My first and foremost goal is to become a successful entrepreneur. Unfortunately, I am still working on trying to get there. While my grandfather’s laws make a great guide for running a business, I don’t have a business yet to run.

After talking with many other successful entrepreneurs, I find that everyone has to find their own path to success, but you can learn from what the greats have to say and let their advice guide you.

Get out of the house

I work remotely. My day consists of waking up, working, going to Publix for food, saying hello to the checkout lady and then returning home for more work. It is relationships with other people that lead to happy and successful lives.

While I can function completely fine by working from my home office, I need to get out of the house. I need to connect with other people to build a strong business network. For me, I build these relationships through my local programming meetups, attending startup weekends, or any other start up events.

Keep coding

My day job is freelance coding rails. I spent 8-10 hours sitting on my computer developing models, controllers, and whatever else my clients need to keep cashflow coming in, but that is boring. I need to keep my skills sharp and balanced.

Great! I know ruby on rails really well, but I want to be good at lots of different tools, because I have no idea what skills I will need in the future. That is why I play with different frameworks like NodeJS or AngularJS.

Stay focused on your goals

I attended the professional speakers Toast Master’s group a few months ago and one of the speakers was in the process of writing a “self-help guide to success” book. Her name and the book’s escapes me, but she had an interesting technique for staying focused on life. Every morning, write your goals in a journal. This starts your day off thinking about what you want to accomplish and keeps it focused on detecting signals that may help you accomplish your goals.

Keep a short list

I find myself in situations where I think: “Great! I have nothing to do right now.” Bullshit. There are always things to do, I find my mind is terrible about coming up with them once its entered that state.

Whenever I come up with a task that needs to get done, I toss it into my Wunderlist inbox. Now I find that I have a moment with nothing scheduled, I can always look their for guidance. I only put short actionable items in that list like: do laundry, ready this article on recommendation systems, or check Zillow for homes.

Hopefully by following these goals, I will stumble through life and find myself retired by athange 30, ha!