Goal Setting for the Self Taught Creator

1. Class Trailer: I get so passionate when it comes to writing goals because it's like writing out your dreams, your ambitions, everything you want to become on a piece of paper and then making steps to have that actually become your life. Written goals make you more successful. We know this, and it feels great to encourage others to work towards realizing their potential and writing goals is empowering. Hi, my name is Matthew. I'm a stay at home dad, a self taught illustrator in the YouTube Welcome to gold setting. For the self taught creative being self taught, it's really easy to become stuck or frustrated or even fearful when it comes to growing in what you do in this class, I'm going to teach you how to write smart goals that actually work and give you a clear understanding of how to become the creator you want to be. I'll teach you to cast your very own artistic vision, right, empowering smart goals and overcome fear and discouragement and even give you some tips for getting started. There's even a bonus video where I share some of my favorite resource is. Once you enroll in the class, you will be able to down load the creator goals guide that I made to help you create your smart girls and keep them for life. If you're self taught creator of any kind and have ever felt stuck or frustrating in your goals, then let me help you create a clear path toward your future success. I can't wait to read all of your goals. See you soon. 2. Creating Your Artistic Vision: Hey, everyone, and welcome to lessen to casting your artistic vision. So in this lesson, what we're going to do is really get your mind going on what are really means to you to find out where it is. You really want to be where your desires really lie in, like what area where you want to go in, Let's say 10 years from now, So let's go ahead and open up the document that I put in your projects below what you can find it. There it's called Creator Goes Template, and when you open up to the first happened, the bottoms has lesson one, your artistic vision. Now when you open this up, you'll see on the left hand side the first column says your artistic vision and to these questions to stir up your artistic desires, and that's what I want you to do. So go ahead and positive video, answer these questions and be very honest with yourself. And when you're done and come back and hit play again, we're going to continue this lesson. Okay, great. I'm glad that you answer those questions. I really hope that you had no limits when you did it and that you answered. It's like to the full truest ability that you were able to That makes us. Okay. The next part of this exercise is to really envision yourself and where you want to be. In 10 years as an artist, so we're gonna do is we're gonna close her eyes and evidence of the screen fade to black. And I want you to just focus on my voice. Listen to what I'm saying and visualize in as much detail as possible. The answer to what I am asking you. Okay. So I want you to really tune into your inner, artistic, self and inner desires and really imagine what your life will be like in 10 years. So in 10 years, what does our mean to you? What is it? Is it different than what it means to you now? Are you practicing a new art medium in 10 years? What kind of artist do you want to be? What are you known for? What have you produced? What medium are you working with? What new things have you learned or what things were you afraid of doing that you actually accomplished? What big dreams did you succeed in What's your occupation? Are you doing art professionally? Are you doing it as a hobby? You're doing it for fun. Where are you? And who are you with? What is important to you? What have you created? What are you passionate about now? All right, everyone, go ahead and open your eyes. And what I want you to do now is right down. And as much detail as possible. The answers, all the questions I just asked you. Not necessarily word by word. Answer a question. My question. But just right on what you saw, where were you? What were you doing? What was important to you? What medium were you working in? What new projects that you complete? What things were you afraid of that? Now you are successful in things like that. I want you to write down just as much as you can remember of what you saw. And there is a section for it, right next to the first questions that you answered in your artistic vision. So go ahead and write down everything you saw about your life in 10 years, and I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Goal Setting: All right, everyone, welcome to lessen three writing smart goals. So in this lesson, I'm really going to talk about in detail what it means to me what has worked for me to write smart goals. If you've written smart goals before, it might be a little bit different. And if you have never written smart goals before that, I'm really excited for you because I really believe this is going to be something that changes the way you think about your goals and about where you want to get in life. You can get there. And I think that smart goals are the path that will lead you there. So that s in smart goals, stands for specific specific means. What we really want to get down to the nitty gritty for what you really want to do so would be the difference between saying I am more creative, which could mean many, many, many things. And I produce music or between saying I draw and I draw on charcoal that's getting very, very specific. I think maybe draw might be good enough, but there might be some people who really want to get into the details how they want to produce or