Goal-Setting Means SETTING A GOAL

You’ve heard the advice. Set goals. Write them down. Post them somewhere. Sometimes the advisor will expand it with “make tangible goals” or “set goals, and then establish smaller steps to reach them.” And often there’s “set goals you can control.” You can’t make yourself write a bestseller. You can make yourself write book after book to send into the great publishing lottery.

I’ve heard it too. I found it good advice, and I thought I was enacting it. But you know what? I was kind of missing the word tangible, and it’s an important one.

tan·gi·ble   [tan-juh-buhl]
adjective
1. capable of being touched; discernible by the touch; material or substantial.
2. real or actual, rather than imaginary or visionary: the tangible benefits of sunshine.
3. definite; not vague or elusive: no tangible grounds for suspicion.

Number three is what I’m looking at here. I was interpreting tangible as touchable. Reachable. The meaning I needed, though, was definite.

Make definite goals.

My writing goals have mostly been “as much as I can.” And then I’d spend all day on the computer, and after a certain point I’d get no more words but STILL be on the computer…and my wordcounts weren’t even all that great unless it was the last day of NaNo or something.

Yesterday I dithered a lot about what story to work on, and then when I finally started, I fretted about what goal I should set. What if I aimed too high, and I couldn’t keep it up? What if I aimed too low, and wasted my time?

Finally I went with two thousand words a day. It’s a good pace but not a frantic one, I reasoned. I could keep it up. I might even maintain that once I go back to full-time at work. (Maybe.)

So yesterday I hit my goal and a funny thing happened. I stopped writing. And I liked it. I got up and did some things, I hung out with my friends, I did internet stuff. All with the shiny glow of I wrote two thousand words today! I’m forty-two and I’ve just now come across this amazing concept that if I set a goal and make it, I can go do something else.

Tonight I hit the goal earlier than yesterday. I’ve been done writing since six-thirty. I’ve put away clothes, dealt with laundry, cooked food, hung out with friends…

A 2k-a-day goal is respectable by any measure, and once I hit it I can go do other things. I’m writing MORE than I almost ever do, and doing more of other things too.

This…is revolutionary.