niiiiice!

What's my scary 2018 goal?

I want to bring in $20,000 doing things that actually matter to me. That's it. It's simple to write, but tougher to implement. But, that's why it's a goal, and a somewhat scary one at that. We don't need the money. We planned our retirement so we don't have to work another day in our life and still have a reasonably good shot of never running out of those sweet greenbacks.

But still, I love seeing at least a little cashflow. And, developing a goal to see just how much I can bring in, while still maintaining my current level of insane happiness, seems like an awesome goal.

How? We have our YouTube channel that brings in a couple hundred a month. This blog is now generating a healthy income of several hundred a month. My work with Rockstar shores up quite a bit, and my wife and I are planning to release a couple of RV-related courses later in the year, too.

What about blog hits? Honestly, I don't care. I blog for fun, and whatever I bring in, I bring in. It's cool seeing traffic and all, but to be perfectly honest, I couldn't care less about pageviews. That said, though...

I've decided to up my game on Pinterest, just to see what all the hype is about. I know Pinterest can be the source of incredible traffic, but it's also a platform that I've largely ignored. Based primarily out of curiosity, I've tried my best to maximize my exposure on Pinterest to see what it can do.

Since I signed up with Tailwind a few weeks ago and started scheduling pins, I've seen a 30 to 40% increase in traffic from Pinterest. That's awesome. But, I've also started spending more time making images for my posts, which I've discovered is way more fun than I had imagined. The idea is to create a visual representation of your article in a bright, colorful graphic that people actually want to click. It definitely uses the right side of your brain and forces you to think about your content differently. I started with Canva, but now I'm using straight Photoshop with stock photos from Unsplash or Pixabay.

Oh, and for those of you who believe Pinterest is a social media platform, it's not. You aren't chatting and bullshitting with people on Pinterest like you are with Twitter or Facebook. Pinterest is a marketing tool, pure and simple. You use it to market your shit. To get people to click. Once you understand that, Pinterest becomes a little easier to deal with, mentally, during the course of deciding what platforms to target for blog exposure.

As long as all this continues to be fun, I'll keep doing it. The second any of it sounds like more of a chore than something interesting and engaging, I'll drop it like it's hot. After all, that's what FIRE is all about, right?

Right!

What's a 2018 goal that scares you?