There are two types of goal; target based and processed based, you can have both, but you can only do one at a time. Also, the “two” is a lie, there’s many more types of goals. Also, also, hello 👋 welcome to the newsletter, good to have you here!
The other day someone wrote that instead of using the perfectly correct “my lips are sealed” emoji of 🤐, their grandpa was instead writing “Your secret is safe with me 🫦” and they were not a fan.
Now I’ll always think of that because I’m old, I keep using emojis, and I have no idea what the fuck is going on and I’ll inevitably accidentally end up using something bad.
# GOALS, GROWTH AND HOW TO DO THEM
When your target based goals aren’t working out you can make yourself feel better by using process based goals.
Things like “I will write for 20 minutes each morning”, or “Each evening I’ll read a book for half an hour”, “I will definitely work on my pen plotting tutorial videos for six hours a week”, as three completely random examples. Rather than a target based goal like “I’ll read a book a month”, and so on.
The idea being that you shouldn’t be judging yourself by the act of finishing things, doing things is good enough. Unless of course you never actually finish things you need to finish i.e. most things in life.
Process goals are great, except, when you need to earn money, they’re good for hobbies, not great for jobs, and if you’re in that hustle zone of your hobby being your job, then good luck to you.
I’m not really on social media now, but in the next bit substitute SM for YouTube/TikTok/Twitter/Instagram/Flume etc.
Two situations;
You want to grow “brand identity” at an “organic” rate
You want to grow fast to start selling your work/getting opportunities/sponsors, etc.
In the first case you’d use process based goals, keep spending X amount of hours making “content” and post consistently.
In the second case you’d study the “market”, look at trends, meticulously test out posts/videos/“content” - see what didn’t work, and double down on what does. You’d have views & subscriber (and artwork sold) targets you’d measure and track.
It’s not rocket science, pick an approach and go for it, and when one isn’t “working” switch to the other.
Anyway, where is all this coming from? ‘cause honestly this is typical neurodivergent “setting the foundation before getting to the point” behaviour, where the point is AI did something that amused me, (that should be enough to lose another 1/3 of the readers).
I’m actual day-job working at the moment (regular income, yay) and for various reasons I haven’t had to earn money from selling my work (or being anyone of particular note on SM) for the past year and a bit, so I’m being process-based in my work.
There was a time when I set out various goals and targets, and put them into my PARgA system in Obsidian, in an attempt to see what diversifying my income streams could look like, it looked like this…
…now, to be honest I didn’t really think the numbers through very much and I’m pretty basic, so a nice round £1k from each source seemed like, well, a target. I figured I’d adjust those as things moved around, and then promptly paid no attention to them whatsoever.
Anyway I went back to look at them the other day, and noticed the “Get 10,000 Newsletter Subscribers” was a) nowhere near happening, and b) had hit some of the arbitrary targets, that were also fairly round numbers, like 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 7,500 and 10,000, and instead of doing simple maths to make those numbers “better”, I opened up my Obsidian vault in the AI code editor, pointed it at the file and said “Make the targets more like levels in a game.” — this is what it gave me.
10 subscribers (+10 XP) - 📧 Starting point
17 subscribers (+7 XP) - 🎉 Easy win
28 subscribers (+11 XP) - ⚡ Small challenge
47 subscribers (+19 XP) - 🚀 Building momentum
79 subscribers (+32 XP) - 💪 Getting serious
133 subscribers (+54 XP) - 🎯 Major milestone
223 subscribers (+90 XP) - 🔥 Big challenge
375 subscribers (+152 XP) - ⚔️ Epic level
630 subscribers (+255 XP) - 👑 Legendary
1,060 subscribers (+430 XP) - 🏆 Master level
1,780 subscribers (+720 XP) - 🥇 Grandmaster
2,990 subscribers (+1,210 XP) - 🏅 Champion
5,020 subscribers (+2,030 XP) - 🦸 Hero
8,430 subscribers (+3,410 XP) - 🌟 Legend
10,000 subscribers (+1,570 XP) - 🎊 Ultimate achievement (final boss)
It didn’t originally start with the emoji, or the names for each level, or the (+xxx XP) part, for the emoji and levels I just kept telling it “make it more game like” - as for the +XP part it kept lying through it’s teeth that each “level” was properly and correctly mathematically spaced. Until I asked it to put the actual differences in there, the “amount of XP I’d need to level up”, at which point it gave me some bullshit about how the last level was always supposed to be like that (less “xp” needed than the previous two), to give the “player” a good sense of achievement when they hit it. Because AI is a lying liar that tried to gaslight you and covers up its own mistakes.
This newsletter is currently at 1,548 subscribers - so I’m a Master level newsletterer, and 232 subs short of being a Grandmaster.
Go me! 🥇
For anyone curious this is what Patreon and YouTube looks like (YT is a little off, as I gave it 5k as a base starting value).
And let me tell you, with process based goals, getting YouTube to 6,750 subs is not an “Easy win” and 9,125 is not a fricking “Small challenge” tyvm!
# BONFIRE vs FIREWORK
I once (and sadly only once) had a chance to chat with Douglas Adams, who was both a delight and incredibly smart on a whole bunch of different topics.
One of the reasons why he was so incredibly smart is that he knew and got to talk to lots of other smart people, and in some cases he got to do that when he wanted to know something because he could phone an expert up, and say “let’s have dinner” and they’d say “yes”, because he’s Douglas Fucking Adams.
This is my observation from over the years.
There are bonfire people, and firework people, and they pretty much directly relate to process goals and target goals.
Bonfire people pick process based goals, build up a good base, nice and wide, keep putting more learning/knowledge/logs on the bonfire, wide at the bottom up to a point at the top, set alight it burns for a long long time, shining out across the land, the embers continuing to glow long after it’s burnt out.
