I’ve often had days when I wonder if I’m making any progress at all toward some long-term goals. It seems pretty easy to think this way given that the goals are long-term and we often only consider the hear and the now. These questions of progress can do some good. They can also hurt.

The downside of these thoughts is that it’s easy to draw the conclusion that no progress is in fact being made. If no progress is being made, what is the point of doing all of this work anyway? Will I ever see a payoff for my labors? It doesn’t seem like it. Maybe I should just quit. Perhaps that long term goal made no sense. Maybe it just wasn’t for me. It would probably be better if I invested my time in other pursuits. These negative thoughts are not helpful.

The upside of questions of progress is that they can cause introspection to occur which can lead to significant breakthroughs. Perhaps it feels like no progress is being made because the path needs a slight adjustment. Perhaps I can work smarter on this goal and bring about its achievement sooner than I thought possible. Perhaps I need to set some shorter term goals to give myself more feedback about the progress. Or perhaps it really is time to assess the worthiness of the goal and whether I’ve learned anything that causes me to question its value.

Most goals that really matter are the long term variety. Achievement of these goals matters because it often takes time and energy to do great things. It takes time and energy to change yourself enough such that the achievement of some goals is even possible. Simply put, achieving long term goals is hard. It’s much easier to quit. It’s much easier to not even establish long term objectives in the first place. As is often the case, the difficult path leads to the more rewarding outcome.

Here are two examples I’ve been thinking about recently:

• I have spent about 3 years learning to trade the stock market. I’ve often wondered why it’s taking so long to become an excellent trader. I’ve often wondered whether I’ll ever get it. I’ve often felt like I wasn’t making any progress. The reality, though, is that a ton of progress has been made, even though it often doesn’t feel that way. I didn’t know anything about the stock market a few years ago. If I really look back in time, it’s easy to see the progress. If I consider where I’ve come from, if I consider where I started, the progress becomes evident. So will I ever get it? I’m quite confident that I will because I’ve had an incredible mentor. This ensures that the things I’m doing every day to get closer to that goal do in fact work. Hundreds of other people have taken the same steps and become excellent traders. It takes time. It takes patience. And it takes a ton of perserverance. This is one of those goals I never plan on giving up on. I plan on pursuing it for the rest of my life.
• Another long term goal has led to questions of progress – Soapadoo. I would like Soapadoo to be a very successful business that provides a ton of value to people. I want it to be so remarkable and useful that folks can’t help but tell others about it. Soapadoo certainly hasn’t achieved these goals yet. If the site were truly remarkable, the traffic to it would have exploded. At this point, there’s been a steady rise in traffic each month, but it’s certainly not viral by any means. Are these Soapadoo goals achievable? I believe so, but I don’t know for certain. Does that mean I should give up? No! Hear’s why – I haven’t even been trying for very long. A few months is just not a long time when it comes to creating a business. It takes time to refine a business to be what customers are looking for. It takes time to market a web site. It’s easy to start a business and then wonder a few weeks later why it hasn’t been an incredible success. If you listen to successful entrepreneurs, it often takes months or even years for an entrepreneurial venture to gain some traction. Overnight successes are rare.

So, for me, I need to keep plugging away every day. I need to ensure that the things I’m working on every day take me a step closer toward these long term objectives. I need to be disciplined and determined.

Well, it’s official. Soapbox has been renamed. The new name is Soapadoo. This is why the site was renamed.

I’ve learned a number of lessons during this transition:

• Naming products is difficult.
• The domain real estate market seems like a pretty profitable business to be in. There’s certainly not an endless supply of .com domains out there.
• I need to research trademarking and determine if I should trademark Soapadoo. I don’t know if trademarking Soapbox would have helped me against Microsoft. Their site is a different kind of site than the Soapbox featuring reviews.

I’ve thought a lot about whether to give the site a name that in some way tells what it does. There are certainly a number of advantages of doing so. There are also a number of benefits of naming a product using a newly created word that doesn’t necessarily explain what the product does. There are a ton of examples of successful products on both sides of this issue. In the end, I chose a name that is a new word that doesn’t explain what the site does.

Either way, I need to make the site so remarkable and so useful to folks that they feel compelled to tell others about it. Then over time, perhaps the name Soapadoo can be positioned in people’s minds as an amazing reviews web site.

