June 16, 2020

You could instead of you should

Different things motivate different people. Take setting goals. Some people love goals. 300 words a day. A chapter per week. An hour a day. 2 books a year. Something by some time.

For other people, goals are terrifying. They’re not something to aim for but an opportunity for failure. They become a source of anxiety. The idea of getting to the end of a day and not getting 300 words down can be enough to prevent a single word from being written at all. Failing to achieve a goal can induce a sense of worthlessness or lack of ability. It could make things far worse.

For each individual, goals can work for some things, and not others. Goals like 300 words per day for writing don’t work for me. But deadlines do. Deadlines give me enough autonomy to decide how I get to the goal, but give me a focus and makes me accountable for getting there.

A lot of advice from professional writers I see is about setting goals. If not the ‘300 words per day’ style of advice, it’s things like SMART goals, or some other variation of a way to break down work. But what we fail to recognise when we’re giving advice is that all we’re telling people is what worked for us. We never say, “300 words per day worked for me.” Instead, we start those sentences with, “You should do 300 words per day.”

Unless you know the person you’re advising intimately (and let’s face it, that’s rarely ever the case for online writing advice) such that you understand what motivates them or energises them, sharing ‘advice’ as instruction is most likely a bad idea. Perhaps all we should be doing is sharing our own experiences. What works or doesn’t work for our own selves. If enough of us do it, there’ll be a diversity of stories about ways to work in the world, and that’s better for everyone.

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