Well May 2014 went off well, hit all my goals.
Now onto June 2014!
Here’s my goal sheet for the month. Just two major objectives:
Happy June :-)
Neville
Goals
March 2014 Goals and SXSW Update
Oh hello there….as I sit in my apartment and type this at 4pm on a Wednesday, there are literally thousands of people drinking, smoking, going to parties, going to industry panels and listening to one of 110 bands playing AT THIS MOMENT……40 feet below my feet.
This is called South By South West (SXSW).
It’s a festival/conference that takes over Austin, TX. in a major way every year during March.
100,000+ people visiting in a city of less than 900,000 people adds a certain “crunch” to the system. Not to mention pretty much EVERY ROAD downtown is closed for events, so driving becomes a joke in certain parts.
SXSW is 3 main parts:
- Interactive Festival = This where all the nerds from around the world come to talk about technology (my fav). This is where you’ll seen Tim Ferriss or Elon Musk just walking around.
- Film Festival = All the movie industry people from around the world geek out about making movies. This is where you’ll see Quentin Tarantino or Steven Spielberg chillin at a party.
- Music Festival = This is where every band, musician, and people-who-wanna-see-bands-and-musicians come into town. This is the largest part people-wise. This is where you may see Snoop Dogg or Lady Gaga hanging out.
I happen to live next door to the Austin Convention Center which is the epi-center of all the action…and everything else is within a 4 block radius. AKA…..it gets crazy around here.
With that craziness said, here are my March 2014 goals (which have been interrupted by SXSW so far):
The first part says “SXSW rent place and stay healthy”.
I ALMOST rented by apartment out for over $3,000/night, but tried to ask for a little more. After taking off to Thailand for a while and other work stuff, I listed my apartment almost before the start of SXSW, so the prices plummeted (oh…and there’s also thousands more apt/condos/hotels in downtown Austin this year because of a big building boom here).
So I didn’t rent out my place unfortunately, but I did stay relatively healthy through SXSW! I still worked out, I didn’t eat late night crappy food, I did drink but far less than normal. Overall I stayed reasonably healthy considering the unreasonable amount of free food/liquor shoved in your face for free during SXSW.
A few days before SXSW started I sent out the last 25 NevBox’s I had:
Here’s a bunch of the international ones going out (those are way more expensive and kinda a pain):
I bought a dog shirt:
We had a “Creative Writing Session” from the pool. Here’s Abel from Fat Burning Man (#1 podcast in the world!) working out of my pool:
Noah had a little party:
I knew SXSW was starting when outside my window I saw 4 electric BMW’s being unloaded for promotion (companies spend ABSURD amounts of money to get promotion during SXSW Interactive):
I rented out the guest suites in my building (both on the ground floor), one for my friend, one just to have parties in. One room had 4 big windows on the ground level like this, 1 block away from the convention center:
I stuck my 3D printer in the window:
…..and brought the guitars/mic/amplifier down just for some street-level concerts:
….and there was lots of co-working by the street also:
It was funny to see random crowds gathering to watch the 3D printer in action. It was the first time a lot of people got to see 
The street view:
A lot of people would just stand there and watch. Kinda awkwardly-funny if you were in the room!
Then we hit up a bunch of the SXSW Interactive panel sessions. Here’s Maneesh and Dave Asprey having one:
I was most happy to see Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak….I listen to his podcast all the time and love the way he can get complex subjects into your brain:
Abel playing a gig in the “Glass Box Room”:
I think by far one of the best parties I went to was the Uship party (Their headquarters happens to be across the street from my building which made it even better)!
One of the founders Jay who I know (and had to name-drop big time just to get me and everyone else in the party):
South By South Dog:
South By South Dog:
Some friends said, “Ok….you can print anything right? Can you 3D print a penis??”
Apparently the answer is yes……you can download a 3D penis from the internet and print it. Here it is:
A cool mural being spray painted:
A common sight during SXSW:
People are just EXHHAAUUSSTTEEDD from all the stuff during the day, and will grab random cat-naps whenever they can:
Saw this MASSIVE 3D printer that could print out big objects like full-sized motorcycle helmets:
Exhausted from panels and roaming around….I FOUND A HAMMOCK!!
