Tag: Goals

Goals for December 2024

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What are your goals for December?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

I stumbled across this site with some journal prompts that I wanted to explore, but I wanted to start with the appropriate date instead of just grabbing one at random. Unfortunately for me, today’s prompt is related to goals and goal-setting, which I suck at doing for myself.

I’m going to do it anyway.

This December isn’t going to be super productive for me in the writing space. Half the month will be a normal work schedule, so I’ll probably be okay there, but the other half I’m actually taking off of work for a combination of travel and family time. I think somewhere in all of the time I’ll probably try to think a bit further ahead and do some better goal-setting for next year, so I can at least try to accomplish things I keep putting off (or at least the things I keep dragging my feet for because “slow and steady wins the race” means stuff still gets done.)

Also, since we’re talking about goal-setting and how I may not be productive in the near future, fingers crossed I can still push my personal projects over the finish line soon!

Life in three years: a one year check-in

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Daily writing prompt
What will your life be like in three years?
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It’s been almost a year since I answered this prompt the first time and I wanted to do a small check-in at this point.

Last time, I mentioned that I suck at planning for my own future, and this still holds true, but let’s see where I’ve made progress.

  • Do I own a home yet? Nope, but I still have a couple years to go.
  • Same goes for publishing a novel. I have a couple projects I’m working on simultaneously (which is kind of bad because then I’m not being consistent enough to knock one out yet) but I have a plan for distributing one of them at least!
  • The student loans thing? Well, as it turned out there was a major class-action lawsuit taking place over the last several years that finally came to a close which led to the federal government forgiving my student loans (and, to be clear, this is NOT in any way associated to whatever the president had been trying to accomplish).
  • Romantic relationship news: still nothing, but again, as far as the “three years” thing goes, I still have time.
  • Visiting friends in other States and countries? Very soon I’m going to a wedding in a different State and meeting some of those very same friends I had planned to meet! Which includes the ones in another country!!
  • The motorcycle is a low priority, especially if I’m hoping to buy a house, so I honestly forgot I had that listed. At this point, if I can get the house thing sorted out, I’d probably settle on renovations for the home so that I could have a proper hobby space.
  • A second novel is definitely not happening, at least not in the same vain as the first.

I mentioned in the end of that first post that I didn’t have plans and I still really don’t. I’m just kind of winging it. Again.

A 2024 preemptive year in review plus looking forward

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What goals did you set for yourself this year? What goals do you have for the next few years and beyond?

Today’s prompt is another amalgamation I created from ones I saw on Sage and Bloom from their post on personal growth and self-improvement.

After I read a couple of similar prompts around goals, I did a little introspection and looking back over the year to see what I’ve accomplished versus what I had planned for. A couple of my goals I won’t reveal specifics but I will give an idea of progress.

Starting a year ago, on about October 15th, I had put up a couple of goals for myself with a target completion date of my 36th birthday in late March. One goal was focused on physical fitness (and I failed spectacularly) while the other was on writing. On the physical fitness side, I was planning to do one of two things at least 4 times a week: go to the gym to work out, or do body weight/resistance bands at home. I think the total count targeted was supposed to be around 120 and I made it maybe a quarter of the time. The writing goal was a little more straightforward. Write every day and hit something like 160 posts for the blog. (If you’ve been following along for the last year, you know that I absolutely CRUSHED that goal!)

Tracking those two goals was easy. I have a small whiteboard in my room where I marked out a grid space for the calendar month and a space above it for reminders and tracking totals. In the grid space I would use a red mark to indicate the fitness activity for the day (just a simple check mark to say I did it) and green for the writing. Then, at the end of each month (or beginning of the new month if I forgot to do it before bed) I would tally up the marks and add them to the running total in the reminder space above. Easy stuff! It felt good to add the marks, but the writing goal was so much easier to manage because I was literally able to do that anywhere at any time because I was using my cellphone and posting from work during breaks or downtime between meetings.

Anyways, those two goals were meant to be short term ones that would help me build a habit and routine. The writing one has worked out great! I went from aiming for less than six months to just keeping up that momentum for over a year now. (I’ll have to go back to the drawing board and do some reflecting on that fitness goal.)

I did have a couple of other writing goals that I put together earlier in the year, and even made a checklist on my phone as a reminder of some “six month strategy” goals but I haven’t made as much progress on them as I would like. One was just a reminder of doing my daily writing prompts, the other two were other writing projects which, although I HAVE worked on, I’m still just in planning and world building. Technically speaking, I still have time in my “six months” but not a lot at this point. Those will likely roll over into the new year.

