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In a recent podcast interview for Tech Nation, Dr. Moira Gunn interviews the author and psychologist Rom Brafman about his book: Succeeding When You're Supposed to Fail and the 6 principles of high achievement. The interview is a fascinating overview of the topics covered in the book, you can listen to it here:

The Six Principles of High Achievement

In the book, Rom describes people who find themselves in difficult situations in life, some even born into them, and yet somehow they manage to push through their obstacles and still become successful. Rom calls these people "tunnelers", due to their ability to tunnel through adversity.

Another interesting concept that Rom discusses in the podcast and the book is that of satellites: used here to describe people who act as a form of mentor that help tunnelers to achieve their goals. Overall it is a fascinating book, which is backed up be extensive research. The book is available on Amazon here:

Mark Graham (AKA festivalmonkey) has a big ambition: to attend three festivals in Ireland, every week, for a year! In between lecturing in music at the Waterford Institute of Technology in south-east Ireland, Mark takes the time to attend at least three different festivals in Ireland every week, some of which have included:

• Scarecrow Championships at the Howya¹ festival in Durrow
• Egg Throwing at the Culchie² Festival in Mohill
• Attending the Puck Fair, Ireland oldest traditional fair

According to Mark:

The more weird and wonderful the festival, the better. I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty!

Mark is now more than half-way through his year-long adventure, and is due to finish in September 2012. You can follow his exploits on his blog, or on his Twitter account.

"We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential."

Barack Obama, Daily Southtown, Feb. 19, 2005

I love this quote on ambition from Barack Obama, as it reminds us that we have to work really hard to achieve our ambitions. All of the trappings of success may come to us once we meet our ambitions (assuming that our ambitions are for material gain), but they will not be handed to us for free.

The use of "poverty of ambition" is also clever, because it associates in our minds poverty as a consequence of the lack of ambitions. The implication seems to be that the poverty (or lack) of ambition will lead to real poverty. It appears to be a favoured play on words by President Obama, as he used it in a subsequent speach:

"Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled."

Barack Obama, speech, Jul. 12, 2006

Once again, an excellent quote on ambition as it reminds us that not all ambitions should be material in nature, and indeed these kind of ambitions can leave you feeling unfulfilled.

We have created a new page on Google+, that we are going to use for re-posting our blog entries, as well as original posts and other links that we think you might find interesting. If you use Google+ and wish to add us to one of your circles, please do so here:

MyBigAmbitions.com on Google+

Feel free to say hello to us while you're there, we would love to hear your feedback!

Dan McLaughlin has a big ambition: to become a professional golfer. Given that he started with very little golfing experience, this was always going to be a tough ambition to achieve.

Dan was inspired by an observation by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, that states that the key to success in any field is to practice the specific tasks involved for around 10,000 hours.¹ Dan decided to quit his day job as a commercial photographer, and using the $100,000 he had saved up until that point, dedicate himself full-time to the study and practice of golf in order to gain 10,000 hours of practice, with the ultimate aim of turning professional.

According to Dan's website, he will be:²

Logging in 30-plus hours a week he will hit the 10,000 hour milestone by October of 2016.

This truely is a big ambition, and we wish him every success in reaching this amazing milestone!

You can follow Dan's progress on Twitter here: @thedanplan

Richard St. John, author of the best-seller 8 To Be Great, gives a fascinating TED talk on the eight traits he believes defines our level of personal success:

The eight traits are:

1. Passion
2. Work
3. Focus
4. Push
5. Ideas
6. Improve
7. Serve
8. Persist

How many of these traits do you possess, and how are you applying them to meet your big ambitions?

You can find out more about Richard St. John at his home page here.

Recently we had added a new feature that allows you to connect your Twitter account to your MyBigAmbitions.com account. Once you do this, you can configure your MyBigAmbitions.com account to automatically post a new Tweet to your followers on Twitter when:

1. You have added a new ambition.
2. You have completed an ambition.
3. You have added a comment to an ambition.

The tweet will contain a link back to the relevant page on MyBigAmbitions.com that you have updated.

If you wish to enable this functionality, log in and go to the new Connections tab on your profile page, then click on the Add Twitter account button as seen below:

When you have successfully authorized MyBigAmbitions.com on your Twitter account, you will then be brought back to your profile page here and you will now see the following new options under Connections which allow you to decide when we will Tweet to Twitter about your progress:

Please note the following:

• We will not store your Twitter password on our servers.
• If you do add a Twitter account to your profile here, we will add a link to it from your public profile page (under your profile photograph).

We really hope you enjoy this new feature and luck forward to adding similar features this year!

We would just like to end the year of blog entries by wishing you all a very happy Christmas, and a successful new year!

Photo by blacklord

Now that 2012 is nearly upon us, it is a good time to start to think about our goals for next year. MyBigAmbitions.com is largely concerned with tracking your big ambitions in life, but there is no reason to assume that you cannot achieve some of those in 2012.

To kick things off, here are our goals for 2012:

• To get more people to sign up to MyBigAmbitions.com and enjoy using the site.
• To add more features to this site.
• To build a public API for this site (if we achieve this in 2012 we will be very happy, as we know it is a lot of work).
• To make MyBigAmbitions.com compatible with non-Latin languages, such as Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese etc.
• To add a community score system to the site.
• To add tighter integration with social networks to the site, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Okay, this is enough to keep us going (we don't want to give everything away!). How about you, what are your goals for 2012, and indeed your lifetime ambitions beyond that? Sign up now and tells us about them.

The home page of MyBigAmbitions.com has been updated to give it a cleaner layout. We began to feel that the old version was confusing for users, so we made the following changes:

• The tag cloud of popular ambitions has been removed from the home page, and placed in its own page which you can access via the new "Popular" link on the navigation menu.
• The login form has been removed from the home page. You now have to click on the "Login" link on the navigation menu to login. Likewise the search form has also been moved to its own page.
• The "Join" button has now been made much more prominent on the home page, which we are hoping will lead to more sign-ups.
• The Google advertisements have been removed from the home page. We took this decision because, while we need to pay our bills like anyone else, we felt that our users should only start to see advertisements after they move deeper into the website, and even then in a (hopefully!) unobtrusive way.
• We have included a new bar near to the bottom of the home page that displays the thumbnail images of our latest members, which when clicked will lead you to that user's profile.
• Finally, links to our latest blog entries are presented on the bottom of the home page to try to encourage visitors to take a look at this blog, which we will continue to add new and interesting content to.

All told we really like this version of the home page, and hope that our users find it attractive and interesting.