I’m a big idea kind of guy. I have ideas for scripts, podcasts, businesses, and on and on and on. I’m sure there are many out there reading this that feel the same way. My ambitions are big. My want to succeed is excessive. Which makes the goals I set for myself the closest thing to unattainable. Like the ideas themselves, the goals are big. Finish a rough draft of this feature film idea you just thought of in a week. Flush out the podcast idea that just popped into your head and be recording within two weeks. Create a business plan and be able to pitch a new business by the end of the month. Maybe this is attainable for some (and maybe I can attain something close to this down the line), but setting goals that go from start to finish with no middle ground leaves me in the worst position possible, stagnant. I’m sure a lot of you know the feeling where you have so much to do where instead of starting one of the tasks, you nap. Or eat some food. Or go on a walk. The point is, when a task (or tasks) seem so big, they can get overwhelming, and this overwhelming feeling can lead to negative results (yeah, worse than nothing). So, I have come today to write that I have found a solution (that works for me at least). It might seem basic and broad, but it is a stripped down, bare bones answer to my stagnation: take baby steps.
Ideas are meant to be created over time, piece by piece. But my mind doesn’t think like that. If I’m not at the end goal or close to it, I’m failing. And if my thinking is like that for five or more ideas at once...you get the point. My mind wants to go 0 to 100 with nothing in between, when I should be building up my idea from 0 to 10 to 20, and so on and so forth. This doesn’t mean that the growth has to be linear, maybe down the line it’s exponential, but the point of the analogy is that there have to be detailed small steps to make in order to get to the end goal. You don’t just magically think of a script idea and, ta-da, the script is written, you actually have to sit down in front of your computer and type the thing out. And we dive deeper into this example, before you even start typing the script out, an outline might be needed, or a beat sheet, or a detailed scene breakdown, or all of the above! These don’t just appear out of thin air (unfortunately) once you think of the idea. Nope, you have to take the step to type that out as well. You can continue to go even deeper into the minute steps necessary (research, etc.) that need to be done before that, but you get my point. There are many steps along the path of creation that cannot be bypassed. You have to sit down and do them.
One of the things you typically do in order to finish any task is to set goals for yourself. I recently decided to take a different approach to this typical progression. It might seem like a radical overreaction to setting and not achieving the lofty goals I mentioned above, but I decided to stop setting goals for myself altogether.
Now before you start questioning me about how I can get anything done, let me explain why I did this. After discovering that setting lofty goals that I couldn’t achieve made me feel like a failure, I decided to set more realistic goals for myself that I knew I could achieve. However, there were two problems with this shift. 1) The goals that I set for myself were still too high. I was setting goals that I knew I could achieve, yet they were only truly feasible when I was at my best. Like in the zone, powering through tasks like it was nobody's business. I don’t know about you, but that’s not me everyday. That brings me to 2) Since these goals were only achievable if I was nearly perfect everyday, I rarely succeeded in attaining them, once again making me feel like a failure. If I set a goal for myself of writing 15 pages of a script and only wrote 10, I failed. If I wanted to create 5 documents for a business idea I had and only created 3, I failed. I constantly was telling myself that I failed, when I objectively was taking the baby steps to succeed in creating my vision. Even if I didn’t write 15 pages, I wrote 10. Even if I didn’t complete 5 documents, I completed 3. I was fulfilling my goal of taking baby steps, but by not reaching my rigid goals I still felt like a failure. That’s when I decided to start not setting goals for myself.
Let me get this out of the way now before you continue reading. I still had deadlines to meet for certain projects, yes, but I want you to keep an open mind while reading to see why I didn’t “goals” in the most rigid of fashions. Instead of deeming the day a success based on how many pages I wrote, I started deeming the day a success based on the fact that I wrote that day. Instead of deeming the day a success based off of documents completed, I deemed the day a success for putting work in on those documents. I will admit, I told myself when I started doing this that it wouldn’t work. In my head I said, “Alright, you’re doing this for your mental health, but you can’t believe this will actually work, right?” I was self-sabotaging myself from the start! However, the more and more I let my goal-less life take hold, I was seeing...wait for it...MORE SUCCESS! I was hitting deadlines for writing competitions that I didn’t even apply to years prior because of my goal-setting failures. I was exceeding the goals I had set for myself from before (the other day I wrote 16 pages of a rough draft of a screenplay, IN.SANE., and also something that happens once in a blue moon if that), and I was happy with just doing the work. I know what you’re thinking, Sean, aren’t you happy now because you’re exceeding your goals from before? Of course I am, but before then, I was finding myself to be happy even just writing 1 page a day. I was finding happiness in doing what I love, and not deeming this love to either be a success or failure based on output. I was taking the baby steps, but not casting judgement on myself for not being as far along as my mind and lofty goals had set out beforehand.
What a concept right? Happiness derived from taking baby steps and setting no goals. This probably doesn’t work for everybody, and maybe it only works for me, who knows. But what I learned from this whole process is that if you aren’t happy doing what you love to do you either need to 1) change something to bring back that happiness, or 2) realize that this might not be something you actually love to do. I knew I loved to do everything from above, so I set out to change my perspective. Change is extremely difficult, but don’t let that deter you from doing so. Even my mind was trying to tell me my change of perspective would never work. If you need a change, try something new, even if your mind is telling you it won’t work, just try it. Look at me, I went from big ideas that were unachievable, to baby steps that made goals seem more attainable, to actual goal setting that made me feel like a failure, to happiness from assembling my creation with no goals to hold on to. This was my road to happiness with the creative inspirations that I love to form, and I hope it gives a perspective into what you are able to achieve too. This journey of change is not an easy one, but I believe that if you are willing to try, you will persevere. I wish you the best on this journey, and I hope you find your baby steps to success.
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