Why I wrote a book: The Big Plan for the Creative Mind Journey

There are so many people I’ve worked with over the years who have incredible ideas and goals. For this reason, Dannie Fountain and I decided to write The Big Plan For The Creative Mind book—as a collaborative way to showcase these amazing people and what they know about goal setting!

In the two and a half years that I’ve been in this business, I’ve seen people continuously work on the same goals. When I hear that they’ve been holding onto a dream for so long without any completion, I get really upset for them! I want creatives to be able to have an incredible dream and put it out into the world because it’s really doing our world a service by putting these awesome things out there!

When we hold back and don’t have a good plan or method to execute our dreams, it holds us back. We wrote this book because we believe that creatives have skills and talents that far exceed our world’s imagination. More importantly, I believe we have a purpose that’s rooted in our core that drives us forward beyond the barriers that we face every single day.

I find that a lot of my clients—these right-brained, heart centered women—are more go-with-the-flow oriented and they have been told by corporate peers that they aren’t setting goals in the right way—or maybe that they don’t understand the traditional way of goal setting. So, they try to accomplish their goals but ultimately they don’t.

Why We Wrote The Big Plan For The Creative Mind

One of the reasons we wrote this book was because we wanted to show creatives that goal setting is imperative in having a business. It’s a non-negotiable. However, when you do a quick goal setting search in Google you’ll find a lot of left-brain linear books that are almost always blue with those green arrows (so boring) or something like that. Those are fine and are great for frameworks but these creative individuals don’t feel like that necessarily works for them.

Creatives don’t like being contained in a box. They don’t like feeling like someone has told them what they have to do. This process of planning isn’t necessarily wrong, but we want to show people through the book that there is a different way of planning and of doing things. Actually, many different ways.

The Harvard Business School Study That Proves It All

There was a Harvard Business School study that was conducted in 1979 which showed that 83% of the people who were part of this study didn’t have any goals. Another 14% had a plan but they didn’t have anything written down—it was all in their heads. Ultimately, only 3% of people took the time to actually write their goals down. In this study they found that the 14% who had goals are 10 times more likely to be successful than those without goals. And as for the 3% who wrote them down, they were 3 times more successful than the 14% with the unwritten goals!

Basically, we wanted to encapsulate the 3% that wrote down their goals and expand that to a bigger percentage in the creative industry. Just simply writing down your goals can set you up for so many more opportunities! All it takes is putting pen to paper.

There are so many different tools out there, too. We talk about power sheets, Conquer Kit, Your Best Year, and other tools and planners that people use. However, it’s not all about what you use—it’s more about how you use it.

The leaders who are writing these books, who have a lot of intellectual property and thought-leadership around the topics of goal setting, have their tools and ideas dispersed in different places. Dannie and I wanted to see them all living in one place so that it’s solidified and it’s being showcased.

Who We Feature In Our Book

We chose a group of 13 entrepreneurs who we feel are doing incredible things at the top of their game. We wanted to show how they execute their goal setting, how they teach it, and also how they tackle a goal when their initial plan doesn’t work out. In the book, we wanted to showcase not only the business side of things but their personal lives as well. The people we chose all have very different lifestyles. Some people live in the city, some in the suburbs, some are married, a few have children, and some don’t! They’re all completely unique.

We wanted to feature all those different pieces of their lives as well as their MBTI profile so that you can really get a sense of what goal setting looks like for these different people. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in somebody else’s profile more than another. That’s okay!

For example, we want you to use this book like CiCi’s Pizza. It’s like a buffet style of goal setting where you get to choose a slice of pizza here, and a slice there and you’re able to pick the best practices that are going to work for you.

You should have fun while creating these goal-setting strategies! We want you to find a way that really works for you. We believe that goal setting should be as unique as choosing pizza from a buffet. You’re not like anybody else. You need a strategy for planning that works for you.

What We Want This Book To Achieve

The Big Plan For The Creative Mind really seeks to offer you unique opportunities. This book is a way for you to connect with these creative industry leaders and get a sense of what it’s like both in their businesses and in their lives. We wanted to show you goal setting on a macro level and show you the cross section of our industries through this process.

In this book—and in each of the leader’s profiles—you’ll see their MBTI, a glimpse of how their brains work, what their thoughts are on goal setting, things that work and don’t work, etc. We also included a brief lifestyle profile so you can get to know them as people—not just experts, but as people in their own homes.

We asked them to fill in the blank on one simple statement: “I plan because _______.” That created some interesting conversations for us in terms of why people sit down to do intentional planning.

We want you to grab this book and start thinking about your brand new year coming up and how to make the most of it. Whether it’s by doing a more linear, left-brain methodology or looking at Katie Hunt’s One Focus—or trying something else that’s in the book! We want you to look at goal setting and figure out what’s going to work for you and have the best year ever.