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Today is one of those days when I would rather be doing anything but working. The sun is shining, there's a nice breeze blowing and it's a balmy 76F here at the moment. Not only is the weather good but it's been a great week for the business too.

We finished the construction part of a major site for a mainstream client earlier in the week and last night the client showed it to a regional meeting of the industry that he is involved in. I'm glad we didn't know that was going to happen because that's a seriously scary thing to look forward to but we need not have worried. Those present thought the site was excellent so we now have the possibility of a lot more work from other businesses around the region.

We want to take advantage of the way the site was received so today we're making a few phone calls, talking to a few people and adding the site to the portfolio on our mainstream website. In fact it's time that we looked at brushing up that portfolio and site because it's definitely old and in need of some refurbishment.

It would have been nice to just kickback and enjoy the warm glow of satisfaction but that can wait till next week. Now is the time to press on and achieve even more.

Quite often new webmasters to this industry think that they have finally ‘arrived' after they see that first sale appear in the stats on their sponsor's site and I can understand why they think that way. Steve and I can still remember the excitement we experienced when we made our first sales and how much we wanted to celebrate.

But as one philosopher once said; celebrate your failures, not your victories.

When you do have a victory that's not the point at which you should be stopping work and slipping into party-mode. Instead that's the time to press on and achieve even more. Use that euphoria that you feel when you see that first sale as a spur to drive you on to achieve even more.

If your goal was to achieve that first sale then reset your goals as soon as you make the first one. Set your goal at making five sales, then 10 and then even more. Don't stop working just because you've achieved your initial goal because, really you don't have much to celebrate.

One sale, one website, one anything is not the measure of success. Consistently achieving your goals day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year is a measure of success and when you reach that point then you can celebrate.

As well as pressing on when you have achieved a victory you should also be doing something else too. You should be looking back; you should be reviewing how you handled whatever it was that gave you the victory.

Steve and I have been looking back over the project that culminated in that mainstream site and we have identified a number of things that we could have done better. For example, we could have communicated with our graphic designer in a more effective way. We could have also spent more time with the client explaining the way search engines work in relation to his site. If we had done that we wouldn't have had to sit down with him two days after the site went live and explain why it wasn't anywhere to be found in Google ... yet.

There are always things that you could have done better and there are always things you can do to make the path to your next goal easier to follow. The perfect time to look back and find better ways to move forward is when you have just achieved your goal. It's a great time to be brutally honest with yourself and assume responsibility for your failures.

It's always easy to blame other people for your failings and for the difficulties you had to over come to achieve your goal. Sadly, more often than not, the problems don't rest with other people ... they rest with you ... so what better time to admit your mistakes than when you have achieved your goal. Once you have admitted them, and learned from them, hopefully you won't make those mistakes again and achieving your next goal will be easier.

So don't stop to party and celebrate just because you've achieved your latest goal. Instead review what happened as you pursued that goal, identify the success and failures that occurred along the way and look at ways of reducing the failures. Then press on to your next goal and keep moving forward because that's what success is all about.