Happy New Years to you! I’m a bit late but that’s on purpose – I didn’t want to get lost in all your other New Year’s Day emails and I wanted to make sure you got all settled in to this new year, so you’d have time to chat.
So, I gotta know, do you have a bunch of new year’s resolutions setup and started?
I do for sure.
Ya know, I was told one of the best ways of helping yourself accomplish more goals is to make them public. Public could mean – telling your spouse, your closest friends or it could mean literally publishing them on Facebook and telling the world. The point is, if you make them known to someone other than yourself you then have an obligation or an expectation to meet and you become accountable by others for what you accomplish -or what you don’t accomplish. Example – If I had a goal of losing 20 pounds as a new year’s goal and kept it to myself I could easily walk into that upcoming super bowl party and eat loads of chips n’ dip and drink gallons of beer and just easily tell myself – a splurge now and again isn’t bad, I’ll just hit the diet harder next week. Right? But, imagine if I had told everyone at the super bowl party my goal and then I start chow’n down on the chips and ingesting the beers, mostly likely someone is going to say something. – “Dude, I thought you were on a diet? That’s your 4th beer and second back of chips! What kind of shitty diet is that?” See – implied expectations or accountability. Almost enough to sober yourself up a bit and actually remember how the game was won. I know we are not all that bad – I’m just giving us a wild example. But really, I’d like to share my goals with you and I would love to hear your goals for this year as well.
Here we go:
Attend more local get togethers (Critiques, Art Associations, gallery openings, etc.)
Create body of figurative work - medium sized
Create U-tube channel and post first video
Develop still life paintings - small advertise for Christmas Sales
Develop workshops get two ready for next year (2020)
Do first major print sale this year. Lion and Lamb – Easter - link with charity
Grow Face Book followers to 400 by end of year (need to be on Facebook more often)
Grow Instagram followers to 1,000 by end of year
Have gallery representation in US this year
Have print on demand items on webstore by end of this year (Bags / mugs?) What?
Have two studio visits this year. Spring and fall
Increase email sign ups. By end of year have 300 signed up
Increase website traffic to an average of 400 visits a month (promotions, advertising, social med.)
Paint more Plein air (once a month)
Paint one fire truck (Redlands?) and do prints to help push local sales
Paint one SAR image and do signed prints for various teams for Christmas
Should sell $ (TOP,SEC,RET) in art this year
Present at 2 art Associations this year
Do 3 promotions this year for website sales
End of year - pitch to some podcasts
create 1 magazine article and pitch
10-20 VIP's get Christmas Card packs
July - website dues due. Switch to Art Store Fronts?
50% Property fenced this year
Complete fire pit
Install Drip line and plant along north fence line
Install new irrigation valve just for garden
Plant new nectarine tree in chicken coupe
Plant new plum tree in front, lime tree in back
Have all credit cards and misc. items payed off this year
Install / purchase Outside Pizza Oven
Redo floor in upstairs bathroom.
And, almost forgot, lose 10 more pounds.
I have already started tracking ideas for next year’s goals and I’m sure that list will grow as soon as I come to the realization that I won’t be able to complete all these goals. Things like “complete fire pit,” this one has been on my list for 3 years now. It’s a goal but just not a high priority one. The fire pit is 90% done so I’m getting there, just slowly. Same is true for the “paint more Plein Air” (paint more landscapes outside). It’s something I would like to do and may possibly be part of a workshop, but it’s not has high on my list as other goals. These landscapes are great learning exercises, are fun to do but in reality, they just do not bring in the $$ like the other art I create. Last year, I wanted to lose 20 pounds. I did but then realized I could stand to lose another 10. We gotta keep it real around here, right?
This list of goals is what I worked on last December, which happened to be one of my goals last year – to not work so much in the month of December. That’s why I backed off from Instagram-ing, Facebook-ing, painting, blogging, etc. Doing this really let me relax and think over the goals for many days so I could visualize what I wanted to accomplish in this new year. I went through the goals as logically as possible and created a kind of road map. Things that just weren’t as important or maybe needed something accomplished first got pushed to my 2020 goals. I also think it’s important to set yourself up for fluctuation or changes (but not failure) because there is just no way of knowing what I will be focused on in July. Everything might change drastically. My goal for my goals was to create ideas I could rationally accomplish and would help me obtain some long-term goals I have for me and my family. Boy, not as easy as just passing up on a diet goal at a super bowl party, Huh?
For this year I have taken advantage of the cool days and have started fencing the property, planted the plum and nectarine tree and have started working on the north fence line irrigation system. In the studio, I have three medium sized figurative paintings in the works and I’m working on a solo show with Toil Gallery for August of this year. I’m back on Instagram, looking at Facebook and of course, I’m adding to my blog😊. Just this last weekend I set up a camera and shot an hour or so of video, so I could start learning video editing and get on track with that U-tube channel thing. I’m off to a good start but there’s a bummer thing too, I gained a couple pounds over the holidays so now I need to lose 12 more pounds to meet my goal this year – Dang it!
It’s going to be a big year! Leaps and bounds – right?
I would love to hear about your goals. Get in touch with me! Let’s inspire, support and push each other!
Cheers,
