Ask HN: How did you do with your goals for 2010? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you do with your goals for 2010?

18 pointscperciva8 comments

Slightly over a year ago, aitoehigie asked what our plans were for 2010. Plans mentioned included learning Erlang, teaching kids to play Go, quitting a day job, ending the year with 10x as many customers as it started with, writing a book, starting to eat a proper breakfast, and many more.

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013531

I know patio11 succeeded in his intention to quit his day job; and I know I didn't reach my target (I have lots of new customers, but I'm not up by a factor of 10). How did the rest of you do with your goals for 2010?

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Looks like my goal was quitting, traveling, launching a new product, and finding a nice young lass. Darn this was a good year.

In Fall 2009, with only 1 year of experience with high-level web programming and no computer science background (BS in Management), I created the goal of working at Google within 3 years.

I enrolled in graduate school pursuing M.S. Computer Science, watched online course lectures, read textbooks, worked on a number of pet projects, and learned new programming languages... all while working full-time.

I'm now 9/30 credits towards my Masters degree and currently interviewing with Google (made it through 2 steps thus far). While I may or may not get an offer, it is just another step on the path to reach my goal.

I could do with some help with setting goals and working towards achieving them. I am never able to set goals which last more than a few days. I always end up changing them very quickly because either I get bored or find something more interesting or exciting. Any tips?

Take note when that happens and let that be your guide to telling you what you should be working on. We all have things we think we should be working on, but they often get kicked to the curb when something else comes along. The more you pay attention the closer you'll get to working on what really matters to you.

But if you want a tip, remember this: The grass may be greener on the other side, but it still needs to be cut, weeded, and watered.

Cool, I didn't post in that thread, so I can now make all sorts of claims about what my goals really were. :-)

all joking aside, I did not achieve everything I wanted in 2010, but I made some solid progress, and I'm looking forward to 2011. My "real" goal was to have a product shipping that I could try to sell, in 2010. I got distracted and lost some time around the middle of the year, and fell short of that goal. But I at least have some demoable stuff, and I now realize that that's fine, since I want to apply Blank's Customer Development Methodology before I go any further.

So my goal for 2011, is to get started doing Customer Development, and both find "product / market fit" and finish a product.

-Managed to : quit my day job, start a startup fulltime, release a product. scored few customers. Market has long established players but we have a unique differentiating approach.

-Not yet managed to : ramen profitability. Product is on the market for about a month, new version based on a lot of feedback is coming in early january.

-Goals for 2011: beyond ramen profitability, work, research (I tend to focus on algorithmic products), release a new web app and to get traction. Possibly will need to do a bit of contracting in between which will slow things down a little.

Had $100,000 in liquid assets and a revenue-generating startup by my 22nd birthday a few days ago. Pretty much what I set out to achieve.

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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013531

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