Setting writing goals and achievements you want to hit can be an incredibly exciting or daunting experience, but universally, the act of achieving your goals isn’t as easy as you would think.
Fundamentally, we are taught the wrong way of thinking about goals.
The Goal-Setting Lie
We understand goals as a point where you either have something or you don’t.
- I am a best-selling author
- I have written 4 books
- I have a million copies sold
These sorts of goals tend to be so large there is no feasible way of achieving them.
It’s like someone giving you a bow and arrow and pointing to a mountain saying there is a target somewhere up there. Hit it.
Good Luck.
It’s never going to happen.
Maybe you’ll stumble around enough to come across it but without a map showing you where the target is you’re going to end up on the wrong side of the mountain.
Set Systems for Your Goals
A goal means nothing if you don’t have your map.
Setting a system for your goals is like adding an eldritch horror underneath your rubber ducky.
When the tides of life come to flip your duck the in-built structure becomes unshakeable.
To set a system you need only think;
“What would a person who has achieved my goal do every day”
If your goal is to finish four books, you can give yourself a word goal.
The EASY Way to Your Goals
I’ve started going to the gym recently and have been told how little people who start the gym continually go to the gym.
This got me thinking about all I’ve learned and preached about goal setting and consistency.
My goal for going to the gym was to feel confident in my body.
Rather than falling into the trap of hyping myself to go to the gym three days a week, I set my goal to just touch the gym door.
That’s it.
I can touch the door and go home, but the thing is I’ve gone through all the trouble of getting to the door I may as well hit the gym.
This is how to achieve your writing goals.
Distill what you need to do as a successful person to the basics, then make it even more basic.
Creating these atomic goals gets the right amount of momentum whilst also by design doing the larger goal.
For example,
If your goal is to write a book in 6 months, a smaller system is writing 2000 words a day.
Then to achieve this system your atomic goal could be to go to a specific writing space, open your document, and type the word Done.
When you go through all the effort to get your writing space ready you will just write.
In Conclusion . . .
Setting and achieving goals doesn’t need to be difficult or daunting.
Simply set systems and apply atomic goals.
You WILL achieve your writing goals this way.
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