How to achieve big scary goals, and a very belated Happy New Year!

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

This year is already 1/26th over! I swear 2013 ended five minutes ago. I'm going to blink and it'll be 2016, and then I'll nap for a bit and it'll be the year 3016 and all of our consciousnesses will be uploaded to the cloud and easily downloaded into teeny-tiny robots that can roam outer space and the bottom of the ocean. It'll be grand. In the meantime: a very belated New Year post!

Speaking of time being weird, I forget how long I have been keeping this blog for. I have five years worth of New Year posts (here they are, in reverse chronological order: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010) and I had to write a sixth or it would ruin the continuity. Blogs are like funny little personal time machines that anyone can access. This time last year I was binge-watching The Walking Dead; this year it's Game of Thrones and Supernatural. I've totally evolved as a person, clearly.

My 2014 highlights: All This Could End was longlisted for the Gold Inky. I taught a workshop for young writers at QWC for a week, and had lots of other lovely school and library visits. I finished writing a manuscript and worked on two others. I graduated from one course I was studying and started a double degree. There are probably a lot of other things I'm forgetting.

My 2015 goals: write every day (so many novel ideas!), blog more, study smarter (less binge-studying at the last minute! Why do I do this to myself?), have more fun and adventures and stop stressing quite so much. It's all very unnecessary. (My goals are not all that different from when I was fifteen.)

I don't have any big scary goals this year, more habits I want to put in place, but I've had big goals in the past that I managed to achieve and big goals that I sort of... forgot about. So: maybe you want to write or publish a book in 2015. Which can seem like a very intimidating goal, but it's very possible. Here are the best ways I know to make big scary goals way more likely to be achieved (obviously with reference to writing books, because that's what I know. But I think you can apply these to anything):
  1. Make yourself accountable to someone. Tell people about your goals! People who will ask how everything is going later in the year - make sure you get some work done so that you can answer truthfully rather than vaguely. Promise a friend that you'll send them the next chapter of your novel every Friday at lunchtime. Preferably the sort of friend who will come over in the afternoon if you fail to do so and take away your modem and uninstall all the programs on your computer except Word. Join online forums or enter in challenges or writing sprints (this is why NaNoWriMo is so great: community! time limits! pressure!). If you do not have deadlines from an external source, create them, and make sure someone will hassle you if you miss them. If you don't tell anyone and no-one's checking up on you, it's really easy to just let things fall by the wayside and wait till next year and have the same goals again. Which we don't want! You can do it! You just need someone to yell at you! Or, be supportive and encouraging. Either, both. It all works.
  2. Make a daily habit of it. Everyone is different, but I do think that the best way to get work done is to work consistently, a little bit every day. I tend more towards binge-writing sporadically and then stewing on ideas but not actually writing for a few weeks, and then it's always harder to get back into it. If it's something that's really important to you, and you don't want to forget about it, make it a daily habit. Tell everyone that you write from 7:00p.m. until 7:30p.m., and then write. Put it in your day-planner/Filofax/Google Calendar/iPhone/scheduler of choice. Make it an important and immovable commitment. You wouldn't miss an appointment with your hairdresser (I hope you wouldn't), so you shouldn't miss an appointment with... yourself, I guess? And your goals? (Talking to yourself is optional. I enjoy it, it contributes to my writing process.)
  3. Make sure your goal really means something to you. It's much easier to motivate yourself to work towards something you want more than anything else in the world. There are a lot of people I know who say that they would like to write a book, but for whom writing is not of central importance in their life. It is incredibly difficult to put work into something day after day unless it's something about which you're passionate (or something for which you're being paid or there's some other obligation). Big important difficult goals that involve a lot of work over a long period of time (like, writing and publishing a book) are challenging to achieve, but borderline impossible if you don't have really strong motivation. Don't set goals that aren't really important to you, personally - there's not enough new years for resolutions that are really from other people/society (for example, weight loss).
  4. Take small steps. The other day I went on a big walk over a big hill. My life is incredibly thrilling. If I thought about the entire trip at once it seemed overwhelming. So I told myself I only had to walk to the next tree. That was manageable. So I walked to the next tree. Super cool. Walked to the next tree. Eventually got over the hill. No big deal. Manageable steps. I thought to myself, this'll be a great metaphor for my blog. I didn't really. It's a terrible metaphor. At one point I thought I was going to faint and I realised hiking at midday in Queensland in the summer was a bad idea. Not really relevant. What I'm saying is: don't think about the whole thing at once. You don't have to write a whole novel. You just have to write a hundred words. How manageable is that? Then you write another hundred. Repeat until book reaches desired length. That's how books get written.
  5. Enjoy the journey. I don't want to sound like a hippy guru yogini, but I think a lot of the time people want to achieve something because they perceive that they'll feel different once they've achieved that thing: happy, or confident, or cool, or proud. I know this is true for me, and it's definitely true for goals related to weight loss - people believe they'll be happier when they're thinner. Unfortunately the reality of things is often very different to what we fantasise about. Once you achieve something, you will just aspire towards something else. It's absolutely worth aspiring to be your 'best self' or whatever else, but enjoy the process of working towards your goals, because you likely won't feel hugely different once you achieve them. (I still fully expect I will reach a certain level of success as a writer and suddenly become a Glamorous Novelist. Delusional, I know.)
I hope you are having a most splendid 2015 so far, and you manage to achieve everything you set out to achieve this year. Don't stress if your resolutions don't work out. You're probably pretty awesome already. I wish you a year of good reading, good writing, good fun, lots of lovely people to be with and lots of lovely places to go and just lots of magic, generally.

P.S. Here are my five favourite blog posts from last year:
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