Tonight I attended the LLAiR lecture/workshop series with Diana Ho ’71, a Scripps graduate who works as a consultant (look at all this career planning I’m doing guys!) which was really interesting. I was actually there for about 4 hours (SO MUCH CAREER PLANNING) but I mostly wanna talk about her first topic.
Turning the Wish Into the Way: Your Planning Toolkit was really informative, and we planned vacations to tie everything together. That would probably be the most useful example to use for this post, but instead I’m gonna substitute an animated TV series that’s been rolling around in my head for a while. It’s basically about these four really obnoxious white boys who are actually the four horseman of the apocalypse, and they just sort of wander around at the end of the world with literally no knowledge that it’s like 200% their fault.
it’s sort of like Ed, Edd and Eddy meets Holden Caufield with some obvious inspiration from real life white boys. It’s a work in progress, obvi, as is my ability to blend cartoon contouring as well as my own
Anyway, so it starts like this: You wanna break a big idea into smaller, more manageable pieces, and the first thing you need to do is understand where you are in that process. To do that we use SWOT
yes, that’s exactly what I mean
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, with Strengths and Weaknesses being things you can control, and Opportunities and Threats being external. You break things down like this:
Strengths: I have a concept that’s somewhat well thought out in my head, a reasonably existent ability to draw and a very real desire to end up with a totally random art career
Weaknesses: I don’t actually know how to animate things, the software to start doing that is pretty expensive and there is exactly zero market for this particular TV show (actually I take that back, this would kill with overly cynical 13 year olds and also maybe bronies)
it could really work with their whole apocalypse thing
Opportunities: I have access to people willing to teach me things, I’m planning on getting a degree, and also learning some computer science. I’m in California where the whole Cartoon Network thing happens, and hey, maybe Adventure Time will run out of side characters at exactly the right time.
Threats: lol literally everything
So once you’ve gauged where you stand in the cosmic balance of the universe (hopefully you fall somewhere in between this vid of jello dancing and the new ANTM theme song) (why yes, those videos are completely unrelated to everything I’m talking about and make no sense as a scale, thanks for noticing) THEN you decide where you want to go. This has two steps: a mission statement and a vision
A mission statement is broad and kinda states your purpose for existing. Some examples might be, “To put a man on the moon, To cure cancer, To be on top” Mine is something like, “to entertain and horrify with self-aware social commentary and terrible apocalypse puns” Catchy, huh?
A vision is a snapshot of the future. When, Where and How you will measure your success. For example I would feel successful if a Buzzfeed staffer writes a terrible article based on this blog post within the next 20 years to show their declining readership how it all started.
So if I want to achieve Buzzfeed article levels of success I need a game plan
again, this is obviously exactly what I meant
Or as D-Ho puts it “Key Result Areas” (areas where results are key to success) so like, ability to animate a tv pilot, funding for said tv pilot, market niche for aformentioned tv pilot and other episode ideas in case it’s a slow programming year for adult swim
which is always apparently
Your Key Result Areas come with Critical Success Factors, which is basically what you’re trying to achieve within that area. So within the KRA of getting funding I would need to have a screenplay and a demo reel that I could present to potential investors/producers. If you still haven’t picked up on this, what we’re doing is breaking down big problems into smaller, more manageable problems.
So then within your CSFs you have goals (and yes I swear we’re almost done) which are tasks for specific people within a specific timeframe. So a few of my goals would be to
1) create a demo reel illustrating my (currently unrealized) ability to animate things
2) research what corporations could be interested in my product (lol none) and
3) meet with the people at those businesses who have to deal with people like me (aka people who are the worst).
The good thing about goals is that you can add as many as you think you need to achieve your Critical Success Factor, like maybe I think I need an agent (whoo! new goal!) maybe I wanna get Hannibal Buress to voice all of my characters (whoo! best goal!) but ultimately every goal is going towards one, bigger and better overall goal.
It’s like how when you write papers you start out with random buzzwords surrounded by terrible sketches of your classmates and build up to five pages, a works cited and a really good understanding of certain bone structures (no, just me? okay)
Anyways, I hope y’all learned something from my first attempt to teach you anything ever. It’s cool if you didn’t though. It’ll all work out in the end.
#sorrynotsorry