Firework people pick target based goals, and those that manage it, shoot straight up, narrow, focused and fast, and then explode in a glorious burst of colour and sparkles.
This is the thing; those firework people pick a niche, absolutely hammer it, fly high high and true, become the highest, brightest, most noticeable in that niche. Higher, much higher than the bonfire. And once they’re up there, they can make that “phone call” to an expert in a different niche, grab dinner, pick their brains, and get smart in another niche, and then another, and another. To push the very poor analogy even further, when they “explode” in that burst of colour, the sparks can set fire (and persist) to things around them.
People sometimes roll their eyes when a successful actor or musician becomes a successful artist or writer, as though they’ve somehow cheated their way to the top of one thing by first being at the top of another. While that may be true, it’s also, well, true.
You have two choices…
Build a wide base, stay consistent, sustain. Or…
Stay narrow, shoot high, then go wide.
I have no evidence to back this up, but if your objective is to be “wide”, starting narrow then going wide (from being able to meet other people) - or moving sideways at the same level, is a better strategy than starting wide, multi-disciplined and working from there. The fireworks always seem to outpace the bonfires (I am a bonfire fwiw).
Or be a Catherine Wheel, no idea how that works 🔥🎡
# ENVELOPES, AGAIN
After all my talk of making tools that let me draw envelope outlines, and boards to score the creases, see two posts ago: https://newsletter.revdancatt.com/p/069-i-bring-you-the-gift-of-envelopes
And then sticking a cutter on the drawing machine so I didn’t have to cut it out myself, see last post: https://newsletter.revdancatt.com/p/070-when-to-stop-building-tools-and
I was like “Hey, doesn’t Cricut make a scoring tool too?”, so I 3d printed a holder for that, and now I have a whole draw/stamp 👉 score 👉 cut, workflow going on, all in the same GCODE file, with pauses where the machine tells me to change the tool.
This may all seem like a bit of a faff for just envelopes, but in working through this I now have a library of code that allows me to:
Draw, stamp, score, perforate, and cut, all with far more complicated designs than an envelope.
The one bit of code I want to do next, which should be pretty easy, is one that lets me tile or repeat the draw/stamp/score/perforate/cut across a larger sheet of paper, so I can set it away doing four or eight envelopes, or 16 & 32 postcards etc, in one go with less tool changing. ✂️✂️
# TINY KITTY £££ UPDATE
Kitty, my AI PA has been keeping me on track in the studio, still helpful, still need to make a video about it.
I’m vaguely aware of how much Kitty costs to run, enough to not be too worried about it. I had reason to go check on something in the Anthropic/Claude API dashboard and noticed that the last four months cost £42.42 🐈💸
# BOOKS
Two new books arrived in the studio this week, I’m still on my Karel Martens kick with Unbound - showing him once again nailing the combining of rules & print. If you like books with lots of pictures, inspiration, interesting design choices and very few words I can highly recommend it.
I legit don’t know a better way to link to the book on the publisher’s site other than go here: https://www.romapublications.org/Roma251-500.html and find book number 492 (trust me this works), click it, and then you can see a whole bunch of sample pages, which you can also click to get a better look.
Meanwhile Generative Design In Branding has the single worst dust jacket I’ve had on a recent book (sorry), which I immediately ditched, and then almost as immediately got an oily smudge on the cover, so I guess I was the wrong one in that battle.
The creative highlights which span several pages are great, as are the spotlights. Shown above is a small part of Tim Rodenbröker’s creative highlight which is reassuringly good and astute, you can find out more about both here: https://timrodenbroeker.de/codecrafted/
The rest of the showcases are, fine, it’s nice to see a diversity of work, some familiar faces and best of all, some not. It’s very easy to get trapped in a bubble of knowing one group of people; so being slapped around the face with exposure to a whole new bunch is refreshing and much needed. 📕📔
# GIG
I don’t get out much, by design.
Last week I happened to be in London, so was Laura, who was playing a gig there. We’re generally both not in London, especially not at the same time, so it would seem remiss of me not to at least pop in to catch some tunes, as I believe the kids say.
I only mildly started to feel my anxiety levels going up once, during Carol’s opening set when I became acutely aware of being surrounded by people, which I solved with a quick bit of box breathing (4-4-4-4, 4-4-4-4) - and telling myself I was an actor who was playing the part of someone who was absolutely fine with all these people in an enclosed space. I passed the in-between moments by walking up to strangers and asking them how they ended up being here and then just letting them talk, which was excruciating to do (the walking up part, not the listening bit), but ultimately mainly rewarding, although I haven’t yet worked out how to get out of a conversation when it becomes far too nerdy about cameras or music. A skill I’ll need to practice some other time I guess.
The gig was great, of course.
More Laura at https://penfriend.rocks/
More Carol at https://www.carolhodge.co.uk/
🎸🎹
END
In a moment of madness we bought a greenhouse and a new shed so that we would do-the-garden.
For the last few weeks I’ve walked down to the end of the garden scattering monkey nuts on the way. I’ll sit in the greenhouse and write for 20 minutes, while the magpies crack open the nuts, that’s our deal.
When I started doing this it was light and warm, now it’s dark and chilly.
Some seeds are arriving this weekend.
All of which is not interesting, but true.
The next newsletter should be out on Thursday the 16th of October, barring any catastrophes; which should be easy considering for the next few months I’m not planning on leaving the house, studio, or greenhouse where I’ll be watering my vegetables 💦🍆
Love you all
Dan
❤️
What a good newsletter; thank you. I quite enjoyed that exploration! I too enjoy the emoji with no idea where most of the social landmines are. 🧐🧑🏻🌾😉