5 Easy Ways To Increase Your Chance of Hitting Your Goals as a Creative Person

5 Science backed tips.

“The strongest force in human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we define ourselves”

— Tony Robbins

At the start of the year I asked around about what their goals were, and I got a sense that people were not ready to set goals. Or some of us were too busy catching up with 2024 stuff to set goals.. guilty.

But as February rolls around, and some of the load is off my back, I’m ready to take a step forward. If you’re not ready to set goals yet, maybe bookmark this page and come back when you are… I wasn’t ready in January …

For the rest of us, I want to share some easy ways to increase the chance of hitting your goals, and setting the one goal that will have the biggest impact to your creative outcomes.

Illustration: Cathrine Cox’s 1 minute collages, I asked the community to share something they’ve made in January, see the full gallery here.

5 Years of Goal-setting

The past 5 years have been about setting and achieving goals for me.

Getting an agent, Becoming a full-time illustrator, Illustrating 13 books and counting, becoming a Substack bestseller, Winning a book of the year Award. All of which was a distant dream, an impossible dream almost.

But year by year, by the grace of God, all these goals have become a reality, with a bunch of bonuses thrown in.

90-Day Quest instead of an Annual Goal

Instead of setting annual goals this year I’m setting 4 goals/quests to achieve in 90 days.¹

I won’t tell you what those quests are today but at the end of 90 days, I’ll tell you how it went. There are many ways to set goals here’s my method:

1. Pick an Outcome and attach meaning to it. (For example, I will become get 2 book illustration deals, so that I can spend quality time with my kid every day)

2. Make a list of activities that contribute to the attainment of that outcome, this could be as many items as I could think off and can grow daily, a list might be 100 items

3. Allocate time daily to work on the top 1-2 items from the list that will produce the greatest contribution to achieving that goal.

You can do it your way and set yours own goals.

What are 2-4 things you want to get done by the end of April?

I will say, for most of your goals that’s none of my business, but if you’re here, my job is to help you to achieve at least one of them and that is your creative goal.

For some of you that is simply drawing every day, for others that might be getting an agent, or signing your first book deal, or your next book deal or hitting a substack milestone… my job is to help you hit that goal!

TEN MINUTE WEEKEND CHALLENGE

Set one creative outcome to focus on something you believe can be achieved in 90 days.

Depending on where you are you might need to break it down into a smaller step. Instead of getting an agent your goal might need to spend 100 hours creating 10 pieces of work. Set your own goal…

But there is one goal that the one goal that will have the biggest outcomes is building a ritual of spending 10 minutes a day creating something.

You can do the daily prompts, and if you don’t like the daily prompts you can do the last prompt you liked or create your own prompts, but make it a ritual, build the muscle and establish your identity as someone who creates no matter what.

This ritual alone is rocket fuel for all your other creative endeavours.

So here’s the challenge.

Reply this email and tell me your 1 creative goal for the next 90 days, do it now, and I will do what I can to help you achieve it.

And lastly, here’s how you increase your chance of hitting those goals.

1. Write them down. According to science writing down your goals increases your chance of achieving them by 42% - I remember one goal I wrote down 2 years ago: Earn $10000 a year from substack. It felt silly to write it down, it was the least realistic of all my unrealistic goals. But I stuck it up on my wall, and every now and then I would ask myself what would I need to do differently to achieve that, and I tried things, little by little. And early this month I got that email…

   

   I don’t think it would have happend if I did not write down the goal.

2. Look at the goals daily. It takes 10 seconds and to make it even easier, make a nice illustrated version of your goal and put it where you can’t miss it. This works by setting your focus, just like how thinking of a 🚗 car makes it appear everywhere. Seek and you will find.

3. Monitor or your progress. Jerry Seinfeld has a a simple daily routine he’s done his entire working life: Write a joke, put a big ‘X’ in his calendar, don’t break the chain - that a strong visual way to monitor progress, if your goals are on the notes app for example you can just put an emoji next to the goal to see how it’s going, happy, meh or sad. Find a way to monitor the progress of your goals.

4. Visualise Obstacles/Make a Plan: when looking at your goals, imaging the obstacles that might stand in your way, then plan a way to over come them. This is a process known as Mental Contrasting.

5. Identify with your goals: If your goal is to be an illustrator, call yourself an illustrator, if your goal is to play a guitar call yourself a guitarist. We have an innate need to stay consistent with how we define ourselves. Call yourself a ten minute artist, and watch how often you turn a ten minute slot of spare time into a time for creativity.

Do these five tips and you’ve significantly increased the odds of smashing your goals, because, science.

Do the weekend challenge, send me that email with your 90-day creative goal so I can be your running buddy and accountability partner!

PS: I did a free Art Gym Workshop with

Katie Stack

to help you transition into a new season, if that’s you, please enjoy!

1. The idea of 90 day quest, and the 5 science backed methods for achieving your goals are inspired by this video by Ali Abidal author of Feel Good Productivity, watch that video for the sicience.