An award-winning journalist explains how you’re postponing success when you set goals that are too ambitious for your current reality.
I should just come out and admit it: I have a real problem with goal setting and accountability. It’s not that I don’t set goals or that I’m not accountable, it’s that I set goals that are too ambitious and beat myself bloody when I don’t meet them.
Which, if you’re hugging a bottle of wine in the middle of the night because you haven’t finished editing your novel yet (mostly because you’ve been trying to look after a three-year-old and keep your family and your workaholism fed through your freelance work) is, oh I don’t know, a wee bit crazy. Not to mention counterproductive. (Or so I’m told.)
So if you, like me, are an overachieving freak (and you’re self-employed, so of course you are) and like to beat yourself up because you haven’t written the 5,000 words you promised you would write today, here are my tips on how to give yourself a break, gleaned of course, from three decades of self-flagellation.
1. Give yourself a break!
2. Lower your standards
(Did I just hear a collective gasp?)
I’m not saying turn in shoddy work or, god forbid, not edit that tweet twice. That’s just who you are as a writer, unfortunately, and I can’t ask you to change that.
But perhaps you don’t need to revise that first chapter forty times until you’ve finished the entire first draft. Maybe instead of writing the perfect first draft of a novel, you can just write a novel and leave the perfection for when you’re editing?
3. Set “Do” goals, not “Be” goals
“Be a bestselling author” means nothing.
“Send information about my book to five new media outlets daily,” on the other hand, is an achievable and measurable goal.
4. Are your goals achievable?
Mine certainly aren’t. I’m going to put a deposit on a house in London with the money from my Booker prize and be a New York Times bestselling author by the end of this year. I, of course, haven’t yet finished the novel that took 3 YEARS to get to the first draft stage or have a nonfiction book deal because I haven’t sent the sample chapters out to agents. (Five points to you for picking up on the self-loathing in that sentence.) But it’s okay, because I have dreams, yo!
Seriously though, I need to get real and so do you.
Dreams are good to have and I have lots, many of which I do really hope to achieve. But this year, my only goals need to be to hit my six-figure income target, finish my novel, and double The International Freelancer’s subscriber base. Achievable and realistic.
If I manage to get all that done (and it’s quite a bit) I should be proud of myself, not giving myself thirty lashes for not having done more.
FREE RESOURCE:
How to Pitch: Pitching guidelines for 200+ publications
We know that finding markets to pitch your story ideas, understanding what they’re looking for, and making sure they pay an amount you’re comfortable with can be the most time-consuming and frustrating part of the job. So we’ve tried to make it easier for you.
Here’s a list of publications, organized by subject and with a note of their pay rates, each with a link to their guidelines.
Happy pitching!
Natasha Khullar Relph
Publisher, The Wordling
Natasha Khullar Relph is an award-winning journalist and author with bylines in The New York Times, TIME CNN, BBC, ABC News, Ms. Marie Claire, Vogue, and more.
She is the publisher of The Wordling, a weekly business newsletter for journalists, authors, and content creators.
Natasha has mentored over 1,000 writers, helping them break into dream publications and build six-figure careers. She is the author of Shut Up and Write: The No-Nonsense, No B.S. Guide to Getting Words on the Page and several other books.
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