CHAPTER THREE

Setting Your Goals

Before you touch a platform or film a single thing, decide what you are building toward — because the goal decides everything else.

Now the book turns practical, and I want to start exactly where almost nobody starts, which is the one question sitting underneath every other question you will ever ask about this: what are you actually trying to do here? Most people skip it entirely. They hear “you really ought to be posting,” they grab the phone off the back bar, and they start — and six weeks later they are tired, confused, and quietly quitting, not because they lack talent but because they never once decided what they were chasing. They worked hard in no particular direction and got exactly where that always gets you, which is nowhere, with sore feet. You are not going to make that mistake, because we are going to deal with this first.

Here is the principle that governs this whole chapter and most of the book that follows it, so underline it if you are the underlining type: strategy follows goals, never the other way around. The platform you choose, the kind of content you make, the hours you are willing to spend, even the way you measure whether any of it is working — all of it depends entirely on what you want out of it. There is no universal right answer to “what should I post,” and anybody who gives you one is selling something, because the right move for the bartender who wants fatter Friday tips is the dead wrong move for the one who wants to quit the rail and go full-time, and both of those are different again from the one who just wants to help keep her favorite old dancehall from closing.

So before we so much as glance at a platform, we are going to do two unglamorous things that will save you months. First, we are going to figure out what you want — the real goal, not the vanity version you think you are supposed to say. Second, we are going to take an honest, unflinching look at where you are starting from, because a goal without a clear starting point is just a wish you are telling yourself at closing time. By the end of this chapter you will have one true goal written down in plain words and a clear-eyed read on your own situation, and every practical thing after this gets built to serve that. Get this part right and the rest of the book has a job to do. Get it wrong and you will work yourself ragged rowing hard in the wrong direction. I am not going to pretend this is the fun part — the fun is the filming and the people and the wins down the road. But this is the part that makes all of that count for something instead of evaporating, so we start here, on purpose, with our boots on.

3.1 Why Goals Come Before Everything

The mistake nearly everybody makes is starting with the wrong question. They start with “what should I post,” which feels practical and productive, but it is a tactics question, and tactics aimed at nothing in particular is just motion — busy, tiring motion that burns your evenings and returns nothing. You can make a hundred perfectly good videos and end up with nothing you wanted, because not one of them was ever aimed at a target. A clip is not a goal. A streak of posting is not a goal. Those are activities, and activity without a destination is just a treadmill you bought yourself.

The real cost of skipping this step is not just wasted effort, though there is plenty of that. It is that you will start chasing whatever the platform rewards instead of whatever you want, and those two things are almost never the same. The app wants views, because views keep you posting and keep other people watching, so the app will happily hand you little dopamine hits of attention that feel exactly like progress and deliver absolutely nothing to your real life. You can rack up a hundred thousand views from strangers three states away and not earn one extra dollar or one new regular at your own bar. Vanity metrics are the most expensive free thing in the world, and a clear goal is the only thing that inoculates you against them.

Here is the good news on the other side of all this, and it is freeing once it lands. The moment you know what you want, every decision after it gets dramatically easier, and most of the noise simply falls away on its own. You can ignore the overwhelming majority of the advice out there — and there is an ocean of it — because most of it is aimed squarely at a goal that is not yours. A clear goal is a filter. It tells you which platform to learn and which to skip, which content to make and which to leave alone, which numbers to watch and which to cheerfully ignore. People without a goal drown in options. People with one barely notice them. And a goal protects more than your hours. It protects the very reason you started — the room, the regulars, the plain thing you love about this work — by keeping you from trading it away one trend at a time for numbers that were never the point in the first place.

3.2 The Menu: What You Might Be Building Toward

Let me lay out the honest menu, because “I want to get famous” is not a goal, it is a feeling, and you cannot build a plan on a feeling. Here are the real things a seasoned bartender builds toward, and most of them have nothing to do with fame. One: fatter tips and a bigger personal following inside your own bar — local pull that fills your section on a Tuesday and follows you if you change jobs. Two: a name in your town or your scene — becoming a known figure people drive in to meet. Three: income beyond the rail — brand deals, sponsorships, a little side money that takes some pressure off. Four: a real career exit — building toward the day you can leave the schedule behind and do this full-time. Five: marketing the house itself, if you own a piece of it or love it enough to carry it. And six, the one nobody lists: honoring your room and helping keep its doors open. And notice these can run in sequence, not only in parallel — plenty of bartenders start out chasing nothing fancier than better tips, find their feet over a season, and only then discover an appetite for something bigger. Where you start does not have to be where you finish.

