Photo by Kenan Reed on Unsplash
I talked about this in my writer’s email today, but I can’t stop thinking about it. (Yes, this means that you might hear some overlap if you subscribe to that list of writing encouragement. If you’d like to join that list, just go to rachaelherron.com/write.)
LISTEN HERE:
Let’s talk about goals.
But let’s do it realistically.
As real people, with messy and hard and beautiful and true lives.
In January, we all get a lot of this goal talk, don’t we? And I’m as prone to falling for it as anyone else. In late December, my Instagram feed fills up with pictures of various planners because guaran-damn-teed, I’ll click on every single one. I don’t buy any of them. Nope, I’m pretty happy with the system I use—a combo of paper planner and digital journal and GoodNotes for iPad. I duplicate calendars from digital to physical and back again, because I enjoy massaging the edges of my plans, tinkering with how I’ll fill my future blemish-free hours.
I fuck up those plans every single goddamn time.
And that’s okay.
On Not Setting Goals
I had an incredibly illuminating conversation with my wife the other day. I’ve always known she doesn’t set goals for herself, but I finally asked why she didn’t.
Lala said, “I don’t set goals because I miss them, and then I end up feeling like a terrible person. It’s just less painful not to set them.”
I’ve been married to her for almost 15 years, and while, yes, I’d known she didn’t set creative goals, I’d never known this. My eyes wide, I said, “But—but that’s the thing about personal goals! You just move them if you miss them!”
She shook her head. “But you’re not supposed to do that! That’s the whole point of goals!”
I almost fell off the couch at the realization that we looked at goals so differently. “Yeah, sure, they’re helpful, but they’re made to be changed! They’re our goals. We just rejgger them!”
“You can’t do that! That’s cheating!”
Cheating?
I squawked, “IT’S MY GOAL. There’s no such thing as cheating in our creative goals!”
She looked a little dumbfounded, as if she’d found out that gravity didn’t work the way she thought it did.
So in case you’re feeling a little upside down, too, let me say it even more clearly.
When you set a goal for yourself that no one’s paying you to do, a goal that will fill your creative spirit, the spirit that makes you glow the brightest, you get to change and adjust that goal anytime you want.
You can do it once a year, or you can do it twice before breakfast.
When I’m writing, I’m not filling out a time card, billing my working hours to someone who requires that I meet Goal A and Timeline B.
I simply want to write something, and having a goal helps me get closer to it.
Missing the goal? It doesn’t hurt anyone else, and here’s the important part—it shouldn’t hurt you, either.
In my old life at 911, if I screwed up, someone might die.
But not meeting my writing goal doesn’t get anyone killed. No one goes to jail. The Goal Police don’t come and put me in Goal Gaol. 😂 *bows*
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” ~Douglas Adams.
I love that quote. I also love the phrase “moving the goalposts” even though it’s usually something that’s looked down upon. If you change the target of a process, or the rules of an argument, moving those goalposts is unfair to the players involved.
However!
If you’re the only one affected, then moving the goalpost is part of doing your creative work.
It’s not failure.
It’s realism.
All of us, every single one of us, overestimate what we can do in the amount of time we think we can. You are not alone in missing your self-imposed deadlines—indeed, everyone does it.
The planning fallacy is a phenomenon first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. Put simply, it says that people have too much optimism about the time it will take to complete something.
Interestingly, this bias only affects your own tasks, not those of others. You know it’ll take your husband four months to build the new deck, not the weekend he somehow thinks it will.
But you? You think you can thumbnail your entire comic book by the end of the week. Instead, it takes you three weeks to get four pages done, and you feel like an abject failure because of it.
Honey, no!
Pick those goalposts up and move those suckers! They look heavy and metallic but honestly, they’re made of styrofoam, and you can move them seven at a time if you want to. (It sure sounds like I’ve never been on a soccer field, doesn’t it? And you’d be RIGHT! The closest I’ve gotten to soccer is watching Ted Lasso in the last week or so, which I highly recommended for sweet, kind TV.)
Time estimates are hard.
You will get them wrong, over and over again.
If you punish yourself, either by beating yourself up when you miss them, or by not setting them at all because you can’t bear that kind of loss, the only person you’re harming is your gorgeous creative self.
My wife Lala is a web developer for her day job. She says that project managers routinely take time estimates given to them by developers and double them. Personally, I try to add a 30-40% buffer time around what I think I’ll need and I still steamroll over my personal deadlines most of the time.
Yes, most of time I miss my goals! Not “some” of the time—most of the time.
The exception is that I don’t miss contracted book deadlines. Those I always hit because I’m a professional. But that’s more along the lines of that time card—when someone else is paying us, yes, we hit the goals they set because we have to to keep getting those benjamins.
But when they’re our creative dreams?
We’ll miss our goals.
But we get to move those lightweight pretty little goalposts anytime we want, with—and this is the most important part—NO GUILT.
Missing your personal deadline means you missed a deadline, like every other creative human who has ever lived. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad painter, or a bad songwriter, or a loser in any way at all. Don’t talk about my friend like that.
Missing a personal goal means you’re human, and creative, and exactly perfect, right now, with no need to fix yourself.
Me? I was bound and determined to finish the first draft of this book by December 31st. But then I got sick, and I couldn’t do it. (I’m actually feeling a little smug about that. Sickness is a good excuse! Usually I have no excuse other than, “well… I just didn’t get around to it but I did sew this cute dress! And I watched a full season of a Housewives franchise! And I snuggled cats until they wriggled to get away!”)
So now I’m planning on finishing this draft by January 31st. Fingers crossed! But honestly, I won’t break a finger if those crossed digits do no good and I drag this first drafting into February or even March.
It’s all good. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me as a human being when those deadlines go whooshing past.
It’s not failure.
Moving goalposts means that you’re still working.
The only failure that can happen is if you set the goal, miss it, and never go back to it again because you’re so upset that you didn’t hit it. That’s the failure that hurts. That’s the failure that can smother your creativity.
And it’s common. You’re not alone if you’re sitting in the shallow end of that pool, your swimsuit getting colder and clammier by the minute. Come on in and dry off, and then–
—Make a new, creative goal. Try to hit it. You’ll get further than if you had no goal at all. Then, if and when you miss your deadline, set a new one! Rejgger that puppy.
It’s really, truly okay. This is how creativity works.
You’re doing it exactly right.
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