Why I Don’t Set Goals
Recently I was having a chat with a friend and he asked me what my goals are in terms of social media growth. Specifically he was asking how many subscribers I wanted to get by the end of the year. Although it is a common question and a common goal for many people within the social media world, it is not something I really care about. Of course I care about the general growth of the channel, social media and the overall business. A business that is not growing even a little, is one that is going backwards in my opinion. However I never really made a specific subscriber count my goal. Matter of fact, I don’t actually remember the last time I set myself a goal. In this blog I will explain this in relation to photography, business and life.
Principle
As you read the rest of the blog, I would like to give you my overall philosophy on goal setting now. That was you will understand each chapter better. Instead of setting goals, I simply create systems and habits. This is done for two main reasons.
First of all a goal is nothing more than a wish. Without a proper system or habit, it will simply never happen. Everyone can set amazing goals (and they usually do on 1st of January), yet 99% of people never achieve them.
Secondly even if you do hit your goal, now what? Do you revert back to whatever you were doing before? Do you know how or why you hit your goal? If you have no plan for what you will do once you have achieved your goal, you could find yourself in trouble. We have all come across people who had this huge goal, achieve it, then feel empty or even depressed after.
So rather than setting a concrete goal, instead workout what you need to do on a reoccurring basis in order to move yourself closer to that goal. Creating a system that ensures automatic, consistent and incremental progress should be your goal. Achieving a specific result should be a by-product of your system. The following examples will explain this further.
Social Media / Business
Let’s start with social media goals as this is what triggered my idea for this blog in the first place. As mentioned before, many people set goals of achieving X amount of subscribers by a certain date. However this goal is completely out of their control because they don’t have any influence on the algorithm or whether the audience will actually find their videos useful.
Instead, I would set up a system. From a high level, the system could be to create one video each week with a two week break every quarter. We can go a little deeper and create a list of specific video types that need to be made each month. Perhaps one video is educational, one is for entertainment purposes and one is optimised for SEO. Finally we can include incremental improvements in quality each quarter. Pick one aspect of your videos and see how you can improve them that quarter. It could be audio, colour grading, B-roll, etc.
If you have this system in place and you stick to it, you are guaranteed to be a much better video maker a few months or years down the line. You are also guaranteed to be consistent. Take consistency and add incremental improvements to your system and gaining subscribers will come as a by-product. Of course one also has to take feedback into the system. If you’ve made 50 videos and all of them tanked, then perhaps you need to start tweaking and figuring out what could be the issue. That is a separate topic however.
Photography
The same attitude can be carried over to photography too. For some people, a dream goal would be to get featured in a gallery or a publication. For others it could be to build a following round their work. For others it could be to publish their own photo book. Whatever the goal, the system of getting there looks similar.
We can break it down into two key tasks one needs to accomplish. The first is to get good at photography and develop your own voice. The second to gather contacts within the industry who can open doors for you or help you with your mission.
We can start with the first goal of getting good at photography. Good is very subjective and a can of worms… so for the sake of keeping this short, let’s define good as having a large number of people respect your work. To achieve this, the system that you need to create is simple. Go out, shoot, make mistakes, learn and repeat. In other words, your system could include the following:
Head into town to shoot 3 times a week for a minimum of a few hours each time.
Spend 3 hours a week editing the same photo in 5 different ways.
Attend one photography workshop every quarter.
Read one photography book each month.
Go on a dedicated photography trip somewhere new every quarter.
Review work from the previous year and see where you can improve knowing what you know now.
If you take the items in the list above and find a way to fit it into your life at whatever cadence that is suitable, and you stick to it for 3-5 years, I can guarantee that you will come out of it a better photographer. Isn’t this a better way to approach it instead of simply saying “get better”?
As for networking, the principle is the same. Attend one photo meet-up per month. Attend one gallery per month. Reach out to people in your city who also share the same passion and see if you can meet up with someone each month. Find the calendar for all photography related shows and exhibitions for a given year and stick them in your calendar. You get the idea.
Life
The same philosophy can be applied to your daily life. Typical goals could be to learn a new skill, drop a bad habit or pick up a new one. For now, I will pick the most commonly failed goal… get in shape.
January 1st rolls around and everyone is dead set on that summer 6 pack and London Marathon personal best. However less than 1% of people will actually hit their goal. Because simply saying I want a 6 pack or to run a marathon, is not enough. I know this as I have been here myself countless times. You need a system in place because even if you do hit your goal, you don’t want to then start going backwards.
I can’t speak for everyone, so here is my system for getting in good shape:
3 weight training sessions per week.
2 high intensity cardio sessions per week.
1 low intensity cardio session per week.
Progressive overload every couple weeks or so.
1 rest day per week.
Every 3 months take a full week off.
Stretching minimum 4 times a week.
This is not a health blog so I won’t go into further details, however if I follow the above system consistently as best as I can (with course correction where needed), then the results will come regardless.