Now here is the part that matters about that menu: most people want some blend of those, and that is fine and normal, but you have to name a primary. You can absolutely want better tips and a little side income and to honor your room all at once — I would expect you to. But one of them has to lead, because when they start pulling in different directions, and they will, your primary goal is the one that breaks the tie. The bartender whose primary is local tips makes very different choices than the one whose primary is a national brand deal, even when both of them want a bit of each. Naming the leader is the whole exercise. A wish list is not a goal. A ranked list is. And if you stare at that menu and honestly cannot tell which one is yours — which is far more common than anyone admits — do not force a fake answer. Surface the real one with a couple of blunt questions.

A year from now, what would make all this effort feel worth it: a fuller section, a check in the mail, a town that knows your name, a hall still standing? If the money were guaranteed either way, which would you still bother to do? And when you truly cannot decide, default to the local goal and just start there — it is the cheapest to chase, the easiest to reverse, and the surest way to learn what you want, because nothing clarifies a goal like a season of working toward one.

And I want to put real weight on that sixth one, because it is the most undervalued goal on the menu and the most Texan. Not every goal has to be money or reach. Some of the best bartender-creators I know are doing this, at bottom, to honor the room and help keep a hundred-year-old hall from going dark — to show a hungry country what they have before it is gone. That is not a lesser goal or a consolation prize. It is a real and worthy aim, and it shapes your strategy every bit as much as a money goal does: it points you at the room instead of yourself, at the regulars instead of the trends, at the truth of the place instead of the algorithm’s flavor of the week. If that is your primary, own it proudly. It is the goal this whole series was written to serve. And if money is your aim instead, that is no sin either; a bartender deserves to be paid well for being good at a hard craft. The only truly wrong goal is the one you never actually chose for yourself — the one the internet quietly picked for you while you were not looking.

3.3 Your Goal Decides Your Game

Once your primary goal is named, watch how completely it decides the game you are about to play, because this is where it stops being philosophy and starts being a plan. If your goal is better tips and a bigger following at your own bar, your whole game tilts local: you lean on the platforms your actual town uses, you make content about your specific room and your specific regulars, you keep your effort modest and sustainable, and you measure success in faces at your bar, not followers in California. If your goal is brand deals, the game flips entirely — now you are building a polished, consistent portfolio in a clear niche on the platforms brands actually shop, and a thousand engaged local fans matter more than a hundred thousand random views. Same bartender, same talent, completely different game, decided entirely by the goal. And if your primary is honoring the room and keeping its doors open, the game shifts again: now you are filming the place and its people far more than yourself, working hand in glove with the owner instead of around him, and counting success in the crowd that shows up and the hall that stays lit — a different scoreboard altogether.

This is exactly why so much of the advice out there will quietly wreck you if you follow it blind, and I need you to hear this clearly. The overwhelming majority of creator advice online is aimed at the most demanding goal on the menu — going full-time, building a national audience, turning yourself into a brand machine — because that is the goal that sells courses and gets clicks. If your actual goal is fatter local tips and a name in your town, and you go follow the full-time-influencer playbook, you will burn yourself to the ground doing five times the work your goal ever required, chasing metrics that do not serve you, and you will quit and conclude you “failed” when the truth is you just ran the wrong race. Match the playbook to your goal. Most of the time, your goal needs far less than the internet insists.

And that brings us to the price tag, which I am going to be honest with you about because nobody else will be. Effort and time scale directly to the size of the goal, with no exceptions and no shortcuts. A local-tips goal might cost you two or three hours a week, filming what is already happening in front of you and posting it without much fuss. A full-time-exit goal costs you, functionally, a second full-time job stacked on top of the demanding one you already have, for a year or more before it pays. Neither price is wrong. But you have to know the price before you commit, because the most common way this ends badly is a person quietly signing up for the full-time price while only actually wanting the local-tips reward. Decide what you want, then look hard at what it costs, and make sure you are willing to pay that, not some other number.

And be honest about whose price it really is, because those hours do not come out of thin air — they come out of a life. They come from your sleep, your days off, and the people at home who are used to having you around. A goal that quietly bankrupts your marriage, your kids’ attention, or the rest you need to keep pouring well is the wrong goal no matter how good its metrics would look. Some goals lean on other people, too — the coworker who ends up in your shots, the band whose set you are filming — and their buy-in is part of the price as surely as your own hours are. Count all of it before you commit, not after.

