With the new year underway, everyone is setting goals for 2024.
In this episode of The Writing Coach Podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns acknowledges the importance of setting goals, but then asks the question, what if goals aren’t really what we should be focused on? If we want to be happy and productive writers, perhaps our focus needs to go somewhere else.
Listen now!
The Writing Coach Episode #185 Show Notes
Download the FREE Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklist Now!
The Writing Coach Episode #185 Transcript
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach, Kevin T. Johns here.
Welcome to 2024. We are living in the future!
How was New Year’s Eve for you? I hope you had a fantastic time.
I also hope you’ve done some thinking about what you want to achieve in 2024. That whole goal-setting idea is something that we’re going to dig into a little bit in this episode.
But first, have you picked up The Scene Alchemy Essential Checklist? This free checklist is the perfect tool to support the revision process. If you’ve written a good scene, but you’re not quite sure what you need to do to make it great, grab the checklist, go through it, use it, and you can turn every scene you write into literary gold.
Now of course, it’s the New Year, so we’re thinking about goal setting, and we’re thinking about what we want to achieve in 2024. I shared some goal-setting tips with you in the last episode. That said, I’ve been thinking about the end of journeys. I’ve been thinking about those end states, those goals that we’re all shooting for, and it made me think about marathons.
Have you ever been at the finish line of a marathon? It’s actually kind of a horrible sight. People are crossing the finish line and collapsing in heaps. Everyone looks pale and is shaking. There are people barfing, people pooping themselves. They’ve got out those trauma blankets that look like they’re wrapping people up in tin foil. I mean, you would think you are in some sort of natural disaster situation when you hang out at the end of the marathon.
All of which is to say that sometimes that endpoint isn’t nearly as glamorous as you might think.
We can also take this endpoint thinking in the opposite direction. Maybe you reach the endpoint, and you’re not passing out into a trauma blanket. Maybe you achieved everything you wanted to achieve. Now what?
There’s a quote I often think about from Prince—I’ve shared it before. Someone asked Prince when he was going to do another album like Purple Rain, another smash hit number one album. Prince’s answer was that he’d been to the top of the mountain, and there was nothing there. This means he’d been number one; he accomplished everything he wanted to achieve, only to find there wasn’t anything waiting for him there at the top. At the end of the journey, it was just an empty mountaintop.
It reminds me of my experience with health and fitness. It’s on my mind because I’ve got to lose some weight. I’m getting old and it’s time to get serious again about my health and fitness. But about ten years ago, I went deep, deep down that rabbit hole, and for about a year and a half, most of my energy was really focused on health and fitness and getting super lean.
But the reality is, you can only get so lean. We only lose so much weight. At some point, I suppose, you then turn your focus to putting on muscle and getting stronger. But the reality is, again, that without steroids, without drugs, or without making your entire life about mass development and getting stronger, you can only get so strong.
In fact, even if you’re focused on maintaining your leanness or maintaining your strength, we’re all getting older, and we all get weaker as we age. So when it comes to something like health and fitness, sometimes you get into it with this idea of there being a finish line, this place where you’re finally happy with how lean you are, or finally happy with how strong you are, but there is no finish line. You lift a certain weight and instantly say well, I want to lift more now. Or you keep eating healthy, except you’re gaining weight anyway because your metabolism is changing as you get older, and now you’re having to tweak your diet again.
There’s no finish line for health and fitness. There is just health and fitness. There’s just doing it.
I wanted to do a bit of a cleanup of my website; I’ve got so many pages and opt-in forms and offers and things I’ve put together over the years, and a lot of it was becoming out of date. I spent some time earlier today going through the website and just deleting or archiving all of these old pages that were no longer relevant. I’m looking at these sales pages, I’m looking at these opt-in pages, and I remember making them. With every single one of them, I was like, “THIS is the one that’s going to change everything. This is the offer, that’s going to make me a million dollars. This is the offer that’s going to have 100 clients knocking on my door wanting to work with me on their books.” But, of course, it never happens. There is no million-dollar initiative.
I’ve been a writing coach for almost a decade now. I’ve done so many different things from summits to webinars to courses to one-on-one coaching and group coaching—all these things. And not a single one of them shot my business through the roof. None of them turned me into an overnight success. There’s just been steady growth. There’s just been forward progression. There’s just one offer following the last one or one tweak made by learning from the last failure.
