2009 is over and we are ready to start even more powerful into 2010. Since it is the first day of the year I would love to take a quick look back on what great things happened in 2009, what were the best posts and what are the next steps to come.

The Birth of UYM

2009 was an awesome year for UYM since it gave birth to this blog. It all started on 2009/08/05 with the first article “How to Unwrap Your Mind – Or Why Personal Development Sucks“. This was a rant that offloaded some of my frustration with some of the concepts in the personal development industry.

I had a pretty good start from this since joining Leo Babauta’s A-List-Blogging Bootcamp. Thanks to this information I was able to increase a loyal readership to 500+ subscribers in these months. For any starting blogger, these are numbers that are very satisfying, and besides the satisfaction from the numbers the loyalty of my readers, the quality of the comments (after installing a good spam filter) and the reactions on Twitter showed me that people really like the quality content I produced in the 40 published articles since my start.

The Top 10 Articles of 2009

Other Ínteresting Things

Uncopyright

On 2009/09/27 I made the decision to uncopyright my blog. That means you can literally steal my content, copy it, send it to someone else, use it in your own work, without the need to ask for any permission.

So if you would like to use part of the content in your own work, if you would like to translate it, if you would like to republish it – yes, you can. You don’t have to email me any longer asking for permission to do so.

This was an important step following an example by Leo Babauta from Zen Habits.

The reactions have been very positive, my subscriber count has increased since, and I had my content used on other sides with some pretty good reactions.

Translations

Miguel de Luis Espinosa was so kind to translate 2 of my articles to spanish. You can find them on my translation page

Guest Posts

I also made some guest posts on such great blogs as Steven Aitchinson’s “Change Your Thoughts”, Goodlife Zen, Write to Done and Arvind Devalia’s blog “Make it happen”. You can find a list of my guest posts on my “Other articles from me” page.

My Goals for UYM in 2010

2009 was only the start, but my goals for 2010 are pretty lofty, including - increasing my subscriber base to 10,000 readers - developing a consulting course - writing at least 1 book - doing more guest posts and having more guest posts on UYM - creating & using more interactive formats like videos, etc.

There are some interesting things coming up, so come back often or best to subscribe if you haven’t already.

Some Personal Notes

The last weeks I have been a bit laid back on UYM, since I moved into a new house with my beloved lady and had to finish an important business project at the same time. That shifted my focus a little bit and didn’t allow me to focus on UYM as much as I wanted. But since these projects are now finished, rest assured that I will switch gears with the development of UYM in the upcoming months.