After playing guitar and singing in the “The Glass Box Room” several nights in a row, I stumbled upon a booth at SXSW that sold throat relief spray for hoarse throats…PERFECT!
And now that the Interactive part of SXSW (aka the nerdy part) is over I’m back to work. I generally skip the music part.
Now off to finish all those March 2014 goals!
February 2014 Goals
This months goals were written from an island beach in Thailand (me and Noah jetted the country for a two week workcation):
I’ve got a document I made much like the ProblemSolvingChecklist which is lightweight, short, and easily consumable…..for whenever you need copywriting inspiration. I should be selling it in the next 10 days if all goes well.
I’m also making it a goal to get the KopywritingKourse setup more as a complete business, so that’s already happening.
January 2014 was a great month, cheers to making February 2014 awesome!
-Neville
P.S. We even happened to run into Nomadic Matt in Bangkok!
December 2013 Goals
Dammit I hate posting these so late in the month, but here-goes my December 2013 goals:
1st I’m porting the copywriting courses to MemberMouse. Existing members won’t notice a thing, but moving forward I’ll be able to do cooler stuff with a proper membership system rather than my current method of using Frontpage 2003. (Wow, I still use a TEN year old piece of software for my webpages).
Next I’ve been dying to send out another NevBox because people loved them so much, but I didn’t wanna just do ANOTHER one on copywriting (at least not right away because at the time I felt I couldn’t live up to the same value the first one provided).
This particular one is going to be called the “Life Changer” NevBox. I’m really excited about it because the change it should have on a person will be immense.
I was at odds with this at first, because the best customers (from a strictly business perspective) are people will a lot of money. However I think THIS particular product would have the GREATEST net-effect on people without a lot of money.
I still felt strongly about doing it, so I’m continuing despite the possible economic risk.
Just got back from Cancun for an Indian beach wedding, that was my only hope for a warm winter. Hope you’re staying warm too!
November 2013 Goals
More than a week into the month and I’m just posting my November 2013 goals….BAD NEVILLE!
But the good part is, the only real work I set out for myself this month has already successfully been accomplished.
Well, at least all the consulting slots have been completely booked up, and now I will have to do them all (it’ll be a buuussy ass week)!
I’m already rocking a neatly-trimmed beard for Movember, so it’ll probably get all bushy by the end of the month.
October 2013 was nuts since I was out of town every weekend and going to conferences and such, so it’ll be nice to be home in Austin for a little while.
My birthday is this month too, so I’ll have to whip up some small celebration plans. I’m not even going to ATTEMPT topping my 30th birthday of crashing Cuba!
Hope you’ve got YOUR November 2013 goals planned out also!
Sincerely,
Neville (who turns 31 years old this November 17th)!
How to get your life back on track
For a little now I’ve been “stuck” in my life. Things were great, then I got too comfortable, then things started to stagnate.
It happens to everyone.
It can be caused by things being too good, or too bad.
And lately I’ve been trying desperately to get OUT of it and back to my PRODUCTIVE life.
Well I did a lot of soul-searching kind of stuff and talked to a lot of people….and that helped to an extent, but dammit….there’s nothing like taking some good-old ACTION STEPS to get out of it!!
SO here’s my Guide to getting your life back on track:
I feel like if you do some/all of these, things will slowly start to spin around for you again. The underlying concept is getting momentum. I’ll try to back up each example with my own actions:
HEALTH WEALTH LOVE (3 minutes)
Quickly evaluate three main areas of your life and rank them from 1-to-5.
Health: Your health situation.
Wealth: Your money situation.
Love: Your relationships with family/friends/spouse/partner.
Before I was:
Health: 3
Wealth: 5
Love: 5
Then it became:
Health: 5 (+2)
Wealth: 2 (-3)
Love: 2 (-3)
So I can obviously see where I need to concentrate on.
Try doing this for your own life, and it’ll shine some clear idea on where you can get started improving. Here’s more about this concept.
Your Top 5 Influences (10 minutes)
This is one of my favorite concepts:
“You are the composite average of the top 5 people you hang around.”
This doesn’t mean your favorite people to hang around, it means the people you LITERALLY SPEND THE MOST NUMBER OF MINUTES WITH PER DAY.
