Making the Most of Writing Advice: Goal Setting, Permission, and Validation
For this second post in the “Making the Most of Writing Advice” series, I wanted to think about permission, validation, and setting goals. This cluster of stuff is about mindset, but it’s also about action.
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 action part grows out of embracing creative freedom and accepting the inherent risk of not finding our readers. It starts with setting goals that have a clear path forward. 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 about SMART goals all over—these are just a couple of the first ones I found:
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Achievable & Ambitious
Most of my experience making 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.
In the past few months, I’ve heard guests and hosts on a couple of podcasts I listen to say things like: “Oh, but I won’t make that a goal because I can’t control the outcome of what someone else does.”
I think this is a misunderstanding of what achievable means, and it’s widespread, but I haven’t found anything that suggests it’s actually what achievable is supposed to mean in a SMART context. 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 depends solely on your own actions and that works for you, I support you. If your approach to setting goals is getting you where you want to go, that’s great!
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 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 drafting 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 it made me realize that the illusion of control is fundamental to how I think about goals. If I’m not in control of nearly as much as I’d like in the first place (and I’m not, none of us is), then making smaller goals that I believe I’m in control of might make it harder to reach my real goals.
Here’s the “achievable” approach: I’m not going to make a goal of getting some number of newsletter subscribers because I can’t control who signs up to my newsletter. Instead, I’m going to make a goal of writing three posts a month because that’s under my control. But it’s not!
Maybe I’ll be able to write three posts a month for six months and then something unexpected happens and I can’t keep up that pace. My newsletter hasn’t gotten many new subscribers, either. But what if I’d spent those six months trying to find more people interested in getting my newsletter? What other things might I have done that might’ve been more effective than writing more posts? Is writing more posts actually getting me somewhere I want to go? Maybe! But if my real goal is to grow my newsletter, then I could’ve been more effective by going after that.
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.
Some goals are ambitious yet achievable (or at least potentially achievable). A writer 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. I think we should do this knowing that we won’t completely achieve all of our goals. Failure 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. (Also, sometimes it’s not.)
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 by yourself 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 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, that the scope is too large, or that 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.
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 a writer’s debut novel, but then the writer hears some advice on goal setting that says they shouldn’t set goals that they can’t guarantee delivery on, so they scale their goal back to finalizing a manuscript that’s ready to query.
It’s still a good goal, but if the writer goes for the first formulation over the second, they’re allowing themselves 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, the writer has still circulated it and gotten some valuable feedback about the state of the book—or at least about the kind of books those agents were looking for.
What do you think?
Let’s go write.