Congratulations! You’ve found the first part of the welcome email treasure hunt series!

P.S. Make sure you’d don’t tell anyone how you got here (you can give people hints to help them if they ask, but a big part of the journey is figuring things out).

Your reward is not just this picture of us with our boys (can you spot Blewp and Meowi?), but a bit of a peek behind the scenes, in regards to the creation of the cheat sheet. We thought this picture was a nice homage to the idea of peeking behind the scenes in general, after all, we are peeking out the window (well, the cats are).

Intention?

When we first made the cheat sheet, we already knew what we wanted to put into it. We had scripted and re-scripted and re-scripted another half-a-dozen times, what we were going to say in our very first intro YouTube video. So, we had many different iterations of explanations for the different tenants of the Reality Crafter System to choose from.

All of them, we thought to ourselves proudly, were very clever indeed.

We also knew what general “vibe” and colour scheme we were going for. We’d certainly put plenty of time into putting together a number of visual assets, a dozen or so “preferred fonts” and around 30 or so “ballpark” colours that we were planning to feature in the things we create…

But, for as organised as it all seemed, it was still quite messy.

Our Notion (the online organisational tool we use to draft things) was all over the shop, with the largest folder containing seemingly hundreds of unrelated pages that we’d have to manually search through to find anything. When Meri was doing the design of the first cheat sheet, she knew that purple and gold were going to be the featured colours… But just vaguely picked a couple that fit that description rather than pinpointing any exact shades as exact shades hadn’t been decided.

The end result certainly wasn’t bad.

Looking at it with nothing else to reference, we were actually quite happy with it. We even made the teaser video snippet (which you may have spotted in some of our YouTube videos) using it. And, at the time, we were perfectly content.

Very content.

Extremely content.

But then…

As we started making more and more things…

We came to the realisation that this haphazard way of doing things was not going to cut it.

We had a general intention and a general goal, but it was too vague to keep everything looking coherent and organised.

Most of the things we created looked good in isolation, but didn’t necessarily seem to “belong” together with everything else we made. Some things featured multiple fonts in lots of different sizes and weights (like normal, light or bold). Time after time Meri kept questioning “is this the right purple? Is this the right gold?” and Pat would look on saying things like “it doesn’t seem right… I don’t know why… But it doesn’t seem right”.

The perfect project we were pouring ourselves into was feeling more and more like a little bit of a mess.

Intention!

That’s when Pat made the call that we needed to sit down and put together a “Brand Guidelines” booklet for ourselves.

Meri was not initially on board and thought it was a giant waste of time. There were videos to make, plans to scheme, AR filters to work on, studios to build and so many significantly more important things to do. What was the point of an immaculate brand for a non-existent body of work?

Both of us had spent an enormous time studying things like productivity and were well aware that “busy work” and delaying the start time of “taking action” was one of the main ways people would fail before even getting started. Meri, especially, had seen Pat bogged down and delaying the start of projects endlessly before and was getting antsy that this was just another one of those times.

But, after some back and forth, Meri agreed and we sat down together.

We used industry standard templates to create our brand guidelines, mapped out the exact colours that the brand would feature, limiting this number to significantly less than 30. We then worked out the exact fonts that we’d be using for different parts of the text (like headings or body of text) and how visual assets would be used.

The end result is the final cheat sheet that you’ve now seen in your first welcome email.

In many ways, this cheat sheet is more legible, the text is less heavy and the whole thing looks more slick. But even more importantly, what you can’t see, is how easily it both links in with everything else and how easily other similarly cohesive things can now be made using the set guidelines.

Intention.

Intention is defined in the Oxford dictionary as “something that you want and plan to do”.

Really honing and refining that intention so we knew exactly what we wanted and planned exactly how we wanted to do it were what separated the first version of our cheat sheet and the second.

The Reality Crafter System and The Reality Crafter Mindset, ironically, work in a very similar way. They are a set of guidelines but you define your goals within them. The clearer you are about your intent, the clearer the pathway is to get you there.