So if you live at home with your parents, just by the nature of that arrangement, your parents will be some of your top influencers. Or if you have a husband/wife….they will be one of your top influencers.
So take a look around, and write out who your top 5 influences are (aka who you are physically around the most):
1.) __________________
2.) __________________
3.) __________________
4.) __________________
5.) __________________
Now…..
Are those people the kind of people you wanna become?
Are they as successful as you wanna be??
Do they have the kind of attitudes about life that you want???
Are they going to places you want to go????
If you’re hanging around a bunch of losers with crappy attitudes…..it’s likely you’ll pick up those traits too.
If you’re hanging around a bunch of positive people with great attitudes and ideas……it’s likely you’ll pick up those traits too.
So check your list to see who is negatively influencing you, and try to cut down the time you spend with those people so they don’t take you down also.
I dare you to cut out at least ONE of those people. DARE YA!!
Here’s more about your top 5 influences.
To-Do Lists (5 minutes)
You KNOW I’m obsessive about to-do lists. But I’ve been a little unfaithful to my dearest to-do lists lately, in that I haven’t been completing them everyday.
I have since returned, and the productivity has begun. Here is my to-do list when I started writing this blog post:
I actually took some of my OWN advice to get back on track:
Watch that to-do list video for some inspiration on how to make your own to-do lists.
You can find out more about to-do lists here.
Stack your calendar (10 minutes)
Simply GOING to events that interest you will help get some momentum going. I started to skip a lot of tech events and conferences….and this bad, because those usually motivate the hell out of me (meeting other people doing cool things always makes you work harder).
I still use a physical calendar to track all my stuff like this:
I went to my bookmark bar of “Austin Events” and started adding things recently.
All good spots to start: Meetup.com, Yelp.com, Craigslist Community.
Wanna go to tech meet ups? Then search “tech meet ups Austin” (or wherever you are).
Nearby universities generally hold a lot of cool events.
I have a whole bookmarks tab of websites/museums/charities etc that hold cool events.
Re-connect with friends by giving to them
Next thing I did was throw a small party (not a typical party though). I only invited 1 or 2 other people.
It was called the “Early Morning Blog Post Writing Party From Nev’s Pool Party!”
The rules were:
- We start at 8am
- We go to the shallow end of the pool at my apt
- You bring your laptop
- You write a blog post from inside the pool
I wanted it to be like “having your own writing island.”
So me and Billy (Forever Jobless) hit up the pool at my apartment at 8am with laptops for a “Blog Post Writing Party”! It may have been the nerdiest party in the WORLD at that moment!
I’m literally writing this post from the pool right now!!
It was actually damn fun, and Billy even said:
“I got more writing done today than I have in 4 months!”
If there’s any Austinite’s out there interested in joining me for this every once in a while, lemme know.
Changing your living space
I think changing your living space often signifies changing your life in some way.
I bought a super-kick-ass “Float” desk from HumanScale a few weeks ago, and it just arrived.
It’s awesome in several ways:
1.) It can quickly adjust to any height with a small lever.
2.) The work area is clean, all-white, and HUUUGGEE.
3.) The engineering behind it is awesome (it uses a counter-balance system that uses the weight of the stuff on your desk to move it up and down)….yet it’s all hidden inside the desk and you’d never know it. Basically it’s like a desk Apple would make!
It’s super-neat to go from standing to sitting in less than 2 seconds with this desk. Sometimes I prefer moving around and standing, but sometimes sitting down is necessary and more comfortable.
Screw all those “Standing” desks…..this one can do both!
The large size of the desk isn’t really conveyed in that picture. I’ve had it for a while now….and I can honestly say it’s been an awesome investment and really helped with productivity!
Also in the “changing your living space” department…….I needed some art for the loonngggest time but couldn’t find any. So I sat down and ordered two of the BIGGEST pieces of art from Ikea I could possibly find. I stuck one of them over a boring white wall above my bed:
It doesn’t look that big in the picture, but that picture is HUGE. It’s like 6.5 feet across.
I’m also making sure I make the bed every morning. I learned this trick from Gary Halbert:
Make your bed as SOON as you wake up in the morning, and you will already start the day off with a small win!
“Messy bed, Messy head.”
WELL…..
Those are a few things I’m doing to “get my mojo back”. Most of these things are more to mentally-psych myself into being productive once again.
