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This week: Flex Goals Edited by: Jeff  
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"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make
new things familiar, and to make familiar things new."
-- Samuel Johnson
Trivia of the Week: In a 2013 CareerBuilder survey of 2,134 workers, 47% reported that their first job after graduation was not in their field of study. 32% reported never working in their field of study, while 64% reported being happy with their choice of major and 61% believing they can still find their dream job. Approximately one-third reported wishing they had chosen a different major. |
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FLEX GOALS
Those of you who are friends/followers of mine on Facebook and/or Instagram may have already seen me post this news, but I'm in a really good mood this week because a certain superhero movie opened last weekend and my name appears in the credits. Ever since Marvel started making their own movies, I've wanted to work with them and Captain America: Civil War was the realization of that goal. Of course, back in the day when I was a recent and naive college grad, I assumed it would be a writing credit and I'd be a big-time screenwriter at this point, but life has a way of surprising you sometimes. 
As that naive recent college grad, I assumed that I would only be working a day job for a couple of years before my screenwriting career took off. But I ended up really liking that job and have spent the last ten years climbing the corporate ladder while I work on my writing on the side. What I've come to realize over these ten years is that not only am I actually really happy with the path my career has taken, but that I did reach my goal of working and getting credit on a Marvel movie, albeit in a different way than I expected. And I was only able to accomplish that goal because it was a flexible goal. Had I given myself the rigid and inflexible goal of specifically "getting writing credit on a Marvel movie," I'd still be back around the starting line because I'm not nearly well known enough as a screenwriter to get one of the handful of Marvel writing jobs that almost every writer in town lines up to pitch for every year.
I think it's important to differentiate between dreams and goals. A dream is, "a strongly desired goal or purpose; something that fully satisfies a wish" while a goal is "an end toward which effort is directed" (definitions courtesy of Merriam Webster). A dream, therefore, should be your grand pie-in-the-sky hopes for what you can eventually achieve with your life's work (My dream is still to get writing credit on a Marvel movie, by the way ). But a goal, on the other hand, should be a more concrete and attainable objective... something that you're regularly expending effort toward achieving. For me, that was "work and get [any] credit on a Marvel movie."
It's incredibly important to have both. You need dreams so you have a larger purpose to work toward... but you also need goals so that you can occasionally clear a hurdle and feel a sense of accomplishment that your plans are moving forward in a positive direction. We run into problems when we treat goals like dreams and set them so high that it becomes a binary success/fail situation without any sense of progress along the way. Goals are meant to be attainable so that, when you achieve them, you can celebrate and then set new ones farther down the path.
The best way to ensure you successfully reach your goals is to make them flexible enough that they can be met by a variety of approaches. The trick is to not make them so general or easily attainable that they're indistinct and lose the sense of accomplishment that comes with reaching them.
Examples of goals that are too general/easy to reach:
 Write something people love
Write a best seller
Get published
Examples of goals that are too inflexible/hard to reach:
Win a Pulitzer/National Book Award
Reach #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List
Get published by Random House
Examples of goals that are flexible and satisfying to reach:
 Write something that wins an award
Write something that sells out its first printing
Get published by a traditional publisher
The general/too easy ones won't give you a sense of accomplishment, because you can essentially find a way to reach that goal without a lot of effort. Send something to your mom and she'll probably say she loves it... goal reached! Self-publish your book directly to Amazon in a very small subcategory like Literature >> Women's Fiction >> Mystery, Thriller, Suspense >> Mystery >> Women Sleuths and offer it for cheap, and chances are pretty good that you can cross off "get published" and "write a best seller" (in that very small category) in the same fell swoop.
On the other hand, the goals that are too inflexible won't give you a sense of accomplishment either because they are extremely hard to reach and, in many cases, require something that is out of your control. You don't have a say in who wins the Pulitzer or the National Book Award, so the success of your goal is suddenly at the mercy of the people who vote for those awards. Same with best seller lists and having a particular publisher accept your manuscript. Those are largely dependent on someone else allowing you or giving you permission to achieve your goal.
