Lesson 3 – Clarifying your goals

A few people got in touch with me after the last lesson saying that their brains were ticking on overload with this new information but that they needed help creating a link between their big picture (lifelong goals, if you will) and their more immediate plans of what they want to achieve this month.

If you think of the whole process as reverse engineering then it makes more sense. You want to reinvent the iPad, so you buy an already completed iPad and take it apart (don’t try this at home if you want continued warranty protection from Apple!). You study the components that make up the completed iPad and you learn how they fit together. Then, you strip the whole thing down to individual parts, and rather than trying to build the WHOLE iPad in one go, you start systematically recreating each component so that eventually you have remade every single part. Then, because you could see at the beginning how they fit together, you just click all the parts back in and voila, you have a new and hopefully improved iPad.

That simple? You can bet you’re ass it is not. The likely reality is what you will end up with is an object that looks like an iPad, but in fact does not work at all. Why? There are two reasons for this. Firstly, you were copying someone else’s design, and this is a recipe for disaster. The original designers of the iPad spent their whole lives learning how this technology works and how to design, construct and improve upon their own earlier designs. For you to come in, a rookie, and try to improve upon something with so many years in the making is arrogant at best, and at worst totally illegal. The second reason is you left out a number of absolutely pivotal components when you put the iPad back together, and these are the SKILLS. As humans we are very good at recognising patterns and mimicking others, but that kind of monkey-see monkey-do approach is quite transparent and rarely delivers the goods when it comes to manifesting your real dreams.

So what’s a better approach? Firstly, make sure your big picture is your own. Don’t just copy another persons dream because you think living their life would be fun. Really think about what true happiness looks like to you. Think about who is around you, what things you have in the fantasy, what things you are doing. The more truthful you are to your heart’s desires the clearer your big picture will be, then you can start to break it down.

In breaking it down to smaller pictures (your 12 month goals and your 30 day challenges) make certain that your stepping stones are actually relevant to your big picture. Let’s go back to the Da Vinci mural example again, the Last Supper:

In this diagram we have the big picture at the top – the ultimate goal, in this case to be able to create gigantic beautiful murals in cathedrals like Da Vinci’s own painting. A good goal that will take a long time, if not a lifetime to master. So to have a fighting chance of ever getting there, we need some more immediate goals that are relevant to the ultimate goal.

In this case, our first 12-month goal is to learn to paint faces with depth and character. In murals like this, faces are essential and must be created with skill and confidence, so it is definitely a relevant goal to master that small part of the collection of skills required to make this whole big picture. 12 months is also a good timeframe because much can be done in a year, lessons can be taken, and literally thousands of practise faces can be drawn or paint in pursuit of that ultimate goal.

In the even more immediate (knuckling down even more, so to speak) the 30-day goal (or CHALLENGE as I prefer to put it) is to paint 500 hands to get the details right. Practise makes perfect, so painting 500 hands in a month is a worthy goal that will build skills required to complete the 12 month goal and thus step towards the big picture. It is all relevant, and involves some serious hurdles that with some focus will be surmountable!

Let’s look at an example more relevant to the music industry:

The big picture here is spending your days hanging out in a private studio, writing hit songs (presumably for a decent living to justify doing nothing else and still eating!). A great lifelong career goal that has more than a few what-if’s between now and then. This is one that many strive for and few actually achieve, perhaps because there is a lack of clarity in the goal-setting, or a lack of follow-through in the small picture challenges. Whatever the case for others, if this is your goal you can most certainly achieve it if you set the right goals and back them up with serious hard work.

In this case the 12-month goal is to have a single playing on international radio. This is perfect and totally relevant to the big picture. Without songs on international radio, there will never be any hit songs and so no private studio or career as a songwriter can possibly follow.

An example of an irrelevant 12 month goal to this particular big picture would be “Have a date with Kim Kardashian”. Okay, maybe that would be nice, and maybe she would even have good connections in Hollywood that could help your career along, but that’s too many maybes for this plan to work, and your love life doesn’t really have anything to do with your life as a career songwriter (unless you’re looking for a muse). The goal set in the image above is exactly what we need, because without radio play, the big picture is literally impossible and will never be reached.

So, breaking it down to an even more immediate goal, in the next 30 days you want to write and arrange 5 songs that have hit potential. Totally achievable in the time frame set, but also challenging. What exactly is hit potential? Well, nobody really knows the exact formula of a hit, but chances are if you show 50 people the songs you write and most of them think they’re great, then you’re onto something good. Whether or not any of these 5 songs makes it to actual hit status doesn’t really matter, its about discipline, practise and development of skills necessary to reach that big picture one day. The songwriter who lives in that fantasy and already has all of that success behind him is a way better songwriter than you are today, but without today’s efforts and steps, he will never exist.

I hope that clarifies the process of goal-setting somewhat for you and gives you some ideas about how to connect today’s ideas and goals with the decreasingly distant dream of success that exists in your big picture.

More tools coming your way soon, so stay tuned to the Online Classroom, and don’t forget to leave a comment below with your thoughts on today’s lesson!

Love and much respect

James Higgins

Director and founder of J.Fox Soul