🥳 HAPPY NEW YEAR!
What are your writing and reading goals for the year?
Perhaps you’re not so hot on the idea of goals. I don’t blame you.
We’ve been brought up to believe that having long-term goals is a staple of life, but recent studies have shown that long-term goals can be detrimental to well-being, mentally and emotionally.
Setting lifelong goals seems like a good idea, but it often results in us taking periscope views of our lives, casting asunder spontaneous opportunities in favour of chasing that one over-arching goal.
And what happens if/when you finally achieve it?
ENNUI. ACEDIA. LASSITUDE.
Basically, feeling like an empty shitbag.
Just peachy, you might be thinking. What a sunny way to enter 2024. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, but hey, at least the newsletter I get about writing is telling me that pursuing a goal is meaningless.
Hush. Goals are healthy. They’re necessary for your life to have direction. I’m just saying we gotta be mindful not to be too one-track-minded about it.
I want to help you set goals that will nurture the enjoyable parts of your life.
🐪 The Desert Walk
To ensure we don’t get lost in granular details, let’s start as vague as possible.
I want you to picture your time on Earth as a gigantic desert. And you, right now, are right in the middle of that endless expanse of sand, walking.
It can be as hot as you want it to be. There can be dunes if you like. Maybe a few cacti, shrubbery, a family of scorpions, an oasis here or there … it’s your desert.
You are heading toward a destination on the horizon. You don’t know exactly what it is, whether a city or village or even a seaside shanty town. But you know that once you get there, the journey is over.
As hard it is to believe, once you arrive at your destination, no matter how glorious the destination is, you will feel strangely empty. You’ll pine for your days walking in the desert. While you might currently feel sick traipsing up and over dunes, accidentally going in circles or off on side quests, there will come a time where you wish to be back here.
The journey is the destination.
A trite adage, but a wise one.
The side quests make walking in the desert fun. If you’re focused solely on making it to the horizon, you’re not open to the beauty of what’s around you and the thousands of mini-journeys that you’re acing daily.
The horizon is your long-term goal. The thousands of mini-journeys are your mini-goals.
It’s a good analogy, right?
👣 Upping Your Side-Quests
The best way to keep your life open to potential side-quests that will almost certainly enrich your life is to accept that life will not go the way you want it to.
By all means, set your ten-year goals and your five-year goals, but make sure you build in some flexibility just in case of unexpected sticks in life’s spokes, like a family member getting sick (that tends to happen) or if you get The Best Job Offer In The World but it’s in Montenegro.
For me, something like this happened in late 2021. Our city of Auckland, New Zealand, had been on lockdown for four months. For us, that meant no social contact except for outdoors remaining physically distanced. Our country’s borders were strictly controlled, meaning endless hoops to jump through if you were a kiwi abroad wanting to come home to see family.
A got a job offer that would take me to Bangkok for two months. The production company could make no guarantees that I’d be allowed back into the country so if I took the job, I’d be risking being locked out of my own country for who knows how long. I was only being offered the job because the person the director really wanted was unwilling to take the risk as he had a wife and two dogs in the country.
It was a risk, and I ultimately took it. The job ended up lasting four and a half months. I worked very hard and I had quite possibly the best time of my life. Did it fit in with my plans? Not at all. It was a huge swing in the opposite direction. But looking back, I’m so glad I did it.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for scrapping all of your plans and leaving your fate up to the whims of the universe. That would be chaos! No, merely a slight easing of the reigns. If your horse wants to venture off the track … sorry, I’m mixing metaphors. Let’s stick to the desert one because I’m rather fond of it now.
🗻 What is Your Horizon Direction?
Come up with a vague direction in which you’d like your life to go. Let’s not call it a goal, let’s call it a Direction.
A North Star, a Compass, a Gravitational Pull, a Horizon Direction.
Your Horizon Direction should be something non-specific within an area of your life. For this newsletter, we’re going to apply it to being a writer, but you could substitute ‘Writer’ for ‘Mother’ or ‘Data Analyst’ or ‘Sky-Diving Instructor’.
It’ll help to put ‘I want to be’ up the front. Brainstorm a few.
Some examples rattled from my mind without too much thought:
- I want to be a prolific writer
- I want to be a writer of epic-length novels
- I want to be the kind of writer who helps other writers
- I want to be a collaborative writer
- I want to be well-known for a specific genre
- I want to be an award-winning writer
Once you’ve got a few, re-read them and cut them down.
- I want to be a prolific writer
I want to be a writer of epic-length novels- I want to be the kind of writer who helps other writers
- I want to be a collaborative writer
I want to be well-known for a specific genreI want to be an award-winning writer
Now, I’m left with three Horizon Directions which feel pretty good to me.
In lieu of specific writing goals, I have three pretty great phrases that, when I remind myself of them, I’m confident they’ll help me decide how I spend my time.
All in one sentence, my Horizon Direction is:
I want to be a prolific, collaborative writer who helps other writers.
That is a succinct and appealing affirmation. I can write it on a Post-it note and stick it above my laptop station, or write it on the front page of my journal, or set an alarm on my phone that reminds me of it every week.
📈 And then sure, make other goals.
Now that I’ve got my Horizon Destination, I feel a lot more chill about making specific goals for this year. If life gets in the way and stops me from achieving them (like it did this year … and has every year before that), it’s all good.
- Write four novels (or three novels and one screenplay)
- Continue writing a newsletter every fortnight for Stormhouse
- Write something every day, even if it’s just for ten minutes
Those are my admittedly ambitious goals. Like I say, I’m not gonna beat myself up if I don’t achieve them. And if I’m ever feeling lost or unmotivated, I just have to remember that I want to be a prolific, collaborative writer who helps other writers. That will help me keep track of my overall direction in the desert but also open to side-quests should they present themselves.
So, that’s me.
Now, what is your Horizon Direction and what are your writing goals?