Goal Setting is Shit

When I look back at my teen journals, every January has a long list of goals I wanted to achieve. Top of that list every year was “getting published.” I genuinely believed that somehow if I tried hard enough, I could get published in my teens. And that I wasn’t getting published because I failed myself and my goals by not working hard enough. This is very sad to me, that baby Mette was so hard on herself and that she misunderstood how goals work so badly. The innocence and ignorance of youth which is probably universal.

The reality is that I WAS doing a lot of the things that would eventually lead to me getting published, mostly not understanding that getting published is an end result of becoming a good enough writer to write something worth being published, and that this was not a task that could be completed with discrete items on a check off list that I could understand at that age. I hated it when people told me that important things take time, or that I was too immature to write well and that mostly I needed to grow up. But in large part, these were real problems with my attempt to set a goal that was vastly over my head.

It’s also true that these days, “getting a book published” is a much easier goal via Amazon Kindle, and I am now constantly frustrated by people who seem to have short-cut the process of becoming a good enough writer to get published by simply finishing a book (ish) and putting it out there with no idea that the AVERAGE book on Amazon Kindle sells zero copies. Average, friends. Even back when I was a teen, I could have tried various end run arounds the publishing process. There were certainly vanity presses I could have paid to print my book. I could have also been satisfied with a much more regional publisher, which could have cut the journey down by a few years.

But let no one say that Mette is a woman who has low standards. No, when I said I wanted to publish a book, I wanted it published by a national company and I wanted (eventually) to be a bestseller. My goals as a writer have changed significantly since then (mostly now I want to write books that are simply good books that make the world a better place and to hell with national best seller status). But I suspect on many levels that I actually have higher literary standards than I used to have, simply because that is what happens when one spends decades leveling up and plateauing (or seeming to) again and again. I like really, really well written fiction and I don’t get tricked by the old stuff, plus I want a writer with depth and heart to boot.

What I was doing already that helped me become a better writer was reading A LOT of books. I used to insist that if you weren’t reading at least 100 books a year in your genre, then you had no business thinking that you could write and publish a book in that genre. Yeah, that perspective came from some considerable privilege. I work a full-time job now and can’t do that anymore. I read maybe 40 books a year, mostly as audiobooks, and I’m very glad that I have a lot of books in my brain, though I’m not sure how many I remember consciously.

Nonetheless, that was good work baby Mette did to achieve her goal. Finishing high school, dealing with teen angst and romance, having babies, facing the loss of a child, and losing faith in my religion of childhood, all were important parts of reaching the goals of publishing good books. But no one would put those on the list of how to achieve important goals. Or if they did, goal setting would probably not be something that capitalism did such a good job at selling to us via pills, charts, gurus, plans and consultations.

I felt like a failure every year because I was so bad at achieving my goals. Which was frankly nonsense. I achieved many, many things as a teen. If anything, I would look back and wish that I had focused a lot less on achievements that one could list on a resume and spent a little more time practicing kindness and acceptance. But baby Mette would be bored by that and that is very much the work of present-day Mette, so all is well in the end.