create. So instead of saying you know, I want to create more, I want to be more creative or I want to just write more. Maybe you can say I want to write poetry. I want to write graphic novels So we're really getting into detail, actually withdrawing. You can say I draw more or I draw graphic novels or I draw classical art. I draw digitally. So how do you want to draw? So actually, yeah, you really can get into some really specific details on how you're going to achieve what it is that you want to achieve. The M in smart goals stands for measurable, and this is really, really important. You've probably seen it in my intro video Up on my wall. I have a board card metrics, and so that that is my measurables. That's the end for smart goals. For me. That's how you're measuring how you're successful. There has to be a number attached to know if you're getting closer to achieving your goal. So it's the difference with saying I want to draw more and I draw three hours a day or I draw 30 pictures a day I want to sing more and I practice singing an hour a day. You see, there's a huge difference now. You know, if you're hitting that goal or not, because I can say I want to draw more and drawn one picture. Is that enough? It's most likely not enough. So that metric really helps you to challenge yourself. And it helps you to know if you are being successful. It's how you're measuring if you create content. If you have a podcast or YouTube channel, your metrics are your subscribers. You were views and maybe your paycheck. If you're getting paid, so you want to have a goal in your metrics. How many subscribers do you want? How many viewers our views per video do you want? The M is so, so, so important when it comes to being a creator, really, when it comes to setting goals in general. So when I teach smart goals, I teach the meaning off the letter A to be accountable because, in my opinion, if you're not held accountable when it comes to your goals, your most likely not going to achieve them now. I left some space in the creator goals template where we're actually going to use a 30 60 90 plan, which is referring to 30 days out, 60 days out in 90 days out, that is going to help keep you accountable. It tracks the action steps that you're going to have to take to hit your goal by the end of the year. There are and smart goals stands for realistic, and this is a really important one because we do want to challenge ourselves as far as we can when it comes where goals. But we also want to keep them realistic. This is the difference between saying I'm going to have a multimillion dollar company by next month. Well, that's probably not gonna happen, is not very realistic. It is realistic to say I can have a multi $1,000,000 company in 10 years. Maybe I can really, really drain challenge myself in, say, five years. I don't know, really, if that's very realistic, because I don't have a multi $1,000,000 company. But it's much more realistic than saying I'm gonna have it by next month and in the realm of realistic also goes with if you are achieving over 50% of your goals. Your goals are probably too easy, and you can challenge yourself a little bit more. However, if you are achieving under 50% of your goals, then you probably need to pull it back a little bit in try to do things that are a little bit less challenging. The T and Smart goals stands for time sensitive. All of our goals are going to have a buy when date. You can see in the Creator goals template that in the smart goals table there is a by Wen column and in this column you're going to fill in the Bai Wen dates of when this goal is going to be completed. It's the difference between saying I'm going to start a graphic design company and I'm going to start a graphic design company by 2023. There's a huge difference. If I have to say I'm going to start a graphic design company, then that gold may or may not happen because I'm not putting a time on it. I'm not. I'm not giving myself that sense of urgency and saying, Hey, I want to achieve this goal by the end of this date. If I don't then I didn't hit my goal. And you know what? That might be okay, you might have to readjust, and you're most likely going to recalibrate your goals once you start working on them. But when he first write down your goals, you want to give yourself a deadline, for when you want to achieve those goals routes, it might take your entire lifetime. You never know. So before we actually jump into how to write smart goals, there's a couple of guidelines I want to give you. The first guideline is that when writing smart goals were going to begin with the end in mind, So we're going to start with our 10 year goal than we've done to our five year goal and then our one year goal. The reason why we do this is think about college. In college. You choose a degree and they give you the steps to achieve that degree. You don't just go to college, take whatever classes you want to take, and then on graduation day, show up and say, Hey, I've taken these classes. What degree can I get? No, we know what degree we want to get. Well, some of us do. At least I did it. But we know what degree we want to get. We know where we want to go, and we figure out how to get there. Right, So that's what we're gonna do When writing are smart. Goals were going to start with the end in mind. We know where we want to be, and we're gonna work away backwards to figure out how to get there. The second thing is that our goals are going to be written in present tense form. This gives you so much power when writing your goals. It's the difference between saying I'm going to be a graphic designer and I am a graphic designer. Whatever it