Plan to Fail Gloriously and Productively!

Photo by Kenan Reed on Unsplash

I talked about this in my writer’s email today, but I can’t stop thinking about it. (Yes, this means that you might hear some overlap if you subscribe to that list of writing encouragement. If you’d like to join that list, just go to rachaelherron.com/write.) 

LISTEN HERE:

Let’s talk about goals.

But let’s do it realistically. 

As real people, with messy and hard and beautiful and true lives. 

In January, we all get a lot of this goal talk, don’t we? And I’m as prone to falling for it as anyone else. In late December, my Instagram feed fills up with pictures of various planners because guaran-damn-teed, I’ll click on every single one. I don’t buy any of them. Nope, I’m pretty happy with the system I use—a combo of paper planner and digital journal and GoodNotes for iPad. I duplicate calendars from digital to physical and back again, because I enjoy massaging the edges of my plans, tinkering with how I’ll fill my future blemish-free hours. 

I fuck up those plans every single goddamn time. 

And that’s okay. 

On Not Setting Goals

I had an incredibly illuminating conversation with my wife the other day. I’ve always known she doesn’t set goals for herself, but I finally asked why she didn’t.

Lala said, “I don’t set goals because I miss them, and then I end up feeling like a terrible person. It’s just less painful not to set them.”

I’ve been married to her for 14 years, and while, yes, I’d known she didn’t set creative goals, I’d never known this. My eyes wide, I said, “But—but that’s the thing about personal goals! You just move them if you miss them!”

She shook her head. “But you’re not supposed to do that! That’s the whole point of goals!”

I almost fell off the couch at the realization that we looked at goals so differently. “Yeah, sure, they’re helpful, but they’re made to be changed! They’re our goals. We just rejgger them!”

“You can’t do that! That’s cheating!”

Cheating?

I squawked, “IT’S MY GOAL. There’s no such thing as cheating in our creative goals!”

She looked a little dumbfounded, as if she’d found out that gravity didn’t work the way she thought it did. 

So in case you’re feeling a little upside down, too, let me say it even more clearly. 

When you set a goal for yourself that no one’s paying you to do, a goal that will fill your creative spirit, the spirit that makes you glow the brightest, you get to change and adjust that goal anytime you want.

You can do it once a year, or you can do it twice before breakfast. 

When I’m writing, I’m not filling out a time card, billing my working hours to someone who requires that I meet Goal A and Timeline B.

I simply want to write something, and having a goal helps me get closer to it.

Missing the goal? It doesn’t hurt anyone else, and here’s the important part—it shouldn’t hurt you, either. 

In my old life at 911, if I screwed up, someone might die. 

But not meeting my writing goal doesn’t get anyone killed. No one goes to jail. The Goal Police don’t come and put me in Goal Gaol.