Ask Celes: What is Your Ultimate Goal for Personal Excellence?

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“Hi Celes, I want to know first of all: What is your ultimate goal for this blog? Because it is a fact that it is becoming a big family. And secondly, how close are you to that goal?” — Ephraim

Hi Ephraim! My ultimate goal for Personal Excellence is simple: To reach everyone in the world, help them achieve their highest potential (in the process reach their highest consciousness), and live their best life. In fact, it’s the same as my mission statement (which can be found on my About page).

Translating it into blog goals, this means (a) On a traffic level, to have some 6-7 billion people reading Personal Excellence every day or every month, babies notwithstanding, (b) On a community level, to be a place where *everyone* can grow together and achieve excellence in life, without boundary or limitation.

At the moment, we have about 500k unique readers and 850k pageviews a month. (Speaking of which, this is an all-new high for PE, so that’s something to celebrate about! *cheers wildly in the background*)

Personal Excellence has only been online for less than three years, so it’s been a fast three years of growth (though not fast enough though, imo). We’ve been growing exponentially in the past months, and I imagine we’ll grow even quicker moving forward as (a) I’m now more focused than ever in growing Personal Excellence, and (b) After two-and-a-half years of running PE, I’ve a good sense of what works and what doesn’t, as part of leveling up and 10,000 hours of hard work.

Along with the traffic growth in the past couple of years, is the formation of a community that’s deeply passionate about achieving excellence in life. I first caught sight of this happening with the introduction of 30DLBL last year, and was extremely warmed by what I saw. I have since developed Personal Excellence more as a community, rather than as an information-disseminating blog.

For example, after the first 30DLBL, came Personal Excellence Forums in Oct last year. This created the platform for readers to connect with each other and befriend one another, outside of the blog posts. This year, I’ve been running a lot of live challenges to get all PEers working on our growth together (21DHL, MDC, Blogging Intensive Bootcamp, 30DLBL, 30BBM). Most recently, I reinstated the blog comments so everyone can join in the discussion together.

My plan forward is to single-mindedly work on increasing blog traffic. This would be via writing more high-value articles, running more challenges with everyone, openly sharing about myself and my life, embarking on new growth experiments, and continuing to live true to who I am. I’ll also continue to try different traffic building strategies. If they work, I’ll keep them; if they don’t, I’ll simply discard them accordingly.

Where community building is concerned, I plan to do it by (a) Creating a conducive space for the community to grow, by setting the right guidelines and providing the right resources, (b) Leading by example, such that everyone feels safe to be a part of the community, and (c) Letting it grow by itself, which will happen as a result of traffic growth.

On (c), I don’t want to be too hands-on in developing the community, simply because I see it as a delicate seedling that’s gaining strength and coming into its own. By intervening too much, I’ll be affecting its natural growth. I ultimately want the PE community to exist independently without me, since I can’t be there to run it forever.

Apart from specific goals to achieve X traffic and to develop a community of excellence, I have no specific wishes on *how* exactly I want it to grow. I’m leaving this part open-ended. In a way, Personal Excellence is literally creating itself as we go along, so it’s exciting to see how everything is folding. It’s like a book that’s writing itself.

Other things like blog revenue, number of ebook sales, social media followers, etc. are secondary to me. I know that as long as I focus on reaching out to more people out there, helping them grow and live their best lives, everything will fall into place.