So, current goals from the past year? Daily writing: crushed. Fitness, writing projects: needs a lot of work.

Goals for the future? Well, I’ve mentioned before in various ways that I struggle with setting goals and sticking with them when they’re focused on myself and I’m only accountable to myself. So, while I might have goals I’d LIKE to achieve in the next 2-5 or 5-10 years, actually getting them across the finish line is a different story. A simple list of those goals is getting some novels written and published, owning my own home, being debt free (outside of the house, most likely) and being self-sustained financially on my writing. Will all that happen? Well, only time will tell.

Looking back at the year so far (we still have about two and a half months to go) I’d say I stand a fair chance at actually accomplishing what I want. I just need to make some changes.

No shame in failing, only in giving up

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What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?

I don’t set a lot of personal goals. For me they have a tendency to feel imposing and put a lot of pressure on me mentally. I mainly just focus on the idea of something being a normal, consistent part of my life so as to avoid all of that. That doesn’t mean I haven’t set any recently.

Two personal goals that are tied together that I set recently were participating in NaNoWriMo last year and trying to write on my blog every day for a few months.

I didn’t meet the word count for NaNo, but still made significant progress, and considering I was simultaneously working on my blog every day, I technically wrote a lot more. Combined, I still didn’t hit the word count goal, but that isn’t what is important. I learned a lot about how I approach writing stories versus my blog, and although I haven’t made significant progress on my stories since then, I haven’t stopped writing. I’m still picking away at the ideas from NaNoWriMo, building new ideas and running into new stories that I want to write, all while still doing these daily prompts.

I may have failed at hitting 50,000 words in one month (it really is challenging!) but I haven’t fully given up. NaNoWriMo is coming up quickly again, and I might see if I can do it this time. Even if I don’t, I do know that, at the very least, I’ve managed to hit an unspoken long term goal for my blog. Next week, October 14th, should be the one year mark of writing daily. With that in mind, it seems even more likely that I could succeed at 50,000 words for NaNo.

Let’s see where things go!

A Personal Tagline

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Daily writing prompt
If humans had taglines, what would yours be?
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I’ll admit, I had to look up the difference between slogans and taglines. I wanted to be sure I had the right understanding of what was being asked in the prompt.

Sadly, as much as I understand the differences, I don’t have a good answer! Taglines are weird. From what I could read in 20 seconds of googling, taglines are like a weird middle ground between slogans and catchphrases, but lean more towards the latter? I don’t know, maybe I misunderstood.

If I had to have a tagline, and it was my choice of what it said, it would probably be something like “Always Moving Forward”. I’ll just leave it at that.

Life’s sacrifices big and small

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Daily writing prompt
What sacrifices have you made in life?
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Life has a funny way of putting obstacles in our way that we find to be either insurmountable or require a sacrifice, but what if you have convinced yourself that it was life doing this and not yourself? The everyday choices we make can sometimes have unforeseen affects far into our future.

This prompt has me revisiting some of the thoughts I’ve had over the years regarding WHY I’ve made certain choices or remained where I’m at (at that time) in life.

After my family moved to South Dakota, the dynamic of my life changed dramatically. Sure, my family had some horses when I lived in Colorado, but that was a relatively recent change due to my Dad meeting and marrying my Stepmom, but I basically went from a suburban teenager to a “farm kid” practically over night. I couldn’t walk or ride my bike to go hang out with friends who all lived within a half mile radius of my house. I lived multiple country miles away from anyone in my class, and had a roughly eight mile drive just to get to school. I had to pick up daily chores to take care of all of the horses my parents kept “collecting” at the time (really they were mostly rescues or small number related to breeding.) This all adds up to a sacrifice that I had no say in and was forced to make. I don’t really regret having to go through that, because I was able to learn a lot about a completely different way of living and the hardships that some people face out here.

Not long after this time was when I would graduate high school and go on to college. I was fortunate that I lived close enough to the city to attend college while still living at home, so I took advantage of that, but it made it difficult to build meaningful relationships with my peers. That choice meant I sacrificed opportunities for social growth, and I’m lucky I even met the handful of people that I still talk to today.

