Your Goals Are Probably Making You Miserable
And the one resolution that changed my life forever.
January 1st, 2021, I made a resolution that changed my life: every day, I would floss.
Snow? Sun? Rain? Floss.
Every night of 2021, I flossed. I still floss. Now, I am a flosser. I no longer lie to my dentist. (My partner even started flossing, too!)
This one-minute-a-day change added years to my life. It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.
Let’s compare this to another goal: Between 2015 and 2020, my new year’s resolution every year was to get a book deal. Every year, I failed to meet it.
It’s not that I wasn’t working hard. I was getting up early every morning, eating cold chicken from a Ziploc on the way to Stumptown Coffee, and spending entire weekends hunched over my manuscript.
The problem wasn’t that my goal wasn’t SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) or that I was focusing on the outcome instead of the progress. No - I thought my desire could bend reality.
This belief kept me outside of the work, judging and rushing, instead of recognizing that the work was my life. No matter what happened, I’d look back on those hours as well-spent.
Year five, I finally gave up my resolution. That year, I sold Acceptance.
Last year, I had another anti-goal: stop chasing new bylines. For my entire freelance career, I was obsessed with getting NEW publications. I didn’t want to pitch to the same old editor! I needed NEW editors! (Also, I really, really wanted to be in the NYT, always!)
These wishes made me miserable. Last year, I gave it up and had the best year of freelancing yet, by far. I did get new bylines — Mother Jones! WIRED! The Cut! — but that wasn’t the point, and I didn’t waste energy chasing this and wanting this.
For a lot of go-getters with a trauma history, it’s hard to say, “I’m enough.” And we’re so overloaded with messages from our culture that we must manifest.
While writing Acceptance, I found the beautiful Rumi quote: “What you seek is seeking you.” I wrote it on a Post-It stuck to my planner.
Like most, I thought this saying meant, “Whatever I want, the universe wants me to have it!!”
But there’s an alternate, more plausible meaning: We think we are in control of our desires, but often our desire controls us.
Let’s face it: almost nothing matters. If we can just do a little of what matters, that’s huge. My goal is to want less, to buy less, to do less — especially in this time of chaos and noise.
Developments + Recommendations
Maybe all of this has been a PSA for 4,000 Weeks, which I read and changed my life. If you need to be convinced, listen to my friend Kate Bowler’s amazing interview with author Oliver Burkeman.
I was on The Trauma Therapist podcast, talking about my Mother Jones piece on The Body Keeps the Score.
Rebecca Solnit (!) gave a great TL;DR on my MoJo story!
I’m finally digging into Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell of
. It makes me believe I can write a novel, in snack-size Snickers little treats of wisdom.Ada fish learned how to kiss!! On the same train ride where I realized she hates the carseat because she wants to look out the window (and attempt to pull the emergency exit handle!)
This is a light day of matching in our family….
I keep coming back to this, 4 months into the new year! Been trying to shift my goals to the process of thinking and creating the stories I want to tell, less so than the specific, glitzy outcome. Less chasing, more doing the thing day to day
I recently listened to a podcast in which Willem Dafoe was interviewed and asked for advice he might have for young actors. He said the only thing that came to mind, which was for life generally-not just acting-was, “Don’t do this to get that. Do this to do this.” I’ve been sitting with that one.