Mindfulness, 100 Days of Starting, by Eric Witchey

[image error] 100 Days of Starting

Mindfulness, Destructive Goals, and Implicit Hierarchies

Eric Witchey

In my last installment on this page, I described my new goal-tracking calendar and how it related to gold stars from my childhood. Tuesday of this week marked 100 days of working with that tool, and I have to say it is going well. I have managed to award myself 100 gold stars.

Woohoo!

Let’s not get too excited. The goal was entirely about consistency in “starting.” The goal statement is “I will write and exercise a minimum of five minutes each every day.” I can, and do, as much as I want. The goal is only about consistency in starting. Even on a day off, I can do 5 and 5.

For many people, five minutes is nothing at all. For others, it is much harder than it sounds. For a few, it will be respected as amazing success at consistently doing something trivial. As my father used to say, “Eric, everything depends on where you stand when you look.” Regardless, my 100-day experience put me in the frame of mind to say a few things about goals and goal setting.

Once upon a time, after my father threw me out of the house and a brief stint in construction in Colorado, I joined an itinerant troop of fire alarm salesmen working for U.S. Safety and Engineering Corp. I had the dubious distinction of rising in the ranks until I managed, mostly by luck and the passion of child who had experienced bad burns, to become the national champion salesmen in an organization of about 3000 salesmen. That’s another story. The point here is that at 19 years of age I found myself in the odd position of teaching others to sell and giving motivational speeches.

Life happened, and I realized I was a writer and needed to go to college. To get into college, my quest took me through many jobs. I sold art, furniture, equipment, and more furniture. Additional successes led to teaching more people to sell and to more motivational speeches, including one very strange and notable speech to a group of people raising money for The World Hunger Project, which is yet another story.

Eventually, I managed to get into college. There, my training in setting measurable, attainable goals served me well.

In most of training sessions during my questing years, I either had to, or chose to, teach goal setting. “It’s very hard to hit a target you haven’t set up,” was one of my mantras. Even all those years ago (40 plus at this writing), goal setting had been standardized by the many generations of hard-working, financially successful people who came before.

We were taught, and I taught, that a goal was a challenge to the self. It had to be realistically achievable. It had to be measurable. It worked best if it was set in a social context (accountability), etc.

Fast forward to where I am now and my life as a writer and communication consultant in many different contexts, and I hope I’ve gained a little bit of wisdom. I have experienced what I’m about to say in academic environments, high-tech companies, furniture companies, selling alarms, state and federal agencies, fiction writing groups, and literally dozens of other environments in which groups of people join together in setting goals.

People naturally start comparing themselves to one another in the context of public goal setting. Competition develops when goals are public, and the competition is only productive for about 10-20% of the participants.

Many people will look at what I just wrote and think, “Well, they shouldn’t compare themselves to others” or “Well, the rest of the people don’t want it bad enough.” Okay, maybe the thought is some other variation on these concepts. “They need to work harder” or “They need to set more realistic goals” or “It’s a Darwinian system and they are not best adapted” or some other self-validating statement that identifies the person with the thought as in the top of the tribal pecking order. It has always amazed me at how easy these kinds of statements roll off the tongues of the people who identify themselves as striving for “success” or “excellence” or just working their way toward the top.

These thoughts essentially turn goal setting into slightly disguised race or contest in which everyone wants the same thing and begins at the same starting line with the same educational, mental, physical, financial, and social equipment. If you are a company trying to make money, that’s good. If you are an artist trying to develop an identity of personal craft and place in the dialog of the art form, maybe not so much.

Let’s assume, as a thought experiment and for the sake my illustration of personal experience, that this kind of insular, hierarchical thinking is actually only represented on one side of a normal distribution. If the identification of self as striving for success is one end of the curve, then identification of self as failing to strive is the other end of the curve.

Observing these systems of communal goal setting over the years, I have seen that the systems always generate temporary “success” for a few people based on the metrics presented. Even if people are allowed to set different metrics for themselves, the metrics tend to homogenize or hierarchical over time. Either people start using the same metrics, or some metrics become more “respected” than others. The result is always competition and comparison.

