I’ve always been a write-down-my-goals person. And lately I’ve come to believe that writing down aspirations, intentions and random thoughts that pop up can also be an “influential” thing to do. Even without worrying about how-when-where-what, I think our subconscious gets going when we write down ideas. 
Case in point: the photo above is part of the vision board I made in 2009 for Christina as she started to design our logo. Andrew’s brother and his wife had just given me a birthday card with “Live Life One Cupcake at a Time” on the front. It fit with my idea that cupcakes are a symbol of enjoying the little things every day- so I stuck it in the middle, and asked Christina to use it as a tagline. (Thanks, Tina and Jamie!).
But I just noticed this week as I was walking by the board (now on my office wall), that way back in 2009, I’d also added the word ‘celebration’ in two places (you can see them in the photo). I had totally forgotten that! It made me smile to see those references to celebrating in the light of our recent focus at PGB on helping people celebrate (Celebration Cakes; customized toppers and images on special cakes; plans for Weddings by PGB). Five years ago I was most definitely simply planning a cupcake business and my focus was on the quality of the cupcakes and customer service…I wasn’t consciously thinking that the real driver of our business would be helping people celebrate. But it was there somewhere in my mind and I think that the act of writing stuff down does make a difference.
If that’s all too airy-fairy for you, I get it: maybe the business would have evolved in this way, vision board or not. But I’ve noticed this interesting correlation between [forgotten] written goals and dreams – and things that have happened to me – often enough that personally I plan to keep writing aspirations and ideas down.