is, your goal might be just saying that you are That is so empowering. So not. I've explained to you how to write smart goals. I'm going to show you how I write my own goals in The Creator goes template. I'm going to go right up to the top 2 10 year goal and my first goal is going to be my wife and I pay off our home by 2028. Okay, so now let's compare this to what smart girls. Actually, it's is it specific? What is the goal? Yeah, the goal is that we pay off our home. You don't think you can't get more specific in that unless you have multiple homes, which I don't. The M is for measurable. Well, what you're measuring is your mortgage in this case. So there isn't I can I can write of 150,000 so that makes it more measurable. But there wasn't metric, which was the mortgage is accountable, which I will show you soon how to use a 30 60 90. Is this realistic? So in 10 years, I hope it is in time sensitive. Yes, it definitely is time sensitive. The second goal I write. Actually, let's put this cool down. In artistic, I write and illustrate three best selling graphic novels. Jeannie. Well, yeah, but this can you eri 2028. Okay, now let's compare it to the smart goals. I write and illustrate three bestselling graphic novels so it is specific because we're talking about graphic novels. It's measurable because we're measuring it with the number three. I will hold myself accountable. I do. Things is realistic and it's time bound. Now let's show an example of where it doesn't line up with our smart goals. So I want to write a book. Right? Definitely is not a smart goal. So when compared to our first artist, ical of I write and illustrate three bestselling graphic novels to line up to that, it should be something like I Oh boy, right in every street. A the best Selling a graphic novel by January 2023. Great, huge difference. This was not specific at all. What kind of book are we talking about? There was no metric. Well, I guess the metric is a book, but I could have said, like, several books, right? And that would not have been specific. I don't know if I was being held accountable. Most likely wasn't Was it realistic? I don't know, because I don't know how many books I wanted to write or what kind of books I wanted to write, and it definitely was not time sensitive because I didn't fill it in so we can go ahead and delete this since we have our goal re ricin and the one year goal should be something like , I finish the rough draft for money Graphic novel by December 2018. Let's compare this to specific. Yes, we're talking about the graphic novel. Is it measurable? Yeah, just one graphic novel. I will hold myself accountable. I think it's realistic and it's time sensitive. Now that's going to the accountable section for the 30 60 90. So in regards to having a rough draft my graphic novel. So I have a few months before this is due because I set the deadline for December. So if I look in January, how can I set myself up for success? What things can I be doing now? Well, I can probably read a guide for writing a graphic novel. Probably read a character design book. If I have the book, I would write it in here because again, you want to keep these specific as well. And I would just continue to write things that need to happen in order to line myself up for this school. I am so happy that you guys have finished this lesson. It's my favorite lesson. I am so passionate about goals. I really encourage you guys to post your project in the project section. I am so excited to read your guys goals. It makes me so happy. I am so happy that you have taken your taking steps to move forward and progress as a creator and what it is that you want to do to build your life the way that you wanted to be . So please post your goals down below in the project section and read other people's goals and encourage each other, because this is how we become successful and become the creators that we really were made to be. I'm so excited. Um, the next section is about addressing and overcoming fear and discouragement, which tends to happen at this stage once you have made up your mind that you want to achieve your goals. For some reason, all these thoughts start coming to your head about why you cannot do it. So we're going to address those thoughts and now to set you up for success later. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Overcome Fear and Discouragement: Hey, everyone, welcome to our lesson on overcoming fear and discouragement. Congratulations again on writing your goals and we're just gonna tackle this topic writer ways that you guys can get started on growing the right way as a creator. So for some reason, when it comes to being a creator a lot of years, actually, when it comes to progressing in life, a lot of fears could come into place. And, ah, lot of times those fears are connected with insecurities. We just feel like, you know, we can't do it for some reason that way cannot do the thing that we want to do so bad. I myself have experienced this with Photoshopped, so I'm typically a traditional artist, and I haven't wanted to learn Photoshopped pre very long time, and so came to the point where even it was like two years ago, I even I signed up for the creative cloud and started paying for a photo shop membership. But I wouldn't do anything with it. I wouldn't even try because I would open the program and I would see how extensive it was and all the tools that there were, and I would disclose it because I felt so lost and that fear would come come into me and I would feel like a man. I can't I can't do it And I would see all these things everyone else is doing. And I would think they're so good and I'm not. There's no