3.4 Where Am I Now? The Honest Self-Audit

You cannot plan a route without knowing the spot you are standing on, so before we set a single target, we take honest inventory of the starting line. Start with time, and be brutally real, not aspirational: how many hours a week can you give this, on top of a job that already eats your nights and leaves your feet aching? Not the hours you wish you had — the hours you have. Then your skills: how comfortable are you really, on camera and with the tech, today, before any practice? Then your current reach: how many followers, if any, and more importantly, how big and how loyal is the crowd already standing at your bar? An honest count of what you are starting with is not discouraging. It is the only thing that lets you plan a route you can actually walk. Put your money reality on that same ledger while you are at it, because most goals here run on a lag — you spend the hours, and sometimes a little cash on a light or a microphone, well before any of it pays a nickel back. Can you carry that gap for a while without coming to resent it? Knowing your honest runway is what keeps you from quitting in month three, right before the turn that would have made it all worth it.

Then audit two things people almost always skip, starting with the bar itself, because you do not create in a vacuum. Does the owner support the idea, or is filming going to start a fight you have not had yet? Is the room itself a place worth featuring — does it have the character and the crowd that make the content sing — or are you going to have to work harder to find the magic? Your venue is part of your starting position whether you like it or not, and we will get deep into managing that relationship in the next part of the book. For now, just put it honestly on the ledger: is the house an asset, an obstacle, or something you will have to carefully bring along?

The last piece of the audit is the one people dodge hardest, and it is the one that matters most: how public are you actually willing to be? Some goals require putting your face, your voice, your opinions, and your bad days out in front of strangers, constantly, and absorbing whatever those strangers throw back. If you are a private person, that is not a character flaw, but it is a real fact that rules some goals in and some goals out, and far better to know it now than to discover it three months and one cruel comment section later. Be honest about your appetite for exposure, for criticism, for being “on” when you would rather just pour drinks. The whole point of this audit is to find the honest gap between where you stand and where your goal sits — and a big gap is not a no, it is just a longer runway. Pretending the gap is not there is how people set themselves up to quit. Name it instead. A named gap is just a plan waiting to happen. An unnamed one is an ambush you are quietly scheduling for your future self.

3.5 Setting Goals That Fit Your Life

Now we turn the goal into something you can actually steer by, and the trick is to set targets you control instead of outcomes you do not. “Go viral” is not a goal, because virality is weather — you do not command it, you can only be ready when it shows up. So aim at the things that are in your hands: post twice a week for a month; make ten clips about your regulars; learn to light one corner of your bar well; turn one online stranger into one paying customer who walks in and asks for you. Those are real, reachable milestones, and the beautiful thing about aiming at what you control is that the outcomes you want — the tips, the name, the reach — tend to follow the inputs anyway. Chase the inputs. Let the outcomes chase you. Build those milestones like a ladder, each rung close enough to step to from the last: a month of steady posting, then a modest reach goal, then a first dollar or a first new face at the bar, then the next rung up. Small, sequenced, and in your own hands beats big, vague, and in the algorithm’s hands every time.

Hold those goals loosely, too, because they are going to change, and that is a feature, not a failure. The goal you write down tonight is the right goal for tonight, but six months of actually doing this will teach you things about yourself and your appetite that you cannot know yet, and the goal should be allowed to grow up alongside you. Check in on it every season or so. Maybe the local-tips goal turns out to light a fire for something bigger; maybe the dream of going full-time turns out, in the cold light of a hundred posts, to be more than you want. Either way, do not become a prisoner of a goal that no longer fits your life. The goal serves you. You do not serve it.

Which is the whole point, and where I will leave you before we go find your audience. Your goal has to fit the life you want, not the life the internet keeps insisting you are supposed to want. Maybe what you want is to build something big enough to finally walk away from the schedule, and if so, good — aim the whole machine at the exit. But maybe what you want is to stay right where you are, behind the bar you love, for twenty more years, and just fill your section and honor your room and be the keeper of the place. Hear me on this: that is not the small dream. That might be the best one on the menu. The genuine tragedy I have watched too many times is the bartender who chased somebody else’s goal all the way out of the room they were actually happy in. Decide what life you want first. Then, and only then, let us go figure out exactly who you are making all this for.