Forget the Big Audacious Goals. I'm Going Too-Small-to-Fail.

Every New Year’s, I get a bit carried away with my own fabulousness.

I love to set big, audacious goals for the new year. Big, inspiring, breathtaking goals. Goals so big they can’t fit in the door. Did I mention they’re big? Big and audacious. I blame the champagne.

Of course, I usually fail at them. This year, I failed at my biggest, most breathtaking and audacious goal: getting a novel, for the first time, agent-ready. To give myself credit, I’m making pretty good progress in getting my novel ready. But the most optimistic forecast has it being ready by middle of this year. So…big audacious fail.

So this year, I’m doing something different. Forget the big goals. Forget a new big audacious goal every month. I’m not doing that. Forget it.

Instead, I’m underachieving. On purpose.

Bear with me here. I'm thinking too-small-to-fail. Instead of going big or going home, you lower the bar. My only goal is to get through this scene. This particular scene I’m working on right now. I’m just going to fix that, this week. Or maybe just two pages of it.

I want my goals this year to be so pathetically easy I can do them even during the worst weeks. You know, those weeks when stuff like THIS keeps happening.

I’m hoping that this strategy will get my novel agent-ready even faster than I wanted. But I’m not looking at that. I’m just focusing on one thing at a time. One day at a time. One week. For once in my life, this year, my eyes are anywhere but on the prize.