This rename process hasn’t exactly been easy. I felt like my car had stalled in the intersection and I couldn’t convince it to start back up. I’m glad to be out of the intersection now. My wife Kelly said at one point, “I am so sick of talking about new names for Soapbox. It seems like we’ve been doing this for weeks. Soapadoo is fine. Will you just go with it?” So I did.

Now, there’s much work to do. I’m really excited about it. I’ve got a number of features coming which will improve the site’s browsing features, make it more social, and help to spread the word about it. I’m also excited to finally start implementing some of Seth Godin’s ideas for how to market Soapadoo. If I can execute well on the plan, there should be a significant increase in traffic to the site. We’ll see in the next few weeks.

Microsoft recently announced that they will be releasing a web site to compete with the extremely popular YouTube. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to call their site Soapbox. It’s taken me a few days to process this development and I’ve made a decision about it.

I must change the name of Soapbox. I resisted this for a few days, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to bite the bullet and change the name. It hurts, but I think it’s the best option I have.

I’ve been reading the excellent marketing classic entitled Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. It has driven home the idea that the name you choose for your product is quite important. The really successful products have a brand name that has become associated with the generic product. When those brand names are discussed, people immediately make that association. Clorox = bleach. Bayer = aspirin. Ebay = auction site. Kleenex = tissue.

I need to choose a name for Soapbox that has the potential for that association to be made someday. So that when people hear the name, they immediately think ‘review site’. Microsoft has successfully soiled the name Soapbox. It will forever be associated with ‘video site’.

Hopefully, I’ll be announcing the new name soon.

A number of the pages in Soapbox contain a list of reviews. Until now, these lists contained each review in its entirety. This was clearly sub-optimal, especially as more and more detailed reviews have been written. I released an update to address this issue which allows users to see many more reviews at a time while lowering the amount of scrolling they need to do. I think it’s a significant improvement and it will facilitate some other enhancements that are on the way.

You can get a feel for some of the changes by looking here.

I recently learned a few lessons about planning and achieving long term objectives.

I used to do very little planning. I’d spend all of the available time I had on a daily basis working away at both short term and long term objectives. I’d just work and work and keep on working and have no end in sight each day. As you might imagine, this lack of planning approach didn’t work. I worked my tail off and never felt like I had achieved much.

Then my wife Kelly helped me to understand that it would be much better if I broke my day down into time slots. Each time slot was an amount of time I desired to spend on each goal every day. A basic time boxing approach. So there were time slots for Bible study, for consulting, for trading and learning about the stock market, for creating businesses, etc. If I didn’t get too much done during a time slot, that was ok. I did my best that day using the time I had available. I didn’t need to keep beating myself up about not accomplishing enough. I was spending the time I had intended to spend, I was living consciously, and I was living my life with a long and steady marathon pace that worked.

There have been weeks though when things didn’t seem to work out very well. Last week was one of them. I think I’ve just now realized why. You see, last week was a busy Soapbox week. I released a new feature that bloggers started talking about. (CenterNetworks, TDavid, Schulzone, TheStuffedDog, and my friend Rafe) There seemed to be so much that had to get done. So I bulled through and did those things. I was really enjoying it and it was stuff that was fun to do. I had started sprinting to accelerate the “creating businesses” goal because that’s what needed to be done that week. This sprint was at the expense of the other goals. That extra time I spent sprinting had to come from somewhere. I knew at the time what I was doing but I justified it by saying things like “it’s ok… I’ll catch up later…” Or, “sometimes these things take precedence…” Whatever. It boils down to not sticking to the plan.

I was able to make a ton of progress in one area of my life. But the other areas were neglected. So I got to the end of the week and felt like I couldn’t keep up with things. I felt like life was so hectic and overwhelming. I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing the things I had set out to accomplish. Some of the balls being juggled were hitting the floor. All of these feelings were completely justified because I HADN’T accomplished the things I had wanted to. I HADN’T made some progress toward each of the objectives. Some of the objectives were completely abandoned on a given day. Zero progress on that objective.

This “sprint on one goal at the expense of others” is not a good idea for me. It worked much better when I took a disciplined, long term approach and completely time boxed each of my activities for the day. Then I always got to the end of the week feeling like I was juggling all of the balls successfully. I was taking a step each day toward each of the goals. No balls were ever hitting the floor. No feeling of being overwhelmed. No feeling of a hectic life. I had taken the finite amount of time I had, broken it up into sections, and worked for each of the sections. I did the best I could with the time I had been given.

