When I decided to finally stop exploring and re-publish my blog last week, I didn’t really know what to expect. I had built a nice email list of subscribers teaching online marketing and business. Now I was suddenly going into a completely new direction and I had no idea what was going to happen next.

But I was tired, and I was ready. I didn’t really care what was going to happen next, I just knew that this was a direction I wanted to take, so I was just going to bite the bullet and see what would happen.

I’ve been thinking about goal-setting a lot in the aftermath of my 2016 annual review. As I was writing the review, it became really clear to me that the way I’ve approached and executed my goals hasn’t worked for me at all.

As a driven, ambitious person, I was all for setting “big scary goals” for the year and then launching myself into action. I’m good at getting stuff done. I rarely feel overwhelmed, and this year I’ve had the time to really get stuck in with the work. However, my execution has lacked one crucial element – consistency.

I was so focused on the outcome of the Big Goals, that I ended up moving from one thing to another quickly as soon as something didn’t seem to bring the results I was looking for. It’s not because I’m scattered, it’s because I’ve believed that I need to work in an “agile” way.

My wake-up call came at a friend’s wedding about seven years ago. Somebody asked me what I did for a living, and I answered truthfully: I’m a singer in a rock band. She thought it was cool, but I went into a rant about why it wasn’t.

“Creative work is definitely more perspiration than inspiration. The constant travelling and playing late night gigs is exhausting. The ‘business’ side of ‘music business’ is a joke,” I fumed.

On and on I went. As you’d expect, she was pretty shocked. But it was her words to me that made me stop in my tracks: “Wow, so much anger!”

A Finnish tabloid newspaper published a story about Susanna, who went travelling to Indonesia. Initially, the trip was supposed to be a sabbatical, lasting for about a year, but the sun, the sea and the small island of Gili Trawangan stole Susanna’s heart. She decided not to return back home. That meant leaving behind the life as she knew it. She had a job in an IT-company. She had just bought a brand new flat. She didn’t have any family or friends in Indonesia, but she decided to stay.

The story received a lot of attention. The newspaper’s comments box was filled with varying responses. Many were positive. Some readers were inspired by Susanna’s story, and voiced their own dreams of moving abroad, away from the cold and dark Finnish climate. Some readers were bitter and cynical.