BIG goals and how to get there

Welcome

To the six (!) new subscribers that have joined us for edition #2 of Notes by Chris B Co - a newsletter for designers and creatives looking to develop their craft, increase productivity, build business understanding and make the most of their creative abilities in their everyday lives. We’ve hit double figures! 🥳🥳 Don't forget to celebrate the small wins along your journey.

Here is where I share design tips, valuable education resources, productivity insights, uses for design in your everyday life and guidance on how to get the most out of your design career. Now and then, I’ll also throw in some design updates from life at Chris B Co.

This week’s topic - BIG goals and how to get there

Whatever your goal is, firstly, I’d like to ask, how important is it to you?

Almost all of us have hopes and dreams of one kind or another. Perhaps it’s a position, title or status you’d like to achieve in your career.  Or you’d like to work for yourself, be your own boss, run your own company.  Perhaps it’s buying a house or moving to a particular location. We nearly all have goals, and most of us also encounter a lot of trouble achieving them (and if that’s not you, well, maybe you should be writing your own newsletter!).

I was at a crossroads in my journey in January 2023 when my business partner of seven years decided that he would like to take our business in a different direction.  He was well within his rights to do so, and we negotiated a buyout without too much difficulty (and I still do some work for the business).  So, for seven years, we’d been building this business together, and what I considered was my future path was gone, and I needed to find a new direction.  In a future post, I will return to the story of how I worked through that process, but I want to share what happened after finding that direction today.

I’d now found and set myself a big goal.  It will involve some risk and a lot of effort. It will take me years to achieve.  But I have a family to support right now. I can’t just go all out to achieve this goal. The way that I’m going to get there?  A consistent amount of incremental changes over a long period. 

In his summary of the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, Sam Davies notes:

For those visual learners, look at the improvements that can be made in just one year with just a 1% change for the better every day.

So, if you already have a big goal, you can commit to making small but incremental changes in your life to achieve it. Find time every day or every week and start working towards something special. For me, I’m pretty sure about what I want to achieve. My days and weeks are structured so that I have between 10 to 16 hours a week that I can dedicate towards my goal. But you don’t need that much! And when you’re starting - the best thing you can do is find something to stick to. Cut out an hour of TV a week. Or combine your auto-pilot tasks, like cleaning or commuting, with something productive that moves you towards your goal. Over time, those small steps will add up to something substantial.

For more on the topic, listen to the podcast below (1hr 30min), where Simon Alexander Ong will introduce you to some methods you can apply to your life to achieve your goals.

What to watch this week

Regarding self-improvement and investing in yourself, Alex Hormozi is stepping it up and showing the path for many entrepreneurs.

I was always interested in investing for my future, but investing our hard-earned savings into the stock market was a mistake rather than investing in our ability to earn an income. Step back and rise above your situation to get a bigger picture of how you might best invest in yourself. This is only a 7-minute video, but Alex has a great video library to add to your playlist.

Productivity tip of the week

Your brain is not meant to store information like birthdays, addresses and phone numbers. Thankfully, our phones now take care of most of that info for us. But what about data from essential meetings or projects you have going on in your workplace? Do you want to take notes from videos you watch or podcasts you listen to?

What have you seen, read or heard that you knew was important but have since forgotten? (Well, I guess you can’t answer that, hey….)

Could you work on a system of capture for this information? A location that you can store notes, search, share and refer back to when the information is needed. It doesn’t need to be fancy but start working towards something consistent.

Next week, I’ll share my current method for this task.

Thanks so much for reading.
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