I love setting goals. There’s a real thrill that comes with deciding on a challenge for myself, especially with my writing. It’s become part of my routine at the start of every new year to make some goals for my writing, such as which writing challenges I want to participate in, how many new books I want to draft, or what book I’m going to work on as my main project. These goals are great because they give me clarity so I’m never confused about what book I need to focus on and get finished, or decide whether I should be editing or drafting something new. Goals are powerful. But something I’ve found is even more powerful than goals?
Habits.
Building good writing habits is the most important thing you can do for yourself as a writer. They’re the driving force behind making progress and improving your writing. You don’t necessarily have to write every single day. For some people, that just doesn’t fit into their schedule. But without a habit of sitting down regularly to write, you won’t make all that much progress on your book. There’s more value in sitting down to write a bit every day then there is in smashing out 10k words every month or so and then forgetting about writing for a while. Smaller writing days, but more of them adds up very quickly. It’s all about putting in the time.
You learn more if you write regularly too. The more time you spend working on a task, the more you learn about how to do it better, and faster too. There’s this saying that you have to write a million words before you get any good. While writing is obviously not quite that prescriptive, at its heart, what this saying tells us is that the secret to getting better is to write a lot. To write often. To write many different stories. You have to show up and write, day after day, if you’re serious about getting better as a writer. To get better at writing, you have to write, and to write, you have to have good habits.
Goals are great because they give you a direction to work in, and they feel amazing when you achieve them. There’s nothing quite like the rush of smashing a goal in record time. But if you don’t have the right habits, all the goals in the world aren’t going to get your book finished. If you write to chase that excitement of smashing your goal, you’ll give up pretty quickly, because that reward is so far in the distance it can’t motivate you for long. Instead, concentrate on building a habit of writing regularly. Celebrate showing up every day and writing your words. Build a process, rather than chasing those temporary highs. And keep writing, no matter what.
If you love coming back to write every day, then you will achieve your goals. If you build the right habits, if you learn to love the process as well as the celebration at the end, then you will make more progress than you imagine. It’s all about consistency. Don’t get too caught up in the shiny attractiveness of your new goal. Let it guide what direction you go in as you sit down to write every day. But then work on your habits, on making that little bit of progress every day. Your habits are more powerful than any goal you can set. Show up and keep showing up and you can achieve just about anything.
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