I just finished NaNoWriMo. I failed, but I won. I didn’t get started until the second week, and it took me nearly 10 days to hit the NaNoWriMo stated goal of 50k words. However, the end of the month found me 8k words short of my personal goal of 100k words. I won, but I failed.

And I got an email from a friend who was feeling inadequate because they “can’t write that fast.”

After offering to show them how, I wondered if that was useful. Almost all the words I wrote were about discovering elements of a story I’ll eventually tell. All their words at their pace on their project might be part of a draft they are building methodically. They may not need to change what they are doing at all. What they are wishing is not that they can do what I did. Rather, they are wishing they could do what they do at the pace I appeared to hit. They are kind to assume that what I did is equal to what they do in quality. I doubt that it is.

A good goal-setting instructor in corporate America would say, “We need to measure different things for these two individuals.”

Of course, that is correct. It is ridiculous for both individuals to measure progress in their writing and their current project by the same metrics. It is equally ridiculous for two people to measure their success by the same metrics. People don’t begin life with the same cultural and societal currency.

What tends to happen in these public goal-oriented systems is that a sort of standard for measurement develops. A few highly productive people occupy the top spots. They slowly come to see themselves as the “hard working” people in the group. Conversely, the people who “fail” to occupy those lofty seats begin, sometimes slowly and sometimes not, to feel their inability to perform at the higher levels. Eventually, those “failures” drop out of the system. New people come into the system. Occasionally, a new person has a life configuration that supports their movement into the upper echelons as defined by the de facto standards created. Occasionally, life conspires to knock one of the standing elites out of their position. They fall, but their beliefs about themselves as a “top producer” don’t necessarily fall. The system will, however, slowly organize itself to define their fall as some failure on their part. I actually once heard a woman say, “She’s a loser now.”

When I asked why, the woman gave me a sharp, professional glare and said, “She should have known better than to have a child at this point in her career.”

The woman who had a child did, after the appropriate amount of time for the company to avoid being sued, get fired for failure to perform. Loser…

This stunned me, but I have since seen the equivalent over and over and over.

While working with a writing group managing their productivity incentives, I watched this goal-setting cultural hierarchy unfold again in a weekly ritual. The de facto standard of excellence and comparison became the number of stories put through the group, and that was in part my fault. Observing the slow stratification defined at each end by poles occupied by a person who easily produced multiple stories a week and a person who had physical and familial obstacles that made a story every six months a personal accomplishment, I began to see the damaging shifts in tribal attitudes.

Fun Fact: The people at both ends of this spectrum eventually ended up with multi-book publication deals. Also, we changed the system before too much damage was done to the writer identities of the slower producers and early development writers.

Observing this weird social dynamic for maybe the hundredth time in my life, it finally hit me that public goal setting that does not serve the health of some late-capitalism corporate entity’s social Darwinism can be very destructive. In arts settings, it is terrible in that measurable executable goals don’t always support discovery in random endeavors.

In the writer’s group I mentioned, we set up a system in which one trusted person kept a logbook in which personal goals could be set. If they were achieved, whatever they were, the individual was rewarded equally to all other individuals who achieved their goals. If the goal was not achieved, the person was encouraged to reconsider and reset their goal for the next cycle.

In this new system, accurate gauging of personal circumstance and possibility was rewarded.

Fast forward another fifteen years, and I joined an online group of goal setters and discovered the old corporate system. By then, I had learned to set my writing goals in terms of committed time to allow maximum flexibility in exploration. I had also learned to keep my goals private for several reasons. First, I had the experiences I described above. Second, I have often been lucky enough to have the life circumstances to allow me to be a high producer, and I have seen the damage comparison has done to people who have very high desire combined with life circumstances that keep them from being high producers. In seeing that, I have recognized that low producers are still producers, and they are sometimes amazing in terms of quality and contribution. Third, I have been unlucky enough to experience periods of high desire combined with life circumstances that made me a low producer. The negative, self-imposed suffering of those periods of time pushed me to reset my expectations in order to find peace of mind and a path out of the problems of those periods. These three elements taught me that, by extension, anyone at any moment can rise to new heights and fall to new lows. Cultural programming combined with systemic hierarchical values can cause them to believe they are special and growing into deserved rewards while they are rising. This leads to the belief that others aren’t enough in any of several ways. When falling, it leads them to believe they, themselves, aren’t enough in any of the several ways. Rising or falling, the beliefs are a lie.

