When your craft is so personal and important to you, it can be difficult to focus on the other aspects of your game audio career that enable you to pursue that craft. Just like a video game, if you don’t have a clear objective and a path to follow towards that objective you may find yourself frustrated, tired, and short on motivation to continue your quest.

In this post, I’ll discuss:

• Why business goals are important
• What an effective business goal looks like
• Why certain goals totally suck.

Ready?  Let’s go.

Grinding for Levels (and Gigs)

If you’ve ever played a Massively-Multiplayer Online game, you’re probably familiar with the term “grinding”. If not, “grinding” basically refers to repetitive in-game tasks which the player must complete in order to achieve an in-game accomplishment or obtain a reward. It is also implied that whatever task you’re doing while “grinding” is not particularly fun. I once spent a couple of hours every day for 1-2 weeks “playing” World of Warcraft to obtain a rare in-game item. This “grind” involved traveling back and forth across a large area to kill small groups of monsters over and over again, picking up the items they dropped, and returning them to an in-game character in exchange for a slight increase in reputation points. Once I had built up enough reputation with this dude, he would be willing to *sell* me the rare in-game item I so desired: a badass white tiger with metallic-looking stripes that I could ride into battle. I was willing to do this work because it rewarded me with something that provided more fun later on in the game:

 

Totally worth it.

When the Entire Game Becomes “the Grind”

Warcraft provided a VAST number of these opportunities at every turn. Want better armor? Better replay the same dungeons over and over again to earn more gold. Want a rare weapon? Better spend hours running around the world gathering raw materials. Want to earn the title of “Gladiator” for your character? You’ll need to win like 1,000 death-matches. Have fun!

Ok, that last one does sounds kind of fun.

While each of these examples exploits the same mechanic, there’s an inherent danger of becoming too focused on the TASKS and forget about the REASON for completing the tasks in the first place. You can accidentally spend hours doing several different types of repetitive tasks and forget that the entire reason you’re in the game in the first place is to play a fun video game. Whoops!

Business can be the same way: You can become easily distracted by the repetitive tasks or the seemingly-important things in front of you and lose sight of the endgame, and this can lead to unhappy feelings and physical/mental burnout – Not to mention the fact that it can suck the life and joy out of the parts of your career that you DO enjoy. Not good. Without a clear goal to frame all of your actions, you may feel like you’re spending a great deal of time/energy without making any forward progress and that feeling SUCKS.

Defining the Endgame: What Makes a Good Business Goal?

If you don’t know what “beating the game” means… how can you ever know if you’re winning or losing?  I think one of the most prevelant weaknesses in humanity is the inability to clearly define what we want. If you want a perfect example, ask any working adult how much money they’d like to be earning per year. You’ll often get a pretty straight-forward answer, but if you ask them follow-up questions in the style of a 6-year old the whole conversation starts to fall apart:
Q: How much money do you want to earn per year?
A: Ummm… $100,000/year would be great!
Q: …Why?
A: Uh, because it’d be nice to make more money than I’m making now.
Q: …Why?
A: So my family and I can live more comfortabley…?
Q: What’s that mean?
A: Uh, I guess it means having a nicer house, better car, not having to worry about money?
Q: How did you figure out that $100,000/year number?
A: Uhhhhhhhh.

It’s shocking, but most people don’t connect the dots (myself included, sometimes). It’s difficult to consider long-term goals during short-term activities, but the most successful people do exactly that. Before you can have a glimmer of hope at achieving this, however, you need to know exactly WHAT your long-term goals are, WHY they are your goals, and HOW what you’re doing is helping you get there. This may seem obvious, but if you look at how you spent the last few days can you say with 100% honesty that most of your time was spent moving the needle on your most important goals? This can be a painful thought, but the things that are most uncomfortable for us are usually the things we need to do the most.

An Effective Goal is Always SPECIFIC

As indicated in my earlier example about annual salary, a goal that lacks specificity may not actually help you get what you want because you haven’t taken the time to really think about what you want. We humans will often fill in the blanks for our own goals with socially-acceptable canned answers like an obligatory salary number or some material item (a nice car, for example) which indicates how successful we must be. It’s ok to want a nice car, or a bigger house, or that gigantic TV you’ve been lusting after – but only if you TRULY want them for a specific reason. Personally, having a fancy car doesn’t interest me very much. Having a reasonably nice house, however, interests me very much – but it’s *still not specific enough*. To increase my likelihood of getting the kind of house I want, I have to define what I want in a house and how important it is to me.

