Reflecting on my 2023 music goals
❄️❄️❄️
December, December, December. The month where the beginning and the end intersect in a beautiful collage of magic, lights, treats, and gifts. It’s become one of my favorite months because of the cozy vibes at home and also because my brain lights up like a Menorah or a Christmas tree and starts to plan what my life will look like in the coming year.
Goal setting
Goal setting isn’t something I’m necessarily super good at (or maybe I’m great at it, I don’t know) but what I do know is that I miss goals constantly. I think it’s because I’m pretty ambitious in my goal setting. I don’t like to set something terribly realistic or I’ll get bored. I set personal goals, work goals, and music goals and it’s just too many goals. At work, we’ve coined the phrase “One goal per goal” because my goals are typically multiple goals stuffed into one run-on sentence.
Here’s a screenshot of my music goals for the 2023… I like to evaluate my successes and failures and see what I learned:
So, in a quick assessment, I can say:
❌ I did not release 8 songs with The Narrative, I released two. Stream them here!
✅ I did play a two writer’s rounds (better than an open mic) and my third is coming up on Friday, December 15th at 8pm at SongSmiths!
✅ I did play a show with The Narrative.
✅ I did take voice lessons all year and feel much more confident about my ability to sing both in the studio and during my live sets.
❌ I did not even look at that piano course on Skillshare after day one, it was clearly never going to happen.
❌ I could say that I practiced piano “regularly” but that is such a vague statement, I hardly feel like I can check it off the list.
Takeaways
When my goals are entirely in my control, my success rate is higher. Releasing 8 songs with The Narrative requires commitment and resources from a lot of other people, so it’s harder to make it happen. Taking voice lessons consistently was easy because it aligned with my natural interests and it felt important to me. Improving my piano playing from an online course was a total fail because I’m completely unmotivated to learn piano in that way, and my priority was singing.
Anyway, the time has come to overcommit once more! Here are the things I know I generally want to recommit to in the coming year:
Early morning creative sessions
The 80/20 rule for food choices (80% good stuff and 20% indulgences)
Solid weight training & exercise routines
Voice lessons
Building community
As for new things, I want to make room for piano lessons since I’m insecure about playing the same rhythms over and over. I want to learn my way around Ableton Live so I can sound design my live shows, and I want to level up my production skills. I’d like to see myself releasing music under a new project name and playing live shows, but I’m not yet sure of how much music and how many shows. I still have 21 days to figure it out!
Goal setting strategies
I learned about goal setting almost entirely through growing my business. Some business strategies are actually just fantastic life strategies, but I wasn’t exposed to life strategies before finding business strategies. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that we focus more on what we can monetize and less on improving our experience of life, or that monetization is one of the only ways we see ourselves improving our experience of life; how very American of us. I digress. There are three things about goal setting that I know for sure:
Writing down my goals and putting them somewhere I can see them is pretty much the only way I remember what goals I set in the first place.
If the goal isn’t SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based), it’s not as satisfying in the end.
My brain likes subdivision and I find splitting the year up into quarters (as demonstrated above) is very effective for me. It’s a business concept called the “90 day world.”
One thing I’ve learned over the past few years, and even more this year, is that I can design the life I want to live as long as I know what I’m looking for. Sometimes that changes and that's okay too. It’s funny to me how we’re all sort of built with this expectation that our minds are meant to be made up once and for all. We’re surprised or disappointed when we change our minds, as if we’ve done something wrong when we need to correct course. Experience, reflect, refine, refine, refine!
Blue Hour Update
This morning, I sent a text to Soren saying that I think I’m in the process of writing the 15th and last song for this record. We have a few more leads & harmonies to track, a few little spots to finish writing (it’s always ONE LINE that gets me!) some production, and a giant heap of mixing to do. I’m excited to find the path for these songs in the world, to choose which ones belong on a record together, to save the ones that will make for good b-sides and future releases. As always, thanks for being on this journey with me.