In the new group, I made it clear that I would only describe my personal goals in terms of hours spent relative to my current baseline. My goals sounded like this, “This week, I want to add 10 hours to my total production time” or “This week, I’m going to keep my production time the same” and even “This week, I’m going to drop five hours in production time.”

By doing this, I tried to manage my world, to monitor my productivity, and to kept my activities from feeding the implicit hierarchy and inevitable comparisons that develop from posting of absolute numbers like word count, stories mailed, stories created, etc. Mind you, I do track all that in my personal logs. I just don’t share the numbers for the reasons described above.

The person running the group is, and continues to be, a friend and someone I respect, but I was pressured on several occasions to present absolute numbers. After the third time, I dropped out because my methods did not fit or serve the tribal norm of the group.

Which brings me back to my trivial success. I do track my personal productivity numbers. It’s a habit that goes all the way back to those fire alarm days. I do know when my productivity goes up and when it goes down, and I knew that my numbers had tanked with the advent of Covid and political and financial uncertainty. My cool little gold star calendar arrived in August, and I decided that what I really wanted was to see how consistency in starting would affect my other productivity elements.

I chose two items: exercise and writing.

I chose to define starting as 5 minutes.

By starting to exercise each day, my body started showing significant changes. Mind you, most days in the beginning were only five minutes, and I’m 62 years old. After 100 days, I am able to do things I could not do 100 days ago.

By starting to write each day, my overall hours of writing jumped significantly. My numbers weren’t entirely bad in my slump. However, starting consistently every day led to sessions that were not part of my previous habits. More stories went in the mail. More hours showed up in my spreadsheet. More time was spent on my projects on top of the time I spent teaching, consulting, and supporting the work of others.

I am aware that I will fail. Eventually, there will be days where I’m just sick of it, or there will be a day when I’m too sick to get out of bed, or there will be a family crisis, or there will be. . .

A person I admire inspired to try this “just start” method. They managed 500 days in a row before they chose to just stop. I won’t share their reasons. That’s their story. I will say that having heard them, I expect a day will come when I share them. My day might come at 200. I might not get to 200 before I catch the flu or Covid, God forbid. The point is not the number or if it is good enough. The point is to be mindful of starting, and I use my gold star calendar as my little push. I want to light up my day with a gold star, and some days the only reason I touched a keyboard was so that that I could light up that gold star. That’s between me and the childhood compulsion for gold stars.

I’m still weak because I haven’t done 500 days. Wait, no I’m not. Wait, yes I am. Shouldn’t I be able to do ten minutes each? Shouldn’t I be able to add eating raw foods to my items? I need to do some research to see how many minutes Margaret Attwood writes every day. Doesn’t Nora Roberts write 8 hours a day? That’s what I should be doing. That’s a job, right? Marketing. I need to build my mailing list and my outreach program. I’ll add that. It’s just one thing. Five more minutes is nothing. Lots of writers do more than that.

No.

The only thing I need is to start today.

I no longer advocate sharing production numbers unless you find you are a person who needs to be surrounded by people competing for some winner’s result that requires each person to begin on a different starting line and run on a different track. I do, however, advocate paying attention to how often we start whatever it is we want to improve in our lives. Just tracking starts is enough to lead to improvements and progress. Tracking results privately keeps others from comparing themselves to us and us from comparing ourselves to others.

For all my creative friends organized into groups, I recommend incentive programs that support all members of the group as they are, where they are, and in a way that does not turn the group into a fire alarm sales competition.

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