way you know, that I can do this and it's not true. And so we have to stop those thoughts from coming into our minds and stopping us from being the creators were supposed to be. I was listening to a podcast, um, a couple weeks ago, and it's hosted by Ryan Holiday. And he had a guest, Tom Bill, you that might be backwards. It was hosted by Tom Bill. You and his guest was Ryan Holiday, and he said, Quote, that was really powerful to me. Something along the lines of you know, we go into the gym and we see people who are big and strong and they're lifting really heavy weights. And we say to ourselves, Yeah, well, they can lift the weight because they're so strong. Well, no, they are so strong because they lift the weight, meaning artists and creators are really good at what they do not just because they're really good at it, but because they do it often and they just do it. And that's what we need to do when it comes to having this fear in this discouragement, especially when it comes to this discouragement. Something that we need to do is really encourage ourselves in believe in ourselves. Brian Tracy is like this awesome guy talks about goals and achievement, and he has this CD set called The Psychology of Achievement. And in that set, he talks about about achievement and the things that we need to achieve in our life, to consider ourselves successful. In the beginning, he talks about love, and he says that the degree to which we love ourselves is the degree to which we can love others. And it's that self love, saying, You know what? I'm not not being super arrogant or conceded, but saying, You know what? I genuinely love myself allows us to get over those discouraging moments where we feel like man, I can't do it. You're not gonna think that because yeah, I love myself. I can do it. I am going to do this and that's what we need to do so. A couple of things that we can do to actually work towards overcoming fear and discouragement is I want you to think of a time where you were afraid of doing something. But you decided to do it anyways and it worked out. Maybe it could have been going on a roller coaster or talking to somebody that you had feelings for, or something, anything, anything. Were you afraid of doing it at first? But you did it and it worked out. And I want you to write that down. I want you to write that down and keep it somewhere where you can see it. And then from this point forward, I want you to write down any time you take small steps into doing something that you were initially afraid of doing. Maybe like me, you're afraid of using this really powerful software. Whether it's Photoshopped, illustrator, Premiere Pro after effects, Whatever. I want you to write down all the times review, go into the program and just look around. Try to spend some time getting used to the tools, whatever it may be. I want you to write those things down and keep track of your small victories so you can start building some courage, building bravery and realizing you know what? This isn't so scary. I'm really not afraid off doing something that I'm really gonna end up enjoying in the future because, to be honest, there is no real danger when it comes to these things that were afraid of or discouraged about. It's not like we're physically going to get harmed. We're not. We're just afraid for some reason, because we don't think that were good enough or we see other people who are so much better than us. So we need to start taking small steps into overcoming those fears and getting comfortable doing the things that we really want to do that we know he really could be passionate about successful in. But we're letting this fear stop us, so no more. We're no longer going to do that. And what I want you to do now is I want you to write out encouraging statements to yourself where you can see them often. So what? Brian Tracy says. It's one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is to say, I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. I like myself and repeat that to yourself five or 10 times, he says. It's so hard to do that and not smile or not feel empowered. You're going to. So something that I've done is I've actually written a bunch of encouraging things on my bathroom here, and I repeat those things to myself every morning, and I want you to remember in this case, less is more. You know, it's kind of like when you have a highlighter. If you have it. The whole book, Nothing's really highlighted, is it? So I don't want you to write out an entire paragraph of things too short bullets that you're gonna look at and see. I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. I am a great artist. I am a great creator. I am a great writer. Whatever it is that you create, I want you to encourage and empower yourself daily, and you're going to see how this fear and discouragement he's going to go away. All right, well, that's enough about figuring discouragement because this class is about success. It's about goal setting. It's about positivity. So we're gonna put the fear to the side and we're going to move on. The next topic is my top five tips on getting started. You need to get started now. You need to do something today to start moving forward in the goals that you have created. I'll see you soon. 5. Top 5 Tips to Get Started!: Hey, everyone, I'm so glad you made it this far. This last video is going to be short and sweet. It's just my top five tips on getting started. Two day tip number one. When when you are trying to think about where you need to move next, what you need to do next, what to accomplish When there's so many things going on, you're not sure what direction to moving to. You