As we take on the new year, many of us set lofty financial goals that end up falling flat. If that sounds familiar, tune in as I share my surprising plan for career and income growth in 2024 that does NOT rely on a specific dollar figure.
After expanding my family and missing last year’s money goals thanks to an adorable (but time-sucking) new baby, I knew I needed to shake things up. Rather than set myself up for frustration with more stretch goals, I’m trying a refreshing new tactic: conversations with 1,000 strangers.
Introverts, hang in there with me! Networking doesn’t have to be scary if you focus on quality over quantity. I’ll share how having just THREE meaningful new connections daily can supercharge your career and creativity without burning out.
If you obsess over revenue spreadsheets but end each year disappointed, it’s time to shift your focus. Join me as I step out of my tracking-obsessed comfort zone and prioritize meeting interesting people instead. Not only will this open new creative doors, but business growth is sure to follow!
As we take on the new year, many of us set lofty financial goals that end up falling flat. If that sounds familiar, tune in as I share my surprising plan for career and income growth in 2024 that does NOT rely on a specific dollar figure.
After expanding my family and missing last year’s money goals thanks to an adorable (but time-sucking) new baby, I knew I needed to shake things up. Rather than set myself up for frustration with more stretch goals, I’m trying a refreshing new tactic: conversations with 1,000 strangers.
Introverts, hang in there with me! Networking doesn’t have to be scary if you focus on quality over quantity. I’ll share how having just THREE meaningful new connections daily can supercharge your career and creativity without burning out.
If you obsess over revenue spreadsheets but end each year disappointed, it’s time to shift your focus. Join me as I step out of my tracking-obsessed comfort zone and prioritize meeting interesting people instead. Not only will this open new creative doors, but business growth is sure to follow!
Every major turning point in my career every LANDMARK in my career has come from meeting somebody new that shouldn't be that big of a surprise so if I want to find a way to grow more and make more connections and do more meaningful projects and make more emotional art then step one is just meeting new people. Welcome to Thanks for Thinking, the music business podcast focusing on self reflection and proactivity for thoughtful music production professionals. If you don't know me, I'm Carl Bahner I'm a mix engineer, educator, and studio branding super nerd. I'm trying a bit of a new format today, because I really enjoyed the way that this podcast used to be. I did enjoy the fact that it had a sense of meditation to it, it took a lot of preparation. Even though the episodes only had maybe five to seven minutes of actual talking, it was all pre scripted, it was all written out, and it took me hours to create just a few minutes of really impactful, meaningful Content and that's great. However, I have two kids now and it's a lot It's a lot harder to keep up with that so one of the things that I'm trying to do is to just make this a little more off the cuff. And that's a little tricky for me, because I'm not used to that. I'm used to speaking in front of groups and teaching classes. I'm used to talking in one on one conversations and being able to interact that way and I'm also used to reading off a teleprompter. But when I'm doing this sort of video, I don't have anybody to look at. And it's a little bit weird just being very transparent about that. But I think this is going to help to make things a little bit more natural feeling and realistically more sustainable because I know that I have a lot of ideas and experiences and Perspectives that I want to share with you, and it's just not an efficient way to do it if I were to keep up with the old format. So, I do really want to keep the content of this podcast similar, in the sense that I want it to be about finding ways that you can ask yourself the deeper questions to help you to find more fulfillment and direction with your job whether you're a mixing engineer, a producer, a session musician. But the way that I want to present it is going to be a little bit different and it's probably gonna be a little awkward at first because I'm not used to looking at the back of a camera. I'm just staring at the lens right there and it's difficult to not, you know, look up off to the side while I'm thinking because I'm just used to doing that. So this will be a good training ground for me as well. But enough about the shift in the format. I want to talk about goals today, and I know that every podcast on earth is probably doing an episode about goal-setting right now because it is the beginning of January But I want to talk about the goals that I set that did not Pan out and talk about the reasons why they did not pan out and I can tell you this most of them user error It was just me not actually setting myself up to achieve the goals I just set them up as things to cross my fingers and hope to happen. I want to start with the elephant in the room, money. I think whether we like to admit it or not, we all set some sort of financial goal for the new year. In the past few years, up until 2023, whenever I set a financial goal, I actually got pretty close to meeting it. But last year was a bit of a letdown for me. I'll be honest. I still did totally fine and also I had a baby. Well, I didn't have a baby, my wife had a baby, but we collectively, uh, made a new human person back in June so, the first five months of 2023, I was killing it, I knew that I was gonna need to slow down when the baby came. And I ended up having to slow down a lot more than I initially intended. That wasn't because I didn't know that a baby was going to be a time consuming, uh, responsibility, because we have another child already. But what I did not plan for was how much of a monkey wrench, the older sister was gonna be and how much, uh, exponentially more difficult it was to, get into a flow, with both kids. and I will say that when I set goals before, I did generally have a pretty good plan for how it was going to do it. I didn't just say, Oh, I'm going to make X amount of money this