Want to find the Quickest Route to Your Goal? Let’s get a plan together first
I attended the National Entrepreneur’s Convention at the end of this week, and it was jam-packed full of stuff to make your head hurt and your business grow. I love what I do, and I’m always looking for ways to make it better. One of the things that was discussed was ‘quickest routes’ or rather is this ‘the quickest route to your goal’.
In business the goal is to do stuff better to make money, but the key to this is to find what people REALLY want and give it to them – better, bigger, and faster. And you can apply this in your work as an artist or songwriter, hell, even musicians can learn from this!
Here’s a key phrase for you that has been in billboards everywhere this summer promoting educational institutions.
A dream without a plan is just a wish.
When someone starts up a company, the successful ones do so having already defined where they want their business to be in the long term. They then work backwards and work out what steps need to be taken to get to where they want to be. Not only that, but the goal is to engineer it so that each step isn’t immensely difficult, and so that each step takes them the QUICKEST possible route to their goal, step by step.
A key thing that comes out of this principle is:
A person without an ongoing plan is just playing at running their own business.
And in our world of music, I would say this:
An artist or songwriter without an ongoing plan is just playing at being an artist or songwriter.
Any success is hit or miss, and unfixable failure is rife. They don’t learn or grow from their mistakes, quite frankly because they often don’t know they are making them. They think that ‘working hard and hoping for the best’ is … well…. the best they can hope for.
What utter nonsense.
Wherever you are, whatever your skills, whatever your dreams. You NEED a concrete plan. This gives you a scalpel to cut away the nonsense that is encumbering you, enables you to say ‘yes’ to the right things, ‘no’ to the wrong things, and get up and move forward again in the wake of failure. It really is your most powerful tool, knowing what your goal is. Without it, you have no destination, and (therefore), no direction (i.e. you’ll be going nowhere fast without one!).
You need to sit down and work out what you think success needs to be for you… because it’s this that will nail down what you really want from your artistry.
What happens once you understand your goal?
Once you define and understand your goal, you can break that (perhaps) seemingly impossible journey into achievable progressive steps. From there, you can identify what step 1 is. And with every step you should be asking myself – ‘is this the quickest route to your goal?’ – what one step will take the minimum amount of effort for maximum gain? step 1 should to be that simple step, but that takes you the furthest distance from step 0 (i.e. nowhere!) towards your goal.
What is the quickest route to your goal? Only you can tell (though give me a shout if you think I can help – I do this pretty often!), but you need to understand your goal before you can craft a plan! But always ask yourself:
So ask yourself, what is the quickest route to my goal?