My friend Joe said it well – ‘Long lasting self-discipline is better than doing things in spurts that ultimately don’t stick.’ Joe was talking in the context of losing some weight. I think it’s a generally applicable principle of goal achievement.

Another realization I had was that there are things on my daily list that MUST get done and there are things that are nice to haves that I really enjoy working on. I realize now that I need to completely finish the must-haves before even thinking about the nice-to-haves. If I do them in the other order, the time slots for the nice-to-haves often get extended leaving less time for the must-haves. I think it’s a much better approach to finish the must-haves first and then know that anything else I accomplish that day is gravy. It’s almost like I need to work on the must-haves to deserve the opportunity to work on the things I’m really looking forward to doing. I’m working toward that reward which makes the must-haves more enjoyable.

I’m no longer going to justify the sprint. The marathon approach seems to work better.

I wanted to mention that I recently took part in the Q&A session that Seth Godin offered to people buying 11 copies of his book. I won’t go into any details, but suffice it to say that it was incredible. He is a marketing super genius and he had a huge impact on the entrepreneurs on the phone call. I greatly enjoyed it.

I’ll also say that there are gonna be lots of changes at Soapbox over the next few weeks. He had ideas that I don’t think I ever would have thought of. And even if I had thought of them, I don’t think I would have had the guts to proceed with them because they’re so different than what I was thinking. I’m really excited about the feedback he provided.

I’m pleased to announce the release of a new feature of Soapbox which you bloggers out there have been asking for – Blog Syndication.

Why would you want to syndicate the reviews from your blog onto Soapbox?

• More people will see your reviews.
• More people will learn about your blog.
• Each syndicated review in Soapbox contains a link to your original blog entry.
• Your reviews will matter more because they’ll have more reach.
• When people are buying a product, they typically search review sites, not blogs.
• Your blog’s rankings in search engines are improved as more sites refer to your blog.
• It is SO easy to mark a blog post as a Soapbox review.

If you’d like to know more about it, here are more details.

To support the latest feature of Soapbox I needed to upgrade to an improved web hosting plan at OCS Solutions, primarily for memory reasons.

A pleasant side effect is that many of the pages are now loading in 1/3 to 1/2 the time they previously did. After I add some caching this week, there should be another significant performance improvement.

It seems that every life story I’ve read about successful entrepreneurs includes them being told over and over again that they’re idea couldn’t possibly work. Here are some of the forms of “No” that are often heard:

• “I doubt anyone would want that”.
• “Other companies are already doing that.”
• “That would be too difficult. It couldn’t work.”
• “That would cost too much money.”
• “What if you fail at that?”
• “That would take too long to implement.”
• “If you did that, one of the big companies out there would implement that and you wouldn’t be able to compete.”

Humans generally resist change. Entrepreneurs generally embrace change and bring it about.

The act of creating a business isn’t supposed to be easy. If everyone you talk to about your idea thinks it’s great, perhaps it’s not such a great idea. Perhaps it’s too easy to implement. Perhaps it’s not a big enough change from the status quo.

Perhaps we should be excited to hear from the skeptics. Hearing from the skeptics might mean that you’re onto something.

As many of you know, I’m diligently trying to make Soapbox so remarkable that customers feel that they need to tell their friends about the site. Seth Godin’s Books have taught me that passionate customers can do a much better job of marketing than I can. I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin.

I am quite confident that Seth would have a number of ideas about how to make Soapbox more Purple. I’m quite sure that he would have ideas about which sneezers I should be trying to reach to turn Soapbox into an Idea Virus.

So I started thinking about how I might provide Seth Godin some value. I started thinking things like, “Is there anything I might do for him such that he might be willing to talk to me for a few minutes about Soapbox? I wonder if he’d be interested in some kind of equity stake or some kind of revenue/profit sharing in exchange for some verbal collaboration?”

THEN, I read his blog post this morning. WOW. He is offering the chance to participate in a call-in Q&A session for people willing to buy 11 of his books. I find this to be an incredible offer. A remarkable offer. In fact, the only reason I’m writing this blog post is because I’m so surprised by the offer. I think that Seth Godin is passionate about what he does and he enjoys helping folks. It seems to me that the businesses and individuals who are most willing to serve those around them are often the ones who prosper.

So, I’ve emailed Seth in the hopes that there might still be room in the Q&A Session. We’ll see!