By Makenna Lewis
Everyone has big dreams at the start of a new semester; it’s a clean slate, nothing has been done yet, no record follows you too intensely—or something like that. Anyway, even in the most laid-back of classes, one topic continually comes up: goal setting. How are you going to improve this time around? What are you going to do differently? What works, what doesn’t?
Reflect, reflect, reflect.
Generally, I don’t like setting goals. Whenever it comes up in school, I use the same one: keep grades above ninety percent the entire semester (which isn’t very difficult for me to begin with). If something is important to me, I just . . . complete it? I don’t necessarily measure my accomplishments or my path to them. In fact, I think of it very much like this exchange in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray between the Duchess of Monmouth and Lord Henry Wotton:
“What are you?”
“To define is to limit.”
By defining what my goals are, it feels like I’m limiting myself. If I can go farther, be something greater, why would I give myself a point to stop at?
So, I had to reach a bit for the purpose of this blog entry, and I came up with a small personal goal: to complete the novel I’ve been working on outside of school. For months now, I’ve been trying to get farther than the first six chapters, which I’ve re-written a ridiculous amount of times. The problem is that I want it to be very, very, very good, and I’m afraid of being disappointed with it. The only way to accomplish my goal is to change my mindset and accept that it isn’t going to be flawless on the first draft. Additionally, I try to make time to write, if only a little, every single day in order to remain consistent.
No matter how hard you try, you’re never going to be perfect—it’s just not logically possible. Still, you’re probably going to improve the skills you’re struggling with now. You’re going to change along the way, as different things become important to you. Wherever your goal brings you, whatever the outcome is, you’ll always have the space to grow and achieve even more.
