A long while ago, I knocked off a goal that was on my list, which was to invest in a company working towards making life easier for the growing number of diabetics in the world.

That company was Dia-B Tech, and I just discovered that they are pretty much out of business, with shares in suspension since last year and just a few thousand dollars left in the bank.

Long story short, I don’t think I will be seeing any of my money back.

It reminded me of the two tips I have heard about investing in shares that I must remember before I doing something like this again:

TIP 1: Never invest more than you can afford to lose

TIP 2: Never invest in anything you don’t understand

I did follow the first tip, and so the money I lost is not something I was banking on.

The second tip though I neglected to follow. I know nothing about biotechnology, or how long drugs take to get to market, or what the likelihood is that a drug will get to phase 2 testing or beyond. If I had my time again, I would definitely have invested in something that I at least understand.

The only mistake is one you don’t learn from though, so I would say that I have now learnt my lesson (and please take this advice before you start playing in shares).

p.s. Tip 2 is attributed to a relatively well-known investor. You have heard of him. Warren Buffett is his name.

Yesterday I celebrated my 26th birthday with a dinner out followed by the theatre.

Turning 26 means that I now have only four years left to complete the remaining 135 goals on my list.

When I started Project 183 I needed to average a goal every 11.8 days. That is now down to 10.8 days per goal, so I am a little behind schedule, but am confident I will catch up again.

Here is me yesterday at dinner – as well as seeing how many goals I will get done in the next four years, I am also looking forward to seeing how different I look on March 10, 2013.

Not sure whether this counts as a failure or not, but it is a situation where I had a chance to achieve a goal and didn’t. So you can decide for yourself.

I have recently been on the search for a job in London. My search was focused primarily on getting a job at an ad agency (which happens to be goal 17).

I had reached the second round of interviews with two agencies, and performed really well in the first of them. Then I was offered a job as online marketing manager at a company called Truphone. Not an agency job, but an opportunity too good to pass up.

So I took up the offer, over the two potential agency jobs. It was tough to do, because ever since I arrived in London, I was thinking ‘agency job, agency job, agency job’.

But as much as I would have liked to knock goal 17 off my list, it wouldn’t have been the smartest move. As important as Project 183 is, I still have to remain open-minded and willing to make decisions that will impact on my ability to achieve a goal, if the overall benefit is better for me. In this case, it is.

So that is my take-out – always be open-minded to new opportunities, even if they mean heading in a different direction to the one you had planned.

The reason movie goals are on my list is because I am terrible at watching movies and thus I rarely make the effort.

Why am I terrible?

Because I fall asleep. Doesn’t matter what time of the day or night it is, if a movie doesn’t interest me straight away, my eyelids suddenly become heavy.

So the prospect of watching Gone with the Wind, a 222-minute long movie about love during the war, is pretty daunting, despite the fact that many claim it is the best movie of all time.

As I write this, I have now failed on three attempts to watch this movie. The furthest in I have managed is 90 minutes, which barely starts to get into the plot. I think I need to have about five Red Bulls, and start the movie first thing in the morning, to be able to stay awake for the entire film.

Perhaps I keep falling asleep because the movie is not my preferred film genre. Maybe it is because the film goes for way, way, way too long.

But most likely, I keep falling asleep because frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

It is very rare to achieve success without failure first.

So I think it is important for me to show some of my failures along the way to achieving Project 183.

The first failure I will post about occurred back in March, and relates to goal 112, which is to complete a CityChase competition.

To give a short background, CityChase is an Amazing Race style competition, with races all around the world. You sign up as a team of two, and on the day of the race you have a set number of hours to complete a series of checkpoints and then get back to the starting point. The Australian CityChase is held every March in Sydney. You can read more at the CityChase website.

In March 2007, I flew up to Sydney with Nat to have a go, and despite our best efforts, we didn’t finish in time. But with an understanding of the competition, and a desire to knock the goal off my list, I flew up to Sydney in March 2008 with my great mate Andy, determined to cross the line in time.

We arrived the day before so that we could familiarise ourselves with Sydney streets, in the hope it might make it a little easier to navigate on the day of the race. And it did.

But what it also did was wear us out a little more than hoped, and combining that with a really tough course, and not enough endurance training on my part, meant we didn’t complete the race.

I flew back from Sydney so disappointed, because I thought that I would surely have improved enough from the first time that completing it would have been a breeze. It showed to me that being complacent and expecting results to happen for you are the acts of a fool.

So far, this has been my worst goal attempt failure, but I think after two failures, I know what it will take to achieve success next time. Training, training and more training. And a GPS device would be handy too.

Andy and I still managed to have some fun on the day. We found fake moustaches at a $2 shop and planned to run the whole six-hour race with the moustaches on; they fell off after five minutes!