Establish Your Goals

For many of us, we don’t have clearly defined goals when we start creating. We start creating simply out of passion for whatever it is that we do. In my case, I started writing at the age of fifteen because I wanted to craft an epic tale of science fiction and fantasy, filled to the brim with strange creatures and exotic places. Looking back, I think writing gave me a chance to live out my dreams of adventure and excitement. The real world was boring to fifteen-year-old Allen, but the world of Gorgon was exciting and completely under my control.

After college, I found myself in a dead-end job with few prospects, so writing once again became an escape, except this time the dream of becoming a professional writer was my escape. I spent countless hours working on draft after draft, hoping that if I simply wrote enough, I could reach my goal of becoming a full-time author. I sought out inspirational stories of writers overcoming adversity and imagined myself on talk shows promoting a new book or a new movie (as silly as it seems). I fell in love with this fantasy, except this fantasy came to an end long before my book was ever finished.

Ironically, my dream of becoming of a professional writer died at a week-long writing retreat that I attended in 2014. Instead of being energized by this retreat, I found myself confronting the harsh reality that my writing was not at a professional level. Instead of finding a community of like-minded people, I felt oddly left out, unable to connect with these people that I initially thought were my peers. Simply put, I was devastated and stopped writing for almost three years.

I wrestled with my inability to write for those three years, occasionally making a grand attempt to return to writing, but it never stuck. I thought, “What’s the point? Why should I invest all this time into something that probably won’t amount to anything?” Still, there was a fire inside me that wouldn’t die, and I realized that perhaps my goals were misguided. I changed my goals, and I no longer dreamed of becoming a professional writer—I dreamed of finishing a book, just one, that I could call my own. Today, I am still writing that book, and I’m having more fun writing than I have ever had before.

Setting the right goals is crucial to success. If we don’t set the right goals, we won’t reach them or, worse yet, we’ll reach them, but find no satisfaction when we do.