need to think about what is going to have the most long term impact. A lot of times it's really easy to get bogged down with all these decisions. You don't know what to do, and sometimes it's easy to do the quickest and fastest thing. But in most cases, the quickest and fastest thing has very little impact on what you really want to get done. So I want you to think about and identify what is going to have the most long term impact. Tip Number two. Spend 80% of your time working in developing your strengths and producing and 20% of your time learning something new. Make sure you're not spending all of your time learning new things and not working on producing what you actually can in the moment that's really important to become a do er and not just a thinker. Great ideas are great, but if they just the ideas, they're not going to get you anyway. Tip number three is to pretend to hire yourself. This is something that I got from Jim Lee. He's the co publisher of DC Comics. He's an amazing, amazing comic book artist. In the interview, I heard him say that when he was younger, before he got his big break, he pretended that he worked for a comic book company already. And so he would wake up super early in the morning and he would draw for our Where's our talking? 8 10 12 14 hour days, drawing all day long and putting in that mileage. And that's what you need to do. Pretend to hire yourself, pretend you already have your dream job and start working in it. Tip Number three Limit your time spent on the resource is research, social media and inspiration and just get to work. Are you noticing a certain theme here? Get to work, become a do er, not just a thinker. It's really easy to stay scrolling through on Facebook or instagram social Media and looking at other people's art collecting inspiration from Pinterest. That's great, but that can only take you so far. You need to actually get to work. So be very mindful of the time that you spend looking up inspiration and resource is and just get to work into Number five is. Keep your goals visible and check them often. It's really important that these goals stay somewhere where you can see them. You know the saying, out of sight, out of mind. We don't want that to happen with the schools. It's actually really, really easy to forget about some of the action items you need to take. When you start moving on, getting a lot of traction and doing a lot of things, it's gonna be easy to forget to do something that might be pretty important to remember to keep them somewhere where you can see them. You can have it posted up in your closet. You could have notes posted up in your car on the dashboard again like we talked about earlier. You could write some notes down on your mirror so you see it right When you wake up in the morning, you want to keep your notes. You want to keep them your goals where you can see them and keep track of your metric data and updated at least weekly. So you can see how, here moving forward. What is the difference between what you did this weekend? What you got done? What impact did that have on your metrics? Did you grow in subscribers? Did you produce more art? Did you write more chapters? You want to keep track what you're actually doing and how it's increasing your productivity and how you're moving forward towards achieving your goal. Well, guys, that's it. At the end of the course, I am so happy you guys chose to watch this course. I cannot wait to read your goals written below. And I can't wait to see how you guys change and grow and what you guys are going to become as a result of writing down actual smart rules that work. Thank you so much for watching this course in the next class. Thank you so much for watching this course. The next lesson is just a bonus video. It's gonna be, um thank you so much for taking this course. The next lesson is an optional lesson. It's just a bonus. Video on my recommended resource is for creators. So if you're interested, go ahead and check that out. Otherwise I'll see you in my next class. 6. Bonus Resources!!: alright guys. So if you open up, the creator goes template and look on the bottom, there's a tab called Bonus Resource is basically what I've done is I have taken a bunch of resource is that I personally have used and I've crag arised them for you. So motivation and inspiration. The books in this section are huge. These books are great. They will really help you develop on mindset of somebody who is successful. I have books on creating comics, Digital and concept are graphic design drawing and this last category is a list of my favorite online artists. So Ross draws Will Patterson and see Pickup Ingo all have YouTube channels that are great for any visual artists. And Matt Core. His website has free tutorials on digital art. Photo shops of these were actually hyper links. You can go ahead and click them in this section over here. Just has a list of a couple of the people that I mentioned Ryan Holiday, Tom Bill, you and Jim Lee. I really hope that you guys check out these resource is because I know that they can help you out. The last tab is called Annual Accomplishments and this is just something that I dio my wife and I do this for fun and for encouragement is we write down the things that happened in the previous year. So, like we will do this like late December or early January and what it's right down. The things that we did that really encouraged us, we're really proud of. And then we'll make a list of things that we want to do the following year. So we've been doing this for a few years now, and once the list builds up, it's really encouraging. Well, that's it, guys. Now go ahead and get to work.