Leading to college graduation and beyond is where I really look back at my life and think about the sacrifices I convinced myself I had to make. I continued to live at home until about the age of 25. I had a job and “friends” that I invested time into, but I was still stuck at home and helping out on the farm. Eventually, I did make the choice to move out, which meant sacrificing income (I lived at home practically rent free because I had an arrangement with my parents to do chores in exchange) that I had otherwise been funneling into video games and other entertainment. I didn’t move far away, as I still helped with chores on the farm, but the choices in living arrangements and jobs thereafter are where I feel I sacrificed the most. I never strayed far from home, from my family. While my sister moved further and further from home, chasing jobs and dreams (she did eventually move back home), I stagnated. Year after year, new things would come up that impacted my family in ways that I made the same sacrifices to stick around and help them out. I had convinced myself that I was kind of a “shield” for my family. That while my siblings were exploring the different facets of life, such as moving to different states (my sister) or settling down to start a family (like my younger brother) I was making the choice to miss out on those things in case they collectively needed me.

There was a point that I realized I COULD have ventured further afield, so to speak, and done more, but I was using my family as an excuse to not stray from my comfort zone. My own fears and insecurities were (and to a certain extent still are) my biggest obstacles that I keep making sacrifices to accommodate. Do I want to change jobs to try and make more money? Yes. Am I comfortable where I’m at because I’m afraid I won’t succeed? Also yes. In that regard, I have convinced myself in part that my sacrifices are that I’m needed where I’m at, which means I don’t grow professionally. Do I want to own a home? Yes, but the market where I live isn’t great for a single income unless you make more money than I do. Are there places I could go that are more affordable? Absolutely, but that means either sacrificing quality or moving out of state (which also means likely finding a new job.) I also happen to have a financially great living situation with my roommates, and it’s hard to part with that even though I’m also making a mental sacrifice to not having my own space to more deeply explore my hobbies, but I also sometimes use the housing market as an excuse to not leave. (I could totally afford to move into an apartment of my own again, but I’m just being picky about once again sharing walls with strangers.)

Life is full of sacrifices, even if they’re driven by fear and insecurities.

Small things add up

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Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
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There are so many different things I could change in my life that would be improvements. If I were to look at them the way I normally do, I wouldn’t be able to stick to them because I have a problem with that.

For instance, take the idea of “eating better/healthier” and trying to treat that in its entirety as a small improvement. The idea is simple enough to follow and seems like it could be a small thing to do but we often take for granted what our relationship with food is even like. How much thought do you put into what you’re eating?

I’ve gone through different phases of eating healthier and trying do things differently for weight management. I’ve seen success with some, while others I failed miserably with. Although the thought of eating better is simple, it means a change in lifestyle. You have to identify many more changes than you expect when trying to make a “small improvement” related to food. Source and acquisition. Quantities and preparation methods. Storage. So, rather than trying to treat something that is actually much larger as a “small improvement” one thing I’ve been slowly trying to integrate into my life in an attempt to modify my lifestyle towards eating better is simply just “eat some veggies” or “have some fruit” in addition to the other things I eat.

It doesn’t matter that I might be adding more calories to my meals, I just need to add better sources of nutrition to those meals. Then when I’ve made that a consistent thing I can move on to the next small improvement.

How I use social media

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How do you use social media?

Social media is very different today from when I first started with Myspace 20 years ago.

I went from Myspace into Facebook during high school, with Myspace being abandoned after only a few years. Facebook was the core of my social media use for the majority of all this time. At first I was using it to seem interesting and garner the attention of my peers (like most teenagers and young adults in college did) while staying connected with them and my family. That has long since changed. Now I don’t even post anything on Facebook, or hardly use it at all, except to stay connected with family and very select friends.

When Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else) came along, I didn’t jump on it right away. When I did eventually start using it I hadn’t yet started streaming on Twitch, but that is what it ultimately became. My connection and attempts at increasing engagement. Just like everyone else. Instagram went much the same way when I finally took the plunge into that territory. The difference being that I had also begun shifting into painting miniatures, so I was trying to share my work while advertising my Twitch channel.

Somewhere in the mix of all of that I also started writing again. I had the grand idea of trying to mesh writing together with all of those platforms. I tried to create engagement with my Twitch audience by allowing requests for me to write something for them based on points. All of that was supposed to be shared here on the blog, and I did good at first but obviously that didn’t go anywhere and I still have a backlog of requests.

At some point I backed off of streaming because of the amount of time and effort it required, which I was struggling to afford when work was taking up a lot of my mental and emotional bandwidth. I tried to continue using Instagram to share my work with painting the miniatures, and I still do that today to a small degree whenever I finish something and feel inclined to share.

Now there are some other social media platforms out there, like Threads, which I have reserved my typical username on but I never really use (just like all the others.) Instead, I’ve been focusing on writing here on the blog and in my private note space for the stories I’m developing.

That should cover my history and current usage of social media. Maybe it will change again in the future, but who knows?

10 years from now

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I’ve never been one to come up with a super detailed “5 year plan” let alone a “10 year plan” but I do hope to be SOMEWHERE in 10 years.