year, but, uh, I'm just going to. Keep doing things like I've been doing it and hope that it works out because that's not how reaching bigger goals works, right? We have to decide what are the steps we need to take in what order at what pace to be able to actually achieve those goals so we don't end up just treading water doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually move the needle for us This year what I wanted to do instead was to set some goals that were focused on making a certain amount of money, but things that I know that if I put the work in and I actually Follow through with these input goals like these goals that are based on what I do and what I can control and things that are also manageable, right? Not just something that is in my control, but something that I can confidently say that I will have the time and mental energy to do. And with two young kids, that's not always a lot of time and energy. So, inevitable outcome of Me following through with my goal consistently With my plan consistently my strategy consistently The outcome of that I feel very confident will be more money anyway So I think it's just starting from the focus on what I can do Not what I hope will be achieved. There's not as much luck involved. There's not as much hoping involved. It's all about, uh, what I put into it. Focusing on what I can do today, not what I hope to have achieved by December 31st of 2024. So, Some of the factors that enabled last year to still work, number one, I raised my rates, quite a bit for my mixing projects and also for the coaching that I do. and number two, I really focused on the kinds of projects that I wanted to reach out to and the things I wanted to say yes to. Counterintuitively by continuing to double down on only taking on projects that I'm really excited about rather than going after the ones that have the most money It kept me energized to keep going, you know, I could have very easily fallen into the trap of taking on every project that comes my way because I needed the money, and I'll be honest, there were a few projects that I had to do that but thankfully I could probably count those on one hand, whereas the other ones, even if the money wasn't my full rate, it gave me the energy to be able to keep going And that was super important to me, especially when the baby came and really for this entire second half of 2023, I was working only two or three days a week not two or three days like a lot of engineers do, the classic 12 hour days or 14 hour days. I mean, I was working three, seven or eight hour days a week. And still being the primary breadwinner for the family, and raising the kids and everything. So, thankfully I was able to still make it all work even though I was essentially working 20 to 24 hours a week. SO the way that that's affecting my goals for this coming year is that I'm actually not Setting any financial goals, any like specific number goals. The goal that I set for myself is to start conversations with more than 1, 000 new people this year. That sounds like a lot of people and it is a lot of people but when you do the math, it's a little less than three people per day. When I look back at the past couple years, I know that sending three messages a day, For me is nothing like that's not a big commitment, and I know for anybody watching this if you haven't done a lot of outreach before three a day might sound like a lot . I promise if you started to do this as well, the first one will take a while. You'll probably rewrite the message five times. But then the second one will be a little less stressful, and you'll probably rewrite it twice. Third one, you'll probably be a little stressed out, but you might be able to get the message right the first time. Day two, start where you left off and by day three, day four, day five, day 190, more you do that, the more practice you get at finding something thoughtful and meaningful to say to somebody, the better you get at it. It's not rocket science, you know, it's just like any other skill. So, setting something up manageable, like doing three messages a day, for me, I know that I can handle that, and I know that if I start a thousand conversations, I'm probably going to meet some really incredible people. I'm not doing it for the purpose of getting new clients. I'm not doing it for the purpose of finding new students. Um, I'm not going into it for the purpose of finding a thousand people that can do something for me. Right? That's not the goal. The goal is to just find more of my people. You know, my tribe. there are so many interesting people in this industry that Inevitably, I'm gonna make some great connections and find some really cool people that hopefully think that I'm cool, too. I can't imagine a world where I start a thousand conversations in a year, and nothing Positive comes out of it, right? I can't imagine that being a thing. I can't imagine it not leading to new collaborations, new teams, new friends, new projects, new students, whatever that is. I'm not trying to set out to find X amount of new students or X amount of new clients I just want to start conversations with people and see where that goes because I know that every major turning point in my career every landmark in my career has come from, you know, meeting somebody new. That shouldn't be that big of a surprise. So if I want to find a way to grow more and make more connections and do more meaningful projects and make more emotional art, then step one is just meeting new people. So what I'd like you to do today though, would be to look at the goals that you set And ask yourself if they are finish line goals like outcomes that you hope to happen and Or, are they things that you can start doing today and you have a clear plan of what you can do today to be able to eventually get to that finish line? are you aiming for the finish line or are you looking at the path? Taking some time to really think about that is going to be humongously helpful for you and your ability to actually achieve those outcomes this year. So, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to Watch this or listen to this and let me know what you think about this format. I'm gonna keep trying it But if there are ways that I can make it better, I'm gonna always try to make it better So thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time