Goals. They’re good for you.

Goooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll!

No. Not that one. Sorry.

The other one.

Throughout my professional and entrepreneurial career, I’ve heard a lot about goals and how they’re important to success.

I was always one to call bullshit….probably because the goals that were set for me in my corporate gig were complete and utter bullshit that were in no way, shape, or form attainable. I didn’t care enough to even try to accomplish my goals because nothing really happened if I achieved them or not. Basically, I avoided being micromanaged for just a while longer if I reached my goals and I didn’t have to worry about losing my job as much as those who didn’t.

WHAT INCENTIVES!!!!

But I digress. I’m in a better place now far, far away from corporate shenanigans.

I recently came across an article by the Distilled Dollar on how he’s earning an extra $13,291 in 6 months. The title sure is catchy so I decided to check it out.

It really is an interesting post so you should check it out on your own but to sum it up, he did this by creating a goal and making it public.

I figured that if this can work for another member of the personal finance blogging community and he’s willing to share it with us, then what do I have to lose?

A couple of goals quickly came to mind…a certain number of page views or perhaps a certain amount of debt paid off? Those are valiant goals but nothing that got me really excited. Then I thought about what I’ve been focusing on a lot lately which is making money through my self-employment experiments.

A random number of making $100 in revenue this month came to mind. I checked out my progress and noticed that I only made over $100 in revenue in 3 out of the 7 previous months this year so that’s a challenging, yet realistic goal.

Then something weird happened.

I’m not quite sure if it was my subconscious or my dog telling me to do these things but this is what went down:

I had one lonely book up for sale on eBay for a measly $5 so I was going to put a couple more up for sale. After some research, it seemed pointless to put the rest up for sale. It was going to be time-consuming and not worth maybe eventually selling a book here and there. It was clutter and they had to go. So I threw them out to clear some room. Just for shits and giggles, I still had the ISBN for one of the books I was trying to sell on eBay and I typed it into BookScouter* and lo and behold, I could sell it for over $6!

So I went garbage picking through my own garbage for the books I threw out. (I’ll do almost anything to make money.) I even checked out some books that I wasn’t planning on getting rid of and sold those too. All in all, I made $19.57 selling books that I was either going to throw out or continue to have collecting dust on the shelf.

Not bad, but, this was just the beginning.

Next is the Coach purse story. One of the places I sold books to has a partner site of some sort that buys designer bags and purses. Something that I’m obviously an expert on!

I’ve had a Coach purse of my mom’s that she got through work years ago up for auction and it hasn’t sold in over a month. Without thinking much of it, I submitted pictures and a description to one of these sites and I got a quote for more than what I was asking for on eBay! I didn’t go through with it because it was a consignment-only offer which meant I had to send them the purse but I’d have to wait until they sold it in shop and only then would I receive any money for it. It sounded a little off so I decided against it for the time being.

Another coincidence is 3 pairs of motorcycle gloves that I’ve had up for sale for a couple of months now sold within a couple of days. Just like that, another $77.70 in revenue!

The biggest nudge however, has been to put some of my old motorcycle jackets up for sale on eBay. They too have been collecting dust in my closet for quite some time and they are in almost new condition.

These jackets would make plenty of riders happy and I’d break my $100 revenue goal with the sale of any of these jackets.

But they’re bulky…I’d have to take some pictures…upload them…and come up with some catchy descriptions.

Basically I was lazy and didn’t have any reason to put them up for sale. I had no real motivation to list them and it was something that I could easily keep putting off.

But that’s no longer the case since I’ve created my goal so all of those jackets are up for sale. If they don’t sell this auction-cycle, hopefully they’ll sell by the end of next month so I’ll easily meet my revenue goals for September.

Another pleasant surprise has been using the app, Ibotta. I’ll talk more about it in an upcoming post, but, you can check it out for yourself by clicking here. That link is an affiliate link so I’ll earn some money if you do sign up and redeem your first rebate within 30 days.

So we’ll see how this goal thing works. I’m really liking it so far. We’re about 3 weeks into the month and I’ve already reached my revenue goal for August.

If you find yourself stuck with something, maybe it’s time to set some goals. It worked out for the Distilled Dollar and it seems to be working out for me. Crazier things have happened!

* This is an affiliate link so I make some spare change if you click the link. Thanks for the support!