Perhaps if you’re going through a period of time where you need this, you could take some inspiration from any of these tips.
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora
P.S. From my last Superpowers post, these people won NevBox’s: Dave, Dave H, Allen T, Jacqueline P, Robin W.
Thanks Sithana for helping me decide. I’m sending YOU one too for that!
P.P.S. Comment on this post with actions that helped your snap out of a sluggish phase in your life….I’ll physically ship 5 commenters NevBox’s (worth $97 each…and you can’t even buy them if you wanted to). Not only that, but your comment might give some poor soul trying to “figure things out” an idea that could change their life!
P.P.P.S. Please share/send this to anyone who could use a little “jump-start” in their life.
September 2013 Goals
I usually like giving myself only a maximum of three goals, but there’s no particular time-frame for them (which personally helps me).
So this month I’ve divided the goals up into week-long chunks. I’m testing how this will work:
WEEK 1: Apartment modifications
I’ve always been only semi-satisfied with my previous workspace at my current apartment. It was small, my legs would always hit the desk…and for some reason I was just LAZY at this desk.
So I ended up buying an adjustable height Float table….it should be here in a couple of weeks:
https://www.dwr.com/product/float-height-adjustable-table.do
I was thinking this amount of money for a desk is INSANE since you can buy a nice desk for waaaayyyy cheaper….but this desk had unique engineering, simplistic elegance, and can easily go from a sitting-desk to a standing-desk in 2 seconds without moving stuff off the desk.
……oh yea, and I also bought a 3D printer!!! (a MakerBot Replicator 2). More on that in a bit
WEEK 2: NevBlog store up and running
I’ve got so many different products and things I sell, but all in different places. Need a place to consolidate that a bit. Also need some semi-advanced functionality for some of these things, but I don’t want to build that myself. So I’ve started using Shopify to build a NevBlog store.
For a few days I was just CONSTANTLY comparing Shopify, BicCommerce and Volusion to see which platform would suite me best.
BigCommerce actually had the functionality I wanted right out of the box, but was more bulky, hard to modify, and less intuitive to use (but it did have a lot of very good features I liked).
Shopify was lightweight, SUPER easy to use. It didn’t have the same digital delivery capability as BigCommerce, but I’ve found some work-arounds.
WEEK 3: Products ported over.
I’ll have to go individually through each offering I have and make sure it works with this new store.
WEEK 4: Start life-changer NevBox.
To be announced :)
August 2013 Goals
Here’s my goals for August 2013:
I’ve been a little on the un-productive side last month, so to keep me on track, I’ll be trying to post my daily to-do list’s all scratched out on this blog.
Hope you’ve got YOUR August goals set!
June 2013 Goals
My goals for June 2013 are pretty simple. Only two. (although might add another if needed).
I’m re-designing this blog to be a little easier to read, and kinda go back to the old-school layout I used to have back when I was on Blogger.com.
Like this:
I dunno what it was about that layout, but it was just easy-as-hell to read and easy to endlessly scroll through.
Kinda want some elements of that back.
Working with Alf, and already got some of the very basic framework spec’d out:
Obviously a lot of the elements (like background) will change. But this just the general framework. POINT IS, this is moving already, so should be completed soon.
….
…….
………..
…………….
Next goal is a kopywriting book.
I randomly started writing it, and it went quick because it was based on the KopywritingKourse.
Now I think the video course is by FAR the best way to learn what I have to teach, but the book will be great for people who can’t watch it for whatever reason. It’ll also expose Kopywriting to a large audience.
It’s ALWAYS harder than it seems to crank out a book (I learned this from my Book In Two Weeks Experiment), but hopefully I can finish this month.
I’m going to TRY to limit the book to 70 or 90 pages so it’s really quick. Like a copywriting guide.
ANYWHOOZLE, those are my goals….Got yours set for June 2013 yet??
-Neville
May 2013 Goals
Well if you’re a lazy-ass like me you’ll NEVER get anything done unless you write it down the night before.
Aannnd on the same thread you’ll never accomplish what you want for the month….unless you write it down BEFORE the month starts.
So here’s my May 2013 goals:
Got your goals for the month yet?
People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going.
–Earl Nightingale