To Write Better, Internalize Your Goals

Focus on doing your job with the best ability you can

Photo by Stefen Tan on Unsplash

I’ve been an ardent reader of the Stoic philosophy for a long time. I’ve read everything there is, from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (which I highly recommend), Seneca’s letters, to modern non-fiction books, such as A Guide To The Good Life.

Among all the lessons that stoicism taught me, the most important one was: internalize your goals. And I found that it’s essential for writing — and most creative endeavors.

What ‘Internalizing Your Goals’ Means

The key to becoming a stoic is not — as many people assume — to become emotionless. It’s to become tranquil and to live a good life. Ancient philosophy (and stoicism in particular) was to people of the past what self-help and motivational books are to us.

We all live in a world that changes every day. Stoics have found a way to restore tranquility despite our involvement in the world that continually changes, and often breaks our plans.

The key was to internalize goals.

When you internalize goals, you:

1. Forget about the outcome.

2. Focus only on what you can control — your effort.

3. Judge your ‘success’ by whether you’ve done everything you could.

In this way, it doesn’t matter whether you achieve your desired goal or not. All that matters is that you’ve tried — and did everything you could do. Knowing that you can rest easy.

How You Can Use It In Writing (Or Any Creative Field)

When you create art, whether it’s a business, a novel, or a Medium piece — it’s easy to fall in the trap of expecting too much. After all, creators create because they seek external validation. And even if you know that things take time, a part of you still wishes for a lucky break.

This is a pathway to heartbreak.

Things most often won’t go according to plan. A business will take twice as long as you thought, and double the amount of money. A novel won’t sell very well. And you won’t receive enough claps on Medium.

These things happen. And we don’t control them.

What we do control is our effort. Instead of hoping for something, we can:

1. Focus on creating the best business we can.

2. Writing the best novel we’ve ever seen.

3. Promote our Medium piece as much as we can.

And if nothing happens and we still ‘fail’ — we won’t get discouraged. We did everything we could.

I Challenged Myself To Write 12 Books This Year

And now I realize that I am probably not going to do it. I did it because I wanted to motivate myself to write. I thought, «If I write 12 books, it’ll teach me how to write — and I’ll ship something new each month.» Great plan. But somewhere along the path, my focus shifted from writing towards hitting some arbitrary goal.

The same happened to me with my weekly newsletter. I created a newsletter and promised to send out weekly «brainfood» — a collection of articles, podcasts, and books I’ve read over the week. But pretty soon this turned into a job. I became a slave to my weekly newsletter and didn’t feel any joy in coming up with new things to write.

In both of these scenarios, I wasn’t internalizing my goals. I was trying to hit some arbitrary mark — be it a weekly newsletter that I didn’t want to write or writing a book each month simply because I’ve ‘challenged myself to do so’.

When I asked myself why I write and create the newsletter in the first place, I realized that:

1. I write because I want to come up with something valuable to read for others. And because I enjoy it.

2. I created a newsletter because I want to build genuine relationships with my readers.

Hence, when I ‘write 12 books per year’, I compromise my writing quality (i.e., fail point 1), and when I create a weekly newsletter that I feel obligated to write, I don’t build real relationships with my readers (i.e., fail point 2).

What I should do instead is to internalize my goals.

Show up and write something valuable each day. Focus on writing my books — and make them as good as I can. Finish when I feel I am finished, not when the clock rings. And forget about ‘weekly newsletters’ — write when I truly have something to share with my audience.

Closing Thoughts

We live in a world we don’t understand. If we want to keep our tranquility, stillness, and honestly — sanity — it’s important to shift our focus from things we can’t control (such as how things will turn out, or what milestone you should hit) towards things we can: our true efforts and work.

You ‘internalize your goals’ when you let go of checking your follower count, payouts, and claps on Medium towards creating something worth reading each day. Or when you focus on treating your business customers in the best way possible — without expecting anything in return.

This is, of course, much easier said than done, but if you do it — you’ll find joy, fulfillment, and peace. You’ll be able to relax into your work.

You, as a writer, have a job to do. Just focus on doing that job with the best ability you can. And let everything else take care of itself.