Break it down

How much do you want to make this year? $50,000? $100,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? Whatever it may be you get to some point where it just doesn’t seem achievable. It seems too hard, too out there and too big of a number for little you to fathom. Well that’s the first and most important step to not reaching your financial goals, believing you won’t. What if the goal seems so far fetched, so hard to believe that you feel your only kidding yourself when you set yourself the target?

The reason it feels so overwhelming is that your focusing too much on the bigger picture, that big number which right now, is just a little bit too big. I believe it is vitally important to focus on the bigger picture and set yourself a target but there is something you can do that will make this goal much easier to get your head around. Break it down.

Thinking of big numbers can get overwhelming so try thinking about little numbers, little numbers that make up your big number. You often hear people discuss what they need to earn monthly to achieve their desired level of income or that target financial goal. I think a month is way too long and that number in itself can get a little too big for comfort. Want a million bucks? Well get prepared to set yourself a target of over $80,000 per month and that’s a lot of cash. Then financial vertigo kicks in and you revise that number down to $10,000… no actually make that $5,000.. ah that’s better.

Well before you start culling your dreams try breaking it down a little more. I mean right down, not per week or day, even per hour. Go right down to the moment, try breaking it down per second. To make a million dollars a year it will require you to make about 3.17c per second. Wouldn’t you say this is much easier to imagine that saying you need to make $100,000 per month? With today’s automated business systems it’s quite standard to set up a revenue stream 24hrs per day so that part is not really a big deal.

For example, If you have a website where revenue is generated through Adsense ads or similar, try to imagine a visitor clicking every 5-6 seconds (15cents per click roughly?). Aim for those clicks, not the monthly $100,000 or yearly million. Bring it right down to basics and immediately the task ahead won’t seem so daunting, shifting your mindset from being totally overwhelmed to saying “hang on, that’s not so bad”. Even 1c per second which is about 1 click every 10-15 seconds equates to $864 per day, $25,920 per month or $315,360 per year. That’s only 1c per second or a click every 15 seconds or so. If you get a click every few minutes then it’s not so hard to imagine building the traffic to eventually hitting your broken down goal.

This can be used for any business. If you sell ice-cream. Sit down and work out the profit margin for each ice-cream sold. Set yourself your yearly or monthly profit target then break it down. How many ice-creams do you need to sell per hour? Once you have worked that out it may seem a little easier to build a marketing strategy and business model to support your broken down target.

Remember what your are doing here is shifting your mindset and taking a different perspective of your desired outcome to tell yourself it is achievable. This will lead to the genuine belief that it can be done and that’s the biggest step you can take towards achieving any goal.