Looking at the flexible goals, you might notice that they're somewhere between the two extremes. Writing something that wins an award is an external indicator of quality (you can't just send it to your family to get rave reviews), but it's not so specific that you need one particular thing to happen in order to realize it. A Pulitzer would be great, but what if the people who love your book are on the Hugo, or LA Times Book Prize, or PEN Award, or Colorado Book Award committee? By setting a goal of winning an award, you're creating enough flexibility that you can find success in a variety of ways that you may not have anticipated at the outset. Similarly, writing something that sells out its first printing is a definable goal that can flex depending on a lot of factors but is still a clear goal. And "getting published by a traditional publisher" sets the goal of having your manuscript accepted by someone in the literary world, but doesn't tie your fortunes to that one opportunity at that one publisher; that goal can be accomplished whether it's Random House or Tor, or St. Martin's Press, or Perseus, or Hyperion, or Farrar Straus & Giroux.
When it comes to your professional goals, make sure you clearly differentiate your goals from your dreams, and make sure your goals are flexible enough to be attained through despite the twists and turns life can throw at you. The better you are at setting your goals and going with the flow, the more satisfying it'll be clearing those goal hurdles on your way to achieving your dreams.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
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Feedback from my last newsletter about the New York Times Best Seller List:
MD Maurice  writes: "A very informative read about the New York Times Best Seller list...for someone who has s regular fantasy about some day having a title on it! It does take away a little bit of the magic and proves that once again, the measure of success is always so relative even when we assume its universal. Thanks!"
Getting on the list is still quite an accomplishment... I share that fantasy with you. And if you intend to get on the list the old-fashioned way (by writing something that people love enough to buy in droves), then absolutely nothing should deter you from that goal. And when you reach it, you can enjoy it fully knowing that you succeeded despite the fact that you've got competition not just from other books, but from people who are willing to take shortcuts to get there. 
A*Monaing*Faith writes: "Thanks for this! I've been taking the NYT list pretty seriously; even though I'm not at all surprised by the idea of media corruption. Guess I just assumed no one really cared that much about the written word anymore to go to such lengths, #sillyme. I can't say I'm not interested in still appearing on the list one day, but it's much lower on my bucket list now."
I'd hate to think that my newsletter made you somehow less serious about a goal you've had as a writer! My intention with the editorial wasn't to bash the List or convince you that it's not a worthy goal; it was merely to point out that the List can potentially be manipulated in certain ways and therefore shouldn't necessarily be taken as an absolute truth in terms of what's selling or worth reading. It's still a great goal to have, and the List is still very prestigious... I just wanted readers to know that it's not the be-all-end-all of what's worth reading.
Pumpkin Harvest writes: "Thanks for the article on the NYT list. Very informative!"
You're welcome!
DB Cooper  writes: "God Bless You for this excellent news letter. Do you remember when the book "Tuesdays With Morey" set a record for weeks on NYT list?"
I do remember Tuesdays with Morrie... it was a very popular book for a very long time!
Monty  writes: "Yes but the more you are known, the quicker the book hits the best list and so often the book was not written by the one it is credited to. I know this. Thank you Jeff."
This is especially true of memoirs and autobiographies where the appeal is the name of the celebrity, not necessarily the name of the writer or the biographer. Plus, it allows them to use those snappy titles like "My Life" or "When I Grew Up" that would make a whole lot less sense if the ghostwriter's name were on the cover.
Feedback from a previous newsletter about smart quotes and dumb coding ("For Authors Newsletter (September 30, 2015)" ):
eyestar~* writes: "Oh my gosh! this was so interesting! I always wondered why the popnote or even drop note thing went haywire!! This article is detailed and well written. Thanks so much!"
You're very welcome! Thank you for reading!
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For Authors: May 11, 2016 Issue [#7640]
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