7 days to plan the next 365

This next week marks the beginning of the end…

The end of my first four decades on this planet that is.

Around this time last year, I had been toying with the idea of jumping into improving my writing.

• My gaming YouTube channel of over three years was coming to a head as I wrapped up my last video that completed my strategy guide for an entire game.

• I was in the midst of adjusting to settling into a new home and getting to know the rhythm of being a parent to a school-age child as well as managing a one-year-old.

• I was reflecting on what it would be like to stay in this spot for the next decade at the very least so that both of my children would have stability in a nice community.

I also had no plan for the next year.

The only thing I had was an idea…

A vision.

A dream.

Here’s what I’m going to do starting from tomorrow…

Day 1 - Review the previous year

I’m going to take stock of what I did each month for the past year and create an outline of it.

Seeing as that I really didn’t take action until the new year, this might be an interesting way to share more about my progress here to “fill in the gaps” from before I started this newsletter.

I want to do an audit of my audience count across all social media platforms that I have a presence in and compile those into a matrix or spreadsheet of some sort.

X makes this pretty easy as to just export the .CSV file or the entirety of the account. It might be trickier for LinkedIn and YouTube.

I also want to look at what I truly enjoyed writing about the most as well as how well it resonated with my audience.

This day will mostly be a reflective session…challenges I faced and lessons I learned.

Day 2 - DTR with myself

This will probably be the scariest part.

I plan to make (gasp) commitments to my SMART goals for the upcoming year.

And no, I’m not going to fall for the trap of saying the number of subscribers or followers I want by a certain date. Instead, I plan on structuring 90-day sprints that have two or three output-oriented goals (number of articles or videos).

Honestly…I hate goals because I tend to freak out about deadlines.

If I’m being truly honest, it’s because I don’t like committing to anything to myself…but the last time I did that and achieved it was years ago.

It’s time to break this one down.

Day 3 - Deep dive into the persona

I’ve been writing as mainly “me”.

The bland version of me that gets up, takes my kid to school, goes to work, returns home, takes care of the family, cleans the house, puts everyone to bed, and sits down to work on this endeavor.

Now that I’ve mined my own mind for a year, it’s time to prime my presence.

I’m still going to be me, but I’d like to “amp it up” a bit.

• Beyonce has Sasha Fierce.

• Bruce Wayne has Batman.

• Tony Stark has…well he’s still him in his suit.

You get what I’m trying to say.

I’m not saying that I want to be someone else. I’m saying that I need to be the version of me that only emerges every few articles you’ve seen in this newsletter.

Funny. Slightly inappropriate at times. Snarky. A bit of witty banter here and there.

Basically the me that I used to be on stage.

Day 4 - Content strategy brainstorming

I’m not sure how this is going to go exactly, but I’ve been reading A LOT of books, consuming videos, reading from the top creators in the writing space to get an idea of what I want to write about and the best way to write about my experiences in my own words.

It’s going to be a hybrid of all these materials:

• short form - X posts, shorts

• medium form - this newsletter

• long form - YT videos, book, articles

Yeah…seems like it’s all over the place, right? My opinion on the matter of “stick to one platform” has evolved over the past few months…especially with recent revelations about what is important to me as well as the current situation with X.

Day 5 - Fleshing it all out

Up to this point, everything was laying the groundwork and the structural outline for how I want to approach the next year. This day is to fill in how exactly it’s going to go down.

I’ll probably break it up into quarter, months, and weekly plans.

If any of you have used Dan Koe’s Power Planner, you will know what I mean.

I’ve been using it this year, and it’s been a great help for me in the way that I’ve utilized it. I wasn’t as aggressive with keeping my eye on the ball as I didn’t know how I wanted to things to go.

Now I do, though.

I also know that I want everything to be connected and to support each other into a web or universe of content that I can create. This vision has been taking shape with my mentors over the past few months.

Everything has the potential to become an expanded version of itself or repurposed or refined or reduced.

Everything counts.

Day 6 - Productization (from farm to factory)

I plan to take a day to look at what I can offer from every angle imaginable. Sure, I could have taken this step much earlier on, but my brain simply did not work that way at the beginning of this journey.

It took months to break down the typical walls that are endemic of the 9-5 perspective.

AKA: the drone/cog/worker ant mentality.

I always knew this was an option, but I never considered it to be one for me.

I could write plenty about this perspective, but I won’t here.

I’ll be brainstorming low, mid and high ticket offers…and maybe one insane one.

Day 7 - All together now

On this final day of the process, I want to flesh out the plan into a calendar format and plan out exactly what I want to hit at every waypoint.

Sure, it most certainly won’t work out the way I plan it to…but as the saying goes:

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

It’s a day to refine and tweak the plans that come together. Maybe I’ll even share it here in detail for you so that you can do your own process.

What do you think?

Prime your presence.

In a way, I did deliver on what I stated I wanted to put together, but this is a 7-day plan to get me started on the year ahead. I had no clue as to how I was going to get going on this past year.

Somehow, I managed to make it this far. It’s amazing that I’ve managed to write this much being sick. (Wonderful timing of course. Gotta love kids.)

Ok so now I have two things I can offer to you in the near future:

• 7-day program to shorten your own self-discovery process

• 7-day program to plan out a multi-faceted content creation strategy based on the previous outcome

I still have no clue what I’m doing, and I know I’m violating at least a dozen laws of building a business that gurus are screaming about on Money X.

It’s ok. This is my process.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or requests!

Vince

P.S. Wow this was long…didn’t know I had this in me. I’ll share a modified version of this on Medium and maybe even paywall it!