2022 expectations vs reality
At the beginning of 2022 I set 5 goals for my business. Wanna see how many of them I reached? Spoiler alert: it wasn't a lot.
At the beginning of the year, I tried to reach out to a few agencies to see if they’d be interested in working with me. I did have one positive response but ultimately decided it was not the best time for me to commit to it as I was too busy with work. I may try again in the future as I still believe it can be an interesting career move.
Although I still feel like my style could potentially work well for surface design I have to confess that I did nothing to achieve this goal. Luckily, I was pretty busy during the year with client work. But that meant that I had no time to dedicate to making this goal a reality. Like last year, all the time I wasn’t actively working, I was spending with my child as she is my #1 priority.
In 2021 I had my baby and between that and work, I completely neglected my social media presence which is still an important tool to find clients and connect with like-minded people. So in 2022, I wanted to create more content. And I did! But I had zero strategy (I really wish I was able to have a more strategic mind) so that meant that I posted a lot in some months and went completely silent in others:
I posted one TikTok video every day in May and then posted nothing for the rest of the year. I tried to be consistent on Instagram but haven’t posted anything in 2 months… But I did start this newsletter and I picked up my youtube again in the last part of the year and I’m very happy about that.
Creating a podcast has been a goal of mine for a very long time as I love listening to them. Finally, in 2022 I gathered the courage and invited my illustrator friend Sara to join me, and together we created one. We launched one episode every week for 25 weeks straight. I’m extremely proud of us for doing it. Have a listen if you know Portuguese, there are a lot of insights into our careers and advice for new illustrators.
Not much to say about this. I’ll try again next year.
And what actually happened
I only met one and a half of the 5 goals I set for myself at the start of 2022. From the outside, it may seem like a pretty miserable outcome but it really isn’t! It was a pretty good year and there were a lot of good things happening. Here are a few highlights: