One moment changed my belief about goal-setting. It happened about 3-4 years ago. I set a goal to earn $xxxx everyday from Google AdSense advertising. Meaning that I won't have to do any real work, just earn it. And yes - that number has four digits and it's for EACH DAY.

No one of my friends, colleagues and family believed that is ever possible. Well, I started working and finding multipliers.

A multiplier in my ideas is some element that you can start, it brings you a little money, but it doesn't primarily relies on your efforts - meaning you can start it and it doesn't require maintenance, then you can start something else - it brings you little more daily, etc.

Ideas like that flow from one author to another in different books. Well, I started with a measly 0.05$/day with a little site with very little traffic from search engines. Some time later I created another site that brought me another 0.05$/day. Double progress. Haha. I knew I was only somewhere about 1/50000-1/20000th from my goal. Meaning that I had to create at least 20 000 more sites to achieve the goal. It was frustrating, since each site took me at least a week. That meant that I had to spend next 383 years doing the same to achieve my goal. And I wasn't sure exactly that Internet will be the same in next 383 years, looking how it changed in last 10 years.

So I needed to do it faster. I noticed that there are things that I do that can be done faster. Like keyword research. Being a good programmer I wrote a simple software that did pre-research for me. I paid a little for access to keywords database from some major company and built a program that accessed it. I got one free day from a week.

Then I thought that 5 cents isn't exactly what I want from site - I added link exchange page on sites that was centralized - whenever someone requested exchange - I got all notifications in one place and accepted or declined them. Sites started to grow and receive more, like 1-3$ a day.

The rest is pretty much the same - I added more sites, did some thoughs on how to speed up process and get more from each site, experimenting with colors, positioning, etc. Whenever I found a great idea - I applied it to all future sites.

And the day of glory came. I printed that AdSense Report stating that I earned $5 more than my original $xxxx goal. I didn't actually tell it to my friends just not to make them envious.

One thing I knew for sure then. If I hadn't stated that I want to earn $xxxx (exact sum) per day - I would have never achieved it. I wouldn't be moving in correct way to do it.

Do you still think goal-setting is not for you?