Are These Your Goals?

Happy Monday, Reader,

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Last week I asked you to do something uncomfortable. I asked you to look at where you actually are, halfway through the year, and count everything. The craft books that changed how you think about dialogue. The feedback that cracked something open. The week you spent wrestling with a scene that wouldn’t work and what you understood when you finally walked away from it. All of it, the finished pages and the work beneath the work.

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If you did that, if you actually wrote it down, you probably noticed something. Some of the goals on your list still feel like yours. They still have weight and direction and something in them that makes you want to keep going. And some of them, if you’re being honest, feel like they belong to someone else. You set the goal, you wrote it down, you meant it at the time, and now you look at it and feel nothing except a vague sense of obligation that you can’t quite trace to its source.

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I know this because I did the same thing. When I audited my own goals last week, I found goals on my list that I set in January that I couldn’t remember deciding to set. I knew I wrote them down. I knew I meant them then. But the person who chose them and the person looking at them now are two different people. I picked up goals from other people’s lists and called them mine without realizing I’d done it.

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I belong to a productivity community on Circle run by Mike Vardy, who developed a philosophy called Time Crafting. Mike has a quiz on his website that tells you what kind of planner you are. A handful of questions, easy to take, and at the end you get a profile of the type of planner you are as a person. I wasn’t surprised when my result came back as underplanner. Someone who’d rather go with the flow than follow rigid plans. That’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I don’t get stressed when plans aren’t going my way. A curse because things tend to take far longer than they should.

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But here’s what I didn’t expect about being an underplanner. When you naturally go with the flow, someone else’s plan can fill the vacuum. You don’t set a rigid goal for yourself because that’s how you’re built, so when someone hands you one, you carry it. It looks like direction. It’s a detour.

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My entire life, I was told that when I graduated high school, I needed to go to college. It was a plan someone else told me I had to follow. A goal that didn’t feel like me at all. I wanted to take a year or two to figure out what I wanted to do and feel comfortable going to college. But because someone else kept telling me to go, I went.

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It didn’t go well. I started in Criminal Justice. Moved to Nursing. Then I went blind and took a couple of years to readjust to living with a disability before I went back. When I went back, I tried Early Childhood Education. Then an associate’s in General Studies. Finally a bachelor’s in English. I graduated high school in 2007. I finished college in 2025. Give or take the years I lost learning how to live again, that’s seventeen years to get a degree. And the only part of that journey that actually felt like mine was the last one. English. Writing. The thing I should have been allowed to start with.

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I know exactly what it feels like to try for someone else’s goal. No matter how much you try, it never feels like yours, which allows you to keep pushing it aside or trying for it while ignoring your own. It is soul-crushing to wake up one day and see that your goals are farther and farther away because you didn’t follow your own.

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And the thing about borrowed goals is that they look completely reasonable. A daily word count because that’s what serious writers do. A revision timeline because someone in a writing group mentioned theirs and it sounded like the right amount of time. A goal that says “write 1,000 words a day” doesn’t announce itself as borrowed. It sits on your list looking productive, and you carry it around feeling like you should be doing it, and when you don’t, you feel like you failed something that was yours to fail only in the sense that you wrote it down. Just like I carried “go to college” for seventeen years, except the writing version doesn’t take that long to show you it was wrong. It shows you every time you sit down to work on something that doesn’t pull you forward.

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Here’s how I’ve learned to tell the difference, and it took me a long time because I’m naturally an underplanner. A goal that comes from your identity has a specific feeling when you imagine achieving it. There’s a pull toward it. A real pull. The kind where you picture yourself doing the work and something in you leans forward. A goal that comes from obligation feels different. It feels like weight. It sits on your list and you look at it and you feel tired before you start. You can’t explain why you want it specifically. You just know you’re supposed to want it, and that supposed-to is doing all the work while your actual desire is somewhere else entirely.

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For me, the goals that are genuinely mine are the ones connected to building something that fits my life. Building accessible versions of things I can use with a screen-reader, because no one understands the necessity like I do. The newsletter that I actually send every week, because the writing of it matters to me. The reading I do that feeds both my coaching and my own understanding of craft, because it helps me grow both as a writer and as someone who wants to help writers grow as well. Those goals come from something I can name. The other ones, the ones I picked up because they sounded like what a person in my position should be doing, those come from a vague sense of what I think is expected, and I can’t name the source because there isn’t one. It’s ambient pressure with no author.

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Last month we talked about demandingness, about how we place conditions on ourselves that have to be met before we’re allowed to move forward. I must feel ready. I should know enough before I commit. The same pattern shows up in how we set goals. We turn what could be a preference into a demand, and we do it with goals we didn’t even choose. “I should be writing at this pace” becomes a rule we’re enforcing on ourselves for reasons we can’t trace back to anything we actually decided. It’s secondhand demandingness, demands we inherited from other people’s lives and then held ourselves to as if we’d written them ourselves.

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And here’s where it connects to what we’ve been building all month. You can’t reset goals that were never yours in the first place. You can restructure them, you can break them into smaller steps, you can extend the timeline, and none of that will matter because the problem is the goal itself. It was never built on anything real in you. I couldn’t restructure “go to college” into something that fit. I had to find the goal that was actually mine.

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So here’s what I’m asking you to do this week. Take the list you made last week, or make it now if you skipped it, and look at each goal and ask one question: if nobody else would ever see this goal, if no one would ever know whether you met it or not, would you still want it? The ones where the answer is yes, those are yours. The ones where the answer is no or I don’t know or the question makes you feel something shift in your chest, those are the ones worth setting down. They’re someone else’s goal wearing your handwriting. And carrying someone else’s goal through the second half of the year will cost you the same energy you need for the ones that actually are.

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Next week we’re going to talk about the most common mid-year reality there is: the thing you started and didn’t finish. What it means, what it doesn’t mean, and how to decide what to do with it without turning it into a verdict on who you are as a writer.

See you next week!

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Maria Acosta Ramirez Accountability & Mindset Coach | Alpha Reader, MAR Literary Services Florida, USA gravatar.com/unabashedd4deba3b56 ​

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