Don't Set Annual Goals, Do This Instead [WRAP 200]
|
Hey Reader, just a heads up that I'm hosting a free webinar on Monday about how to build "stackable" offers in your creator business. One of the biggest mistakes that I see creator businesses make is only having one offer—that could be an affordable template for $29 or one-on-one coaching for $2,000. On Monday, January 12th at 1pm ET, I will show you how to avoid the One-Offer Trap and create a series of offers that scales from low to high on your core idea. This means you don't have to come up with a bunch of different ideas at different prices, just scale one idea properly.
💡 One Big Idea: No Annual GoalsI used to sit down every January with my notebook and plan out the entire year. Q1: launch the course. It looked great on paper. It felt organized and intentional. It also never worked. By March, something would take twice as long as I thought. By June, a totally different opportunity would show up. By September, I’d realize that thing I planned back in January didn’t even matter anymore. I kept trying to force it. Kept thinking I just needed to plan better, be more disciplined, stick to the timeline. Then I stopped trying to plan my entire year in January. Best decision I made. Now instead, I plan in six to eight week sprints. Take my newsletter coaching program I just launched. That was a six-week sprint. Host three webinars. Send the emails. Talk to people. Fill the program. Launch it. Done (except for running it and all). In February I can look at the calendar and ask: what’s the next sprint? There are still things that I do for an entire year, like the YouTube channel. But it still follows a pretty consistent system. Objective is to grow the channel to 2,000,000 views in 2026. The milestones are consistent videos. The goals are to improve each video to get more views. And so on. Another big shift for me was pretending every month was the same. I know February-April and August-October are my best months for intensive work. I know May and June are full of family birthdays and trips (like camping!), so I don’t plan anything major then. This approach lets me adjust as I go without feeling like I failed some big annual plan I made when I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And as good as I have gotten at all this productivity stuff, things still happen every year that I did not plan for! You don’t need a twelve-month roadmap. You need to know what the next six weeks look like, and a system that helps you break that down into weekly goals and daily actions you can actually complete.
📹 Video to Watch: One Goal at a TimeI talked through my entire goal setting system—starting with OMG and breaking it all the way down to what you should do for a daily action that aligns with your main objective(s) for the year. I also have a personal OMG breakdown up on the channel, but I'm only going to leave it up on YouTube another few days before moving it into the members area of Analog Action. So catch it while you can! 📚 What I'm ReadingA lot! I'm on book 3 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, a light and fun Lit-RPG read—not for kids though, too much cussin'. The premise is that the earth has been invaded, and the surviving humans are put in an intergalactic game show to survive and move further down the dungeon (and not die). I just picked up The Last Train to Paradise from Book in Hand in St. Augustine, FL. This book is about building the Keys railroad, which connected mainland Florida to Key West, covering 150 miles of open ocean before it was destroyed in a 1935 hurricane—who woulda thought?! Hey! This is WRAP #200! Pretty insane. That means we're staring year 5 of this format together and I couldn't be more excited. Thanks for reading the WRAP, watching the YouTube channel, and for hundreds of you buying my courses, templates, and coaching. I have a really cool job making cool stuff and helping others do the same. You're a part of that, Reader, and I'm grateful. Have an awesome weekend, Matt Ragland |