Last week, I shared the methods I use to create my goals every year.

This week, I want to talk about habits.

To put it in football terms, if goals are the endzone, habits are the yards.

For every goal I’ve created in my life, those that have gotten accomplished the fastest (and with the best results) have been those I’ve broken down into daily or weekly habits.

For me, there are three primary habits I am hoping to adopt and improve upon in 2024.

My hope is that by putting these out into the world I will be able to simultaneously hold myself accountable and inspire you to create some new habits of your own.

Let’s go.

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Make more music

I don’t make enough music.

There. I said it.

Over the past couple of years, my job has slowly evolved from releasing music and testing things to helping others with their music and marketing full-time at the expense of creating my own work.

And while I love what I currently do, I recognize that I have not left enough space to make music of my own.

That needs to change.

The habit: spend one hour every weekday working on music.

I have no goals for a set number of releases, nor do I have goals for streams, revenue, or anything else—I simply want to fall back in love with the habit of creating music.

My assumption (and my hope) is that if I can just spend five hours per week making music, the rest of the aforementioned metrics will take care of themselves.

And I’ll probably end up spending far more time making music than just five hours per week.

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Create more cinematic content

I love making videos, and I especially love the art of telling compelling stories through video as a medium.

The storytelling bit isn’t something I’m particularly great at yet, but man, I sure would love to be.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to fall into habits of convenience when making videos for YouTube.

For a long time now, I’ve rocked the exact same camera setup and have created very similar videos each week.

In 2024, I want that to change.

The habit: take the time to write a script, plan shots, and film b-roll for every video I make.

Most of the time, when I make a YouTube video, I have a general idea of what I want to film and I just turn on the camera and go for it, but this has led to fairly static shots and a reliance on publicly available b-roll footage from stock sites.

This works, but it’s not that artistically fulfilling.

It has also hindered my growth and improvement as a video creator.

I’ve come to realize that if I want to tell better stories and create more engaging content for my channel, I need to put in the work to do that.

That means deep diving into how to improve my lighting setup, how to shoot cinematic sequences, how to tell a good story, and, last but not least, selecting a wider variety of topics to cover that will allow me to put those newfound skills to good use.

Don’t worry, I’ll still be covering the marketing side of things, but I believe there is a big opportunity to serve others with my content in ways I haven’t yet discovered.

I want to see what that looks like.

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Improve our course offerings

My primary business these days is running our agency with DuPree X.

We also have a course we sell alongside that, but where the agency has grown, evolved, and massively improved over the past two years, the course has not.

Not only is our existing course due for an update, but there are multiple other avenues of growth and marketing that we know work but just haven’t had the time to put into a course format.

Look, I know the agency solution is not for everyone. Some can’t afford a higher-ticket service like that, and others simply want to do the work themselves (me 👋🏻).

The issue is that I desperately want to provide value to artists and creators at every level, not just those who are agency clients, so we need to improve the way we do that outside of the agency.

The habit: take at least one hour per week to work on course curriculum for DuPree X.

I believe that, much like with music, if I can simply devote a set amount of time to the inputs for this, then the outputs will take care of themselves.

By setting aside the time to work on curriculum every week, I think we’ll see a much broader course offering that will help artists at all levels by the end of the year.

My goal, our goal, through DuPree X is to serve artists just like us, and I believe this will be a massive step forward in achieving that.

So those are the three big habits I’m looking to adopt and improve upon in 2024.

How about you?

If you’ve got something on your mind, hit reply and let me know!

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