TheRatRaceLab.Com

A belated Happy New Year to you all.

I have been pretty evasive in talking about just exactly what went down at the end of this year, and the blog has been short on content, views and comments recently. I recently purged a lot of the old posts from 2009. Including this post, I believe that 31 posts remain in existence however, and I am looking to moving things forward.

One of the main reasons that I have not divulged a lot of what has gone is because it has a lot to do with another person’s business, and it would have been unfair of me to share details about their affairs without their permission, and frankly, had I asked for it, I still don’t think I would have got it. It would have been a fruitless activity.

Secondly, I am still trying to make sense of a lot of what happened and where things go next. As far as “where are things going next” is concerned, there is still a lot of stuff up in the air and I am in the middle of making some of the most significant and difficult decisions of my life. I won’t go into those too deeply. This blog is predominantly about business and online marketing and a lot of my decisions incorporate a lot of very personal factors and relationships. I am not sure it would be valuable or worthwhile posting all about them here.

What I think will be of value is sharing with you the 9 lessons I took from 2009. In many ways, this has been one of my worst years. I have found myself under-challenged, under-stimulated and under-achieving and falling short of a few of my goals that I set for myself at the start of this year. I even remember telling a friend of mine on New Year’s Eve of last year, that “2009 is our year”. It wasn’t to be, and I make no such grand statements at the dawning of this new year.

So, whilst this year has been a predominantly painful experience, I am trying to turn that negativity on it’s head and look for the positive in the situation. One of the big positive’s about 2009 was that I developed some important online and commercial skill sets. Further to that, I also learnt a lot about life, love, people and business. I’d like to share with you 9 important business/people lessons that I took from 2009 and will be shaping my approach to the years to come. I hope you find some of these useful and I hope some of these things resonate with you.

1. Treat your online “make money online” income or hobby as a business. I can’t stress this enough.

2. Have a vision that guides your business and life. Be in it for something else other than the cash, or you are destined to fail.

3. Have a positive impact on everyone and every situation you are involved with. Even when the excrement seems to be hitting the fan!

4. Never spend if you don’t need to. Make shrewd financial decisions and be sure to live within your means.

5. Business is truly all about relationships. Even online businesses.

6. Treat your customers like gold. They are the life blood of your business.

7. Be honest with yourself and others. Identify problems, causes of problems and face them.

8.  Don’t underestimate the greed of people, including your closest friends. This was the most important lesson I learned this year.

9. Systemize everything in your business. Get efficient and productive!

The above is a short summary of the 9 lessons I took and learnt the hard way from 2009. Maybe you’d like to add some of the things you have taken from this year in the comments section below?

Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post on the eve of New Years, I am looking to turn this into a lot more informative blog, with some great resources for people interested in online marketing and business models. This isn’t going to be my personal blog. I have a domain and website setup for that, and any personal blog I do is going to talk about a huge range of things. Business, love, people, health, philosophy, politics, music, the lot. I don’t want you to bore you all here with that, and I am not at the point yet where I can talk about all that in any detail.

So I am focussing this blog on documenting my transition from full-time “Rat Race Participant” to self-employed businessman enjoying, time, freedom and money. I want to document this in the hope it will help other people, and also me when I look back on it. I am going to be sharing a lot of ideas, information and results of things that I do on this blog, and will keep you up-to-date with all my projects.

To get off to a good start in 2010 and to set the tone for this blog, the only content I have planned is based on the list of 1-9 lessons I have posted in this blog post. I am going to be talking about each other 9 lessons in depth with a blog post dedicated to each listed point in this post. I am going to into detail about how I discovered these lessons, sharing personal insight and anecdote from the businesses and projects I have been involved with this year. I am going to be showing you how to apply these lessons and insights to your own business and how you can avoid a significant amount of the mistakes I made in 2009.

I’ll be fleshing out the content here with updates on my latest projects and how well they are doing etc as well, bringing you actual results and analyses of what worked and what didn’t. If this all goes well, the story ends in the next couple of years, when I reveal to you I hit my targets, reached my goals, and I am ready to start living the life I have always dreamt of. Hopefully you’ll be able to reply in the comments box below that post “me too.”

To your continued and infinite success my friends.

Alex