Start S.M.A.R.T. – Use S.M.A.R.T. Goals to Achieve More, Get What You Want, and Turn Your Dreams into a Reality by Justin Byers

This review is for Start S.M.A.R.T. – Use S.M.A.R.T. Goals to Achieve More, Get What You Want, and Turn Your Dreams into a Reality by Justin Byers. I received this book for free from the author through LibraryThing.com's October 2013 Member Giveaways batch. I was given two weeks to review it since it is a pre-release copy.

These are the questions I was asked to answer.

• Please write a review of the book. How did the book help you? What did you learn from the book?
• On a scale from 1-5 (5 being the highest rating), how would you rate it and why?
• I was also asked to point out any spelling or grammatical errors as well as any other mistakes that I noticed.

This book is pretty much exactly what I needed to get me thinking about my future and what I really want out of it. I really like the road trip analogy. It makes alot of sense to me. 

I started out doing all of the activitites but between it being a PDF which is really hard to read on an iPod touch, my iPod touch breaking down, and having to finish reading it on the computer, I stopped doing them and just thought about what I would have wrote down. The activities are really close together and some of them were a little bit redundant in my opinion. Also, it would have been great to see actually worksheets within the book for every activity. There was a link for a few worksheets but not for every activity.

The way station goals example was a little bit intimidating. It looks alot like an outline for a term paper and those kinds of things can be scary for some people.

I plan to use both the goals journal and an accountability partner in the future. Those are awesome ideas!

The errors I found were:

• Page 17 of 41: "It is difficult to say exactly you might mean..." The author left out the word "what" between "exactly" and "you".
• Page 21 of 41: The word fulfillment was misspelled as "fulfilment".
• Page 27 of 41: "You should find be a person you are comfortable being honest with..." The wording got a little bit confused in this sentence.
• Page 33 of 41: "...and what the emotional motivation behind it us." I think "us" was supposed to be "is".

I would rather it a 4 out of 5 because it really needs to have activity worksheets inside the book for every activity. I feel like I would have learned alot more from it. I would definitely recommend this book, even if no worksheets were added in the final published product though.

The book helped me by giving me ideas to keep my goals alive and help me achieve them. I learned a new way to look at my goals and ways to achieve them that I never thought about before or never knew how to execute.