STEADY, COWBOY #012

🏃‍♀️Creative people - trying to get off to a fast start in 2025?

Cool, I might be able to help - today I’ll go thru three of the most impactful things I’ve learned from successes and failures writing my own annual plans since 2015.

Okay, so welcome to “STEADY, COWBOY”, where I do three things (mostly) every week:

1. 🛰️Document the effort I’m putting in to become a world class photographer & creative entrepreneur

2. 📈Track the progress I’m making, where my head is at, and what I’m testing to raise my own game

3. 🤝Share as much value as I can, so that I can be useful to you in your own creative mission, whatever that may be

I’m super psyched you’re here. Let’s go.

🛰️1: REPORTING FROM THE FIELD

🤠WHERE I’M AT AND WHAT’S ON MY MIND

Writing to you from Seattle, The whirlwind trip to Las Vegas and Los Angeles is complete, I’m working my way through edits, and life is good.

I want to show you something supremely cool I got to be a part of: Remember how I mentioned I shot a fun project for a friend’s brand? Here’s some behind-the-scenes from shoot day, along with about five minutes spent breaking down lighting approach and troubleshooting on set:

And here’s a couple posts with visuals from the shoot:

valuable.studios

View more on Instagram

Overall, this was a killer opportunity, had a blast, really fun to have gotten to make it. This is a really positive, gratifying way to land the year. I want to see lots more of this out of myself in 2025.

📈2: TRACKING MY PROGRESS

🎞️STILLS

Let’s break down the work I put up this week, just one post:

📸 “INSTANTS” [Summer ‘24]

Let’s break this down: Here are a handful of portraits I’ve shot on an Instax SQ6 over the last nine months. I haven’t tried all the Instax cameras, but so far this one is my favorite. I still find it occasionally blows the subject out too much with flash, but I really do like this thing and I think that square silhouette just feels very classic. I want to keep shooting these and I encourage you, get one of these bad boys, buy some film when it goes on sale, and shoot a few each time you’re on set at a shoot. You might really surprise yourself.

🎬VIDEOS

Okay, on to this week’s videos:

11/26: Timeless or dated, Alexander McQueen 2007:  IG | TT
11/27: The world is your runway part 2: IG
11/29: Art direction playbook: Made In cookware IG | TT

Alexander McQueen video surprisingly popped, Made In video surprisingly flopped. No big deal, it’s a learning opportunity every single time.

📈AUDIENCE GROWTH

Instagram: 9426 followers, +145 vs. last post, +2% vs. last week
TikTok: 1077 followers, +54 vs. last post, +5% vs. last week
Newsletter: 939 subscribers, +13 vs. last week, +1% vs. last week

🤝3: HELPING YOU LEVEL UP

🔬FOCUS FOR TODAY: GETTING OFF TO A FAST START IN 2025

I love a fresh year. It’s an opportunity to recalibrate, figure out what’s important to you, and go get ‘em. Since 2015, I’ve been writing annual plans for myself with all my goals. Seriously, here’s the cover from the cover of my 2016 plan, I was a maniac then and I’m an older maniac now:

☝️Here are three things I’ve learned from doing nearly a decade of these:

1️⃣You can’t do it all today, but you can do something today: James Smith says something like “you overestimate what you can do in a week, but underestimate what you can do in a year.” He’s right. A year is a long time, and it’s 365 opportunities to do something small in service of your aspirations. You can make really small moves, and if you do it consistently, you start to see results. So in 2025, I’m not giving myself any hard deadlines about milestones I need to hit. I’m just going to decide on what’s important to me and then figure out the small steps needed and how often I need to do it to get there/become that person. Examples:

• Instead of “become extremely muscular” it’s “strength training 4x/week and hit 175g protein per day”

• Instead of “build a massive newsletter” it’s “write a newsletter each week and try to make it a little more useful and fun each time”

See what I mean? The green ones are manageable, the red ones are daunting. I’m gonna focus on small wins stacked frequently.

2️⃣What works for Ali Abdaal or Tim Ferriss may not work for you: In 2024, I tried hard to make time blocking work, ie from 6PM-7PM on Tuesdays, I’m going to focus on cold emails. I went through Ali’s exercise on my ideal week, I designed it perfectly, I had finally figured out exactly how to run my whole calendar like a finely tuned machine.

Gargantuan failure. I couldn’t do it. Don’t even know if I hit one day perfectly. Maybe it’s that I’m easily distracted, maybe it’s that the demands of the day are always different and sometimes 6PM on a Tuesday isn’t the right time for me to write emails. I didn’t like being regimented and scheduled, it felt like shackles. Life happens, sometimes I want to work out at 6PM and write my emails at 6AM the next day.

So in 2025, I’m done beating myself up anymore on my inability to stay on a consistent, hour-by-hour schedule. Instead, I’m going to try something different, smaller, more manageable. I set up an easy shortcut on my iPhone and my Apple Watch that start a 15 minute timer, and I’m going to treat myself like a lab experiment - what can I accomplish if I really focus, 15 minutes at a time? I’ll weigh in during 2025 to see if it’s working…or if I need to figure out something else.

3️⃣Real leisure matters: I am known to spend unproductive hours staring at the computer under the guise of productivity. It’s a cruel joke. There is only so much I can accomplish in one day, and too often I try to squeeze one more task out of a day, one more hour of research, whatever. It is typically, and unfortunately, low quality time spent. So in 2025, I’m trying to zig when my instincts tell me to zag: When I know I’m out of gas but I just have that instinctive urge to power through something, I’m trying to better acknowledge that I can’t solve it all today, and maybe the best thing for me is to go for a walk, hang out with my family or friends, watch a movie, read a book, whatever.

🤨Okay, was this useful? if y’all want to see more like this, let me know.

🙋GOT A QUESTION?

Have a question about cameras, lighting, editing, workflows, whatever? Ask me here - your question may get featured and answered in depth in next week’s newsletter.

💬LINKS

📍Free mood board #05, horses in fashion: LINK
🆓Five free Lightroom presets: LINK
🛠️All the cameras + flashes I use: LINK
🤝1:1 consult calls: LINK

🛬4: WRAP UP

💬COMMENT OF THE WEEK

🔗SHARE

If you saw something you like or found interesting in today’s post - will you do me a solid and forward it to a friend or creator you think might like it?

Everybody have a great rest of the year,

Garrett