Making the Most of Writing Advice: Goal Setting, Permission, and Validation
For this second post in the “Making the Most of Writing Advice” series, we’re looking at permission, validation, and setting goals—so not just mindset, but also ways of acting from that mindset.
The mindset piece is what I think of as a central fact of sharing creative work: you don’t need permission, and you can’t count on validation. We can create and publish whatever we want! (Let’s go write!) But also, nobody is obligated to like what we publish. (Still, let’s go write!)
The piece where we act from this grounding in creative freedom and acceptance of the inherent risk of not finding our readers starts with considering how we set goals for ourselves. The SMART format for goals is (deservedly) very popular, and often recommended for both professional and personal goals.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. It’s easy to remember and encourages us to think carefully about the goals we make. There are blog posts and articles all over, and these are just a couple of the first I found:
Image © 2026 by Ann Cooper
Achievable & Ambitious
Most of my experience making formal or structured goals is with OKRs (objectives and key results). Measure What Matters by John Doerr is the book to read for more about OKRs. There’s plenty of overlap between the two approaches, but what I want to focus on here is something many SMART goal makers could take from OKRs: ambition.
Part of what makes ambitious goals ambitious is that they tend to be goals where success isn’t completely under the goal-maker’s control. An achievable goal can also be ambitious, but I’ve heard intelligent, experienced people talk about how they can’t make thing Y a goal because part of thing Y is outside of their control. Even over the past few months, on a couple of podcasts I listen to I’ve heard guests and hosts say things like: “Oh, but I won’t make that a goal because I can’t control the outcome of what someone else does.”
This misunderstanding of what achievable means is widespread, but I haven’t been able to find anything that suggests it’s what’s strictly meant. We’re limiting ourselves with this definition of achievable even though SMART supports a bolder stance.
Before I go any further, let me say that if you like to make goals where the success or failure only depends on your own actions and it works for you, I support you. If your approach to goal setting is getting you where you want to go, that’s great!
Either way, please write me at ann@anncooperwrites.com and tell me about your approach, I’d love to hear from you!
Fantasies of Control and Productivity
After I drafted a version of this post with my thoughts about permission and validation and how goals intersect with that idea, I experienced a beautiful moment of library synchronicity.
I use (and love) the Libby app for ebooks and audiobooks from my library. I also subscribe to Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter, and when I saw that there was an audiobook of Meditations for Mortals, I got on the waiting list through Libby. Time passed and I forgot I’d reserved it until I got a notification that it was available a few days after I’d finished my draft of this post.
In the introduction, Burkeman talks about fantasies of control and productivity. He doesn’t talk about goals or goal setting per se, but I realized that the illusion of control is fundamental to how I was thinking about goals: if I’m not in control of nearly as much as I’d like to be in the first place (and I’m not, none of us are), then making smaller goals that I tell myself I’m in complete control of is me making it harder for myself to make progress toward my bigger goals.
This might sound like I’m saying we should throw achievable out the window entirely; after all, if we’re not in control of anything, is every goal ambitious? Is any goal ambitious? I think there can be a balance here.
Some goals are ambitious yet achievable (or at least potentially achievable). An author who wants to publish traditionally having a goal of signing on with an agent? Ambitious, yet achievable. A new author having a goal of getting a six-figure advance from a major publishing house with their first book? It’s certainly ambitious, but not realistically achievable.
I want to encourage us to make ambitious goals that depend on forces we don’t control and can’t predict. We should do this knowing that we won’t completely achieve all of our goals. Failure—if you want to call it that—is inevitable, at least some of time. It’s also TOTALLY OKAY! Sometimes where we end up when we fail is ultimately a better place than our original target.
Avoid self-Destructive Goal Setting
When I advocate making ambitious goals, I’m not saying push yourself harder; please be kind to yourself. I’m saying that making a goal that you believe is achievable because it’s within your ability to execute on completely could be self-limiting—and what’s more, there’s a way of seeing that approach as being part and parcel of the pressure to be productive, to be on top of things, to always be taking care of business and putting a bow on top, to succeed completely or not at all.
A self-limiting definition of achievable can be self-destructive at the same time.
Ambitious goals are goals that we might not fully complete, but that give us room to really get somewhere interesting while not requiring that we be so tidy and perfectly productive along the way—we can do challenging things while being human!
Putting it Together
Goals should include a concrete and measurable plan to achieve some result that is valuable to you in a specific way. If you make an ambitious goal and you complete 80% of the work to succeed at whatever your target is, how meaningful is it, really, to label that as a failure?
But if you’re often finding that you’re falling very short of your targets, or not even finding time to dedicate to the work needed to reach a goal, that’s a signal that you might have too many goals, the scope is too large, or your targets are too ambitious. That’s okay, you can refine your goals and keep moving.
Here’s where we rejoin the guiding idea that we don’t need permission and we can’t count on validation. This means that publishing creative work requires a balance of arrogance (I know y’all are going to want to read this!), humility (I’d love to give you something you find valuable, how can I improve?), and bravery (I know some of y’all will hate this, maybe loudly, or even worse, not notice it, but I’m sharing it anyway).
What might this look like in practice? Since we know validation isn’t guaranteed, we might think that we can’t or shouldn’t set goals that include securing some form of validation. Think of a situation where the goal is to find an experienced agent to represent our debut novel, but then we hear some advice on goal setting that we shouldn’t set goals that we can’t guarantee delivery on, so we scale our goal back to finalizing a manuscript that’s ready to query.
It’s still a good goal, but if you go for the first formulation over the second, you’re allowing yourself to go that extra step to not just get the manuscript ready, but to act on it by sending it out to agents. Then, even if nobody picks it up, you’ve circulated it and you’ve gotten some valuable feedback about the state of your book—or at least about the kind of books those agents were looking for.
We all live in relationship to each other, so let’s make goals that acknowledge that and allow us to “fail” productively, and without shame.
Let’s go write.