On Goals

Category

Writing challenge – one short story, one week

I haven’t done a writing challenge in a while, and surprise of surprises, my writing speed has dropped in their absence. I think it’s about time I fixed that. Related: I got the promised feedback from my editor this past Saturday, and after I shrugged off the hangover from that night’s (unrelated) festivities, I took a peek yesterday. I have so many edits to make! *cries* Fortunately his feedback is really helpful – it illuminated a lot of problems I...

The limits of talent

Many people think that we all have natural talents which can never be changed. “I’m a word guy” or “I’m really good at math”. People think of these proclivities as immovable realities that can never be changed. I disagree. Now to be fair, there are limits. Most of you never had a chance to become an NBA player, whereas I, who stands at 6’7″ (200cm), did. (Don’t worry, I squandered it gloriously.) But outside of that, the limits are far...

Challenge failed, and that’s alright

I named this challenge aptly. It’s the end of the month, and I didn’t reach the 58,000 word mark that I was looking for. There’s still novel yet to edit. I have failed. That’s the easy answer. Here’s the correct one. During my last challenge, I gave myself 18 days to edit 27,000 words. I managed that, barely. This time I gave myself 23 days to edit 58,000 – over double the content in only 5 more days to do it in...

False proxies

In my day job I am a marketer, so please indulge me for a moment. I promise it will be relevant to writing in the end. Marketing guru Seth Godin occasionally talks about false proxies, it’s an idea that has stuck with me. A false proxy is something that can be measured which is assumed to rise (or fall) in correlation with your goal, but is not your goal. Proxies are used when your goal cannot be measured. Seth explains it...

You can’t do it all

Often, we try to do too much. We have jobs and dreams and all the different people in our lives, we have places we want to visit and things we want to do and marvelous experiences we want to have, and we don’t want to give up any of it. So we don’t; we try to do it all. You can’t. If you try to do it all, chances are you will fail at some of it, and quite often,...

Destined to fail

I don’t think failure is a bad thing. Not trying is bad. Dragging your feet, not putting forth your full and honest effort, defrauding your customers and lying to your friends and releasing substandard work, those are all bad. But failure? Naw. Failure is healthy. Failure means you were trying to do something impressive, and just happened to come up a little short. Failure is how you get stronger. Time for me to set myself up for failure. It’s challenge...

You can’t compare your own success to others

I recently spent some time with my older brother, and I found myself reflecting on our varying levels of success. You see, by most people’s measures my older brother is a very successful man: a high paying job, a loving wife, kids who only drive him crazy most of the time, etc etc. I, on the other hand, am single and have a day job for which “high paying” would be an inaccurate descriptor. Even factoring in the years that separate...

Sprint completed! The halfway point

Just a few minutes ago, I finished going over the last few words of the 27,000, just barely hitting my goal*. Phew! With that, I’m officially at the halfway mark, which puts me massively behind where I wanted to be at this point. My goal was to finish editing the entire book during my season off from episodic blogging at RandomC, and I’m halfway there instead. Whoops! Granted, the first quarter of the book was the toughest by far, requiring many...

When good plans go awry

It’s always interesting to see what happens when good intentions meet the real world. Take my 27K challenge. When I first set the goal for myself, I thought I might be giving myself too much time. Lo and behold, after two days where I edited over 10K words cumulatively (mainly through judicious cuts), I was suddenly sure I was going to finish early. There would be egg on my face, but I would just tweak things for the next challenge I set...

Keep me honest – 27K sprint

The main purpose of this blog is to motivate me to finish editing my book, but I haven’t talked about that much. Mostly I’ve focused on inspirational or intellectually-stimulating posts, which help in their own way, but I think its time to get down to brass tacks. Its time to get specific on some goals, and use your attention and judgement to help me reach them. There’s a major turning point in my story coming up. It’s one of the...