Hey there,

First up, belated Happy New Year to you. I sincerely wish you the best year you’ve ever had.

If you’re anything like me, you had a ton of different plans and ideas ready to go… all singing, all dancing stuff to make you more money in less time, with less stress than ever.

Am I right?

That’s just how it works. It’s your inner-entrepreneur struggling to get out.

January becomes a time of proto-evolution as you gear up for a year in the trenches, hip deep in what John Carlton calls Operation Moneysuck.

But then February wades in like the school bully – slapping your lunch out of your hand and grinding your face into the mess you left from 2010.

Reality can be a bitch, can’t it?

Well yes, it can. But personally, I won’t let it. You shouldn’t either.

2010 was a monumental year for me. My best biz year ever, I made a whole slew of interesting friends and had a lot of cool new experiences.

Best part of 2010 for me? Sitting down a few days ago with my calendar and working out that I took a total of 13 weeks vacation. Pretty cool huh? Especially when you consider I almost doubled my income from the year before.

Now, that may sound all blue skies and lollipops… but it didn’t happen by accident.

It happened because I had clear visions of what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to accomplish.

In a word, I had clarity… and scary as it may seem, clarity is something that most businesses are sorely missing.

Without it, you’re essentially hoping that you have a good year… relying on fate to not kick your ass and deal you a shitty hand at each opportunity.

Don’t know about you, but I’d rather not just wish for success… I’d prefer to make it happen.

So here’s what to do to make sure 2011 doesn’t crush you under its heel, tearing up your half-baked plans and laughing while it does so.

Sit down right now (seriously) with a pen and paper, and work out what it was you did in your biz that gave you the most monetary bang for your buck.

I’m talking about the things that generated great returns with the least effort, and stuff you can easily repeat.

Once you’ve got a few notes on that, move forward and make some notes on the opposite stuff. The things that hindsight tells you were a mistake, the massive time-sucks and projects that didn’t do well, or maybe weren’t even completed.

For example, 2010 was a banner year for me… but I still had one project that failed spectacularly… time-wise, income-wise, in just about every way you can imagine. I worked on it for seven whole weeks, only for it to tank on launch day due to decisions I wasn’t privy to.

Result? Lesson learned and I’ve moved forward. Time is everybody’s most valuable commodity, so I’ll make damn sure there’s no way I’ll ever find myself in a similar situation.

You see, every mistake you make, every bad choice, poor decision, downright DUMB thing you do is really just an accelerated method of learning. There’s nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about. The only truly stupid mistakes are the ones you make over and over – and those usually come directly from a lack of this kind of clarity.

It’s surprising how much you can learn from a simple brainstorm sessions like this… even in as little as an hour you should wind up with way more clarity than you previously had.

Then, you go to work planning a year that lets you capitalize on the more profitable, fun stuff you did, and deliberately avoid the mistakes and bad situations you stumbled into.

The trick when doing this is to be as objective and logical as possible. Don’t let your feelings cloud your judgement. This is simply an exercise in finding out what worked for you last year, what didn’t, and how to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

A good solid hour doing this could easily be the most valuable business hour you spend this year, because it will affect every hour from here on out. Don’t skip it.

Hope that’s useful to you.

What are your goals for the rest of 2011? I’d love to hear some of them, so let me know what you have planned in the comments section below.

To the blank page,

-David Raybould