Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Audio Recording

In Episode #16, I explain how to set effective goals as a freelancer in order to maximize your growth.

 

 

Written Transcript: How To Set Goals As A Freelancer

Hey guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

In this episode, I want to talk about goals. I want to discuss a little bit about how to set goals, how to meet your goals, and how to expand your goals over time.

The reason I want to talk about this is because I see a lot of people who, at least in my assessment, really get goals wrong. So, I want to talk about how I’ve approached it and how I recommend that you approach it, for whatever that’s worth.

So the first thing, and probably the most important thing with goals is specificity.

You need to be specific with the goals that you set. And that starts, first and foremost, with really understanding what it is that you actually want. I saw a Tweet the other day where someone said something along the lines of, “A lot of people default to assuming other people’s goals, because they’re not willing to do the work to figure out what their own goals are.”

I really resonate with that. It’s kind of in line with something that I’ve observed for a long time:

It seems like a lot of people default into what is generally looked at as successful within society, even when meeting goals that would make you theoretically successful aren’t actually going to make you happy—aren’t actually going to fulfill you.

And honestly, I can’t think of a more tragic thing than to spend your whole life working towards a certain goal only to realize once you get there, that it’s not what you actually wanted.

So, first and foremost, if you’re someone who is working towards something—maybe you’ve been working towards it for a while … maybe you’re just getting started—I would encourage you to, if you haven’t already, stop and really consider where is this leading? Is this the outcome, is this the day-to-day lifestyle that you want?

And this isn’t a static thing; you don’t just do this once. You should be re-evaluating this as time goes on and you get closer to your goals. As you start to meet certain thresholds along the way to the ultimate goal, you should be reevaluating, “Is this is actually what I want?”

So that’s first and foremost, and kind of continuing on that specificity, once you understand what you want as your longterm goal, then you need to get granular. You need to take the longterm goal—the macro goal—and turn it into milestones and specific micro goals along the way.

So for example, say you want to make $10,000 a month. If that’s your only goal, you’ll probably never hit it because it’s a big goal for most people. It’s an overwhelming goal, especially if you’re at a point where you’re making a hundred dollars a month. A hundred to $10,000 is a huge leap. And every moment you spend working towards that but not hitting it is going to feel like failure.

If you have a handful of goals along the way, you’re much more likely to be able to focus on a more attainable, shorter term goal. A goal that gets you closer to that $10,000 a month goal is psychologically going to be much more helpful and productive for you.

Plus, how do you even get $10,000 per month? if you don’t ever turn that into actionable steps and actionable goals that you can reach on the way there, it’s just a concept. It’s just a dream until you actually put together the detailed plan that includes goals along the way.

This leads us to the next point, which is, don’t set goals solely around things that aren’t a hundred percent in your control. To clarify what I mean, hitting $10,