It’s just a steady march forward.
Even if, by some miracle, my next offer brought in a million dollars, guess what would happen? I would then say, “Okay, how can I make this $2 million next year?” We think of these goals that we set for ourselves as an end state where we arrive at some point in the future, but we never arrive at the future. There’s only just the moment that we’re in now. Even if you made a million dollars at that moment, you’re now looking to the next million or the next two million.
What I’m getting at here is there is really only the journey and whether that’s the journey of building a business, whether that’s a journey of losing weight, whether that’s a journey of writing a book, and being an artist, the end state isn’t nearly worth the amount of energy we put into thinking about it.
Now, just last week, I did an episode on goal setting, and we talked about goal setting in my group coaching programs this week as well. Goal setting is important. It’s important to have goals so that we know that we are on a path towards something. Without goals, we’re just wandering through the wilderness, flailing about. We need those goals there to set us down a path. But just because we’ve set goals, it doesn’t mean those goals are going to be the focus or should be the focus of our day-to-day activites.
In fact, goals are not an end point; they’re a metric. They’re part of the indicators that we’re using to measure progress and to keep ourselves on track. But it’s not a place we ever arrive at, or when we do arrive, it is superseded by the next goals.
All of which is to say, we need to be more focused on the here and now. When you reach that goal, it’s going to be like Prince; you’re going to be at the top of the mountain, and there’s nothing there. Or you’re going to be like the marathon runner who just stumbles over the finish line and passes out. The end state is not a place we want to hang out in over the long term. What you do is you set more goals, or you say, “This didn’t work,” and you try something different. But either way, the journey begins anew, so there is no finish line; there is just the marathon.
There is just the moment. There is just life. What you have to do is find a way to have fun while you’re doing it, to find a way to enjoy the moment because there is no heavenly finish line. There’s only today. There’s only you sitting down at the keyboard and working on your novel and moving one step closer to publishing that novel. But publication is not the end state either. It is just another step on the journey to marketing that book, and selling that book, and then eventually to moving on to the next book.
I know you’ve probably been bombarded with goal-setting information these last couple of weeks; set those SMART goals and all that, right? Yes, goals are important. But all they really do is give us a point on the horizon to head towards. And if you’re always staring at that horizon, you’re not noticing the beauty of the moment all around you; you’re not noticing the flowers at your feet; you’re not noticing the joy that is being alive and being an artist and being a creator, and being able to tell a story.
This is a nice short episode to start the year with. Nothing too complicated. All I wanted to say was, you’ve got to learn to have fun writing a book. There’s so much of life that’s contextualized as struggle and as perseverance in overcoming obstacles. And yeah, that’s, of course, absolutely part of writing a book. But it’s not the majority of it, or at least it doesn’t have to be.
The majority of writing a book should be fun and enjoyable.
That’s something we focus on in my group coaching programs. Story Plan Intensive January 2024 edition is underway. Now we’ve got folks in the group coaching program; they’re having fun but also making incredible progress at the same time.
In my FIRST DRAFT group coaching program, we’re always laughing, we’re always having fun, but we’re also making massive progress on our books and on our writing and improving our writing skill set.
And yes, people are finishing books! Congratulations to Sandy Day, the author of ODD MOM OUT, a fantastic book that she just published. Everyone should go grab a copy right now. It’s so much fun and so heartfelt. That’s a book that started in STORY PLAN, and then went through the FIRST DRAFT group coaching program, and then went through the FINAL DRAFT group coaching program. Now that book is out in the world for people to buy and read, but that’s not the end of anything for Sandy. She’s out there promoting the book. She’s out there selling the book. And guess what? She’s already got a decent draft of the next book underway, and we’re working on that now in our group coaching programs.
It’s always wonderful to celebrate those milestones, but the milestones aren’t the end state. There is no end state. There’s just the journey.
All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’re going to have a fantastic year of podcasts here in 2024. Don’t forget to head over to my website. You can find the show notes for this episode. You can find the transcript, and you’ll find links to all of my group coaching programs. You can also grab your copy of the Scene Alchemy Essentials checklist.
Hit that subscribe button, and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