I like to use shopping malls as a perfect example of how important this is; If you know what you’re looking for, you can be in and out of any store in a matter of minutes with precisely the item you needed.  If you go to the mall to “shop,” on the otherhand, you can accidentally spend hours wandering around looking at things you don’t really need or want. These trips will often result in the purchase of some crap you never needed and probably won’t use. We’ve all been there: If I go to Target looking for a new desk lamp, I’ll leave with a desk lamp. If I go there because I “need a few things,” or if I’m keeping my wife company while she’s shopping for a new picture frame I’ll find myself wandering the departments and coming up with all sorts of use cases for things I find on the shelves.  In contrast, if you ever see me step foot inside of a shopping mall in December my approach is more like a special ops mission.  I have a hit list (of items), and unless my route has me walking by an Auntie Annie’s pretzel stand I’m not stopping for anything else.

In games, if you lose sight of why you’re playing the game you may rob yourself of all the fun. In life, you lose sight of how you’re spending your time you may find yourself lost on an endless quest for MORE – more money, more work, more time.  Here are some examples of bad goals, and a more specific version of the same goal:

• BAD: “Get my name/music out there,” in 2016.
• BETTER: Get 1,000 page views on my website’s demo page.
• BAD: Finish a concept album.
• BETTER: Complete 3 JRPG-style tracks for my demo reel.

 

Effective Goals Can Be MEASURED

I won’t go into too much detail on this one, because it’s pretty self-explanatory. If you can’t measure your goal, you can’t meet your goal. If you strive hard to be a “better composer” or exercise to get into “better shape,” you’ll likely find yourself disappointed. Being in better physical condition may seem like a reasonable goal, but how do you know when you’ve arrived? How do measure how much “better” you are, or where you started from for that matter?

If you go a level deeper and get more specific with your goal, you will also arrive at a measurable outcome: greater strength can be measured by the weight you can lift, a lower body weight can be measured in pounds or kilograms on a scale and BMI, and your speed can be measured by the time it takes you to run a mile. Similar business goals may be: number of new clients per month/year, amount of monthly revenue earned, number of professional contacts made, etc.

As far as your music is concerned, you can’t be a better composer unless you define what the hell that means – and your definition may be completely different from my definition, which is fine! I may want to learn how to craft catchy melodies in a reasonable amount of time, cut my mixing time in half, or harmonize melodies in new and exciting ways, etc. The music stuff can be more subjective than a concrete number-goal, but we can use indirect methods of measurement as indicators in most cases. If I were trying to improve my skill at harmonizing a melody, I’d need to look at how I’m harmonizing melodies today (maybe I’m only using I, IV, V, and vi chords) and set a goal for myself to use a specific cadence or chord in my next composition(s).

Effective Goals are BOLD, yet ATTAINABLE

Make sure you give your goals a quick reality-check before going after them. Is making $100,000 a year through your music attainable? Perhaps. Is it attainable to do this within a year of beginning your career?  Perhaps not, depending on what skills you’re walking in with.  It’s important to avoid setting unrealistic expectations for yourself (and others) so that you don’t end up feeling like a failure when you never had a chance from the start.

On the other hand, don’t be a sissy.  Set the bar high, just don’t be stupid about it.  Sometimes seemingly-unreasonable goals are an exciting challenge, but they’re often just something exciting to talk about.  If you don’t understand and see a viable path to your lofty goal, you probably need to dial it back a bit.  If you want to be the next Nobuo Uematsu/Koji Kondo/Austin Wintory, you will be crushed under the weight of that goal unless you break it down and understand what makes their music special.  For example, Koji Kondo is a master at writing melodies and continues to make that his leading goal regardless of the tools and technology available to him: he wants to write a memorable melody.  Trying to “be Koji Kondo,” isn’t helpful.  Writing a melody-a-day as an exercise for 30 days in a row, reading and applying the knowledge from 1 book on writing melodies, or doing an analysis of 10 pieces from one of those composers would sure go a long way though.  Don’t you think?

If you DO know exactly what you need to do and how to do it, then shoot for the stars and tell everyone else to get the hell out of your way!

Warning: Don’t Play on Easy Mode

…and by “Easy Mode,” I mean setting a goal within your immediate comfort zone as a means of avoiding that which you really should be spending your time on.  My favorite author, Tim Ferriss, said the following in his book, The 4-Hour Work Week:

“What we fear to do most is usually what we most need to do.”

We’re not talking the surface-level, sweaty-palm, heart-thumping kind of fear, here.  We’re talking about the sneaky kind of fear that lurks behind the scenes and convinces you that – before you really commit to putting yourself in uncomfortable networking situations to land more gigs – you really should spend another month or so tinkering with your demo or honing your skills.  Then, surely, you’ll be ready to put yourself out there.  Right?

Next Steps: Spill the Beans

Alright, it’s time to lay it out there and define what your epic 2016 goal should really be.  Share in the comments below (don’t worry – this is a safe place), or ask questions/advice if you need help.  Just remember that you shouldn’t broadcast your goals on social media or to your friends/family; as I explained in last year’s kick-off post, talking about your goals and getting positive feedback before you’ve done anything is detrimental to your progress.