Well, to start, 10 years from now I’ll be 46. Roughly the same age as the eternal mental image I have of my Dad.

With that in mind I think I’d like to see myself having accomplished multiple things. He had worked on and completed his Master’s and Doctorate somewhere thereabouts, but I don’t know that in today’s current higher education system I would want to start down that path. Maybe things will be different a few years from now (to really line up with the relative timing of when my Dad started his Master’s program.) Instead I’d rather see myself having published a few novels regardless of how successful they turn out. Of course, this requires putting effort into my writing projects over my 3D printing and painting projects.

I would also like to see myself in a house of my own within that 10 year window. Maybe even in my second house, which would be slightly larger because maybe I’ll have met someone and started a family!

I’ll leave things there and not saddle myself with too many expectations. Just need to work on one thing at a time.

Streaming takes a lot

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Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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I feel like the vast majority of people who see people posting dumb shit on social media and YouTube don’t fully understand the effort that can go into content creation.

Now, this also includes the people who decide to post that dumb shit, because a lot of them start off with the mentality “oh that’s easy, I can do that too, and I’ll make millions!” That’s not the case. At all. Granted, the most popular people on social media had to start somewhere but there is also the element of luck to consider.

Putting luck aside, the effort that the SUCCESSFUL people on social media and streaming platforms put in is incredible and varies depending on the style of content they’re choosing to create. In my case I can at least talk about streaming since I did that off and on for years as a hobby.

Most people don’t understand the amount of time and effort that gets invested into streaming. You might think it’s as easy as pushing a button to stream to the world and just sit at your desk playing games for a few hours, but there is much more to it than that. Especially if you have any intent to turn it into a “career” of some kind. You need the right equipment/software and know how to use it. You need to understand the target audience. What games do you like? What games do THEY like? What is your style of game play and audience interaction? Are you really good at a particular game, or are you clever/witty/funny? What’s the best time to stream at and can it fit into your schedule? How are you reaching your target audience to let them know you’re live? Are you streaming often enough? Are you limiting yourself to just streaming on a single platform or are you branching out somehow? What are the current trends in gaming? How do you get ahead of everyone and not feel like you’re riding on the coattails of big streamers who are nearing the end of their time interested in a game or genre? Boiling it all down into a singular question “How do you go from pushing the Live button to making it into a career?”

More and more questions your should be asking yourself the further you go down that rabbit hole. You can’t just record yourself doing something silly or dumb and expect to be famous the next day. People who experience that are incredibly lucky, and chances are it’s a flash in the pan kind of moment and it’ll never happen again. You can increase your odds of success by answering the questions I asked above and putting in the effort, but even then, it isn’t a guarantee.

If you want to break it down into something quantifiable like making a living then you can look into the numbers that are out there, but I can at least provide a hypothetical example for you to chew on.

on Twitch a Tier 1 sub costs a user US$4.99 before taxes. The streamer receives a 50% cut of that. Using nice even numbers that puts it US$2.50. If you were lucky enough to live in a part of the country where the cost of living was cheap, and you had no debts, and you could live off US$50,000 per year, what does that equate to in Twitch subs? That’s 20,000 subs. I don’t have the actual Follower to Subscriber conversion percentages at hand as I’m writing this, but if you were fortunate enough to have 20% of your followers convert to subs, you would need 100,000 followers on Twitch. Let me share a tweet with you all to offer some perspective. CommanderRoot shares a lot of fascinating statistics, and this tweet of theirs from December of 2020 likely still holds some truth to it in 2024. https://x.com/CommanderRoot/status/1336488690986717184

By the end of 2020 less than 4,000 streamers on the entire Twitch platform had greater than 100,000 followers. There are roughly 7,000,000 streamers on Twitch today in 2024, so assuming the numbers haven’t changed drastically between then and now we can do some more math. Using nice even numbers, if my math is right, that means approximately 0.06% of streamers on the entire platform meet the completely hypothetical criteria I set before. (Personally, I’d say the criteria are very optimistic compared to whatever the real numbers are.)

This is why I say most people don’t understand the effort that goes into streaming. If you want this to be a career and you have nothing else going for you, if you want to keep trying, then maybe someday you’ll get up there, but it’s going to take a TREMENDOUS amount of time and effort that you’re not going to get back, and this is all just in streaming on Twitch. At the core of all of this, you can figure out the basic idea and apply it to other forms of content creation, like writing. Follow the questions, follow the numbers, get your answer. No matter what you’re doing, do you understand it enough to know where to aim yourself?