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The Write Now Podcast Is 10 Years Old!

OH MY GOSH, how has it been ten (10) years?! 🤯🤯🤯

It doesn’t seem possible. But I double-checked, and the release date of the first episode of Write Now with Sarah Werner was January 6, 2015. I tried re-listening to that first episode, but quickly cringed and hit Pause — I didn’t know how to speak into a microphone properly, my audio levels are all over the place, and the production value is… nonexistent.

I can happily say that I’ve learned a lot about writing and audio production over the last decade, which reminded me of this very comforting meme: 

The image is of a very sweet husky wearing glasses and a bow tie in front of a whiteboard, which says:

“If you ever find yourself cringing at something you did in the past, it means you have grown as a person.”

And it’s true. If you’ve learned from the mistakes you made in the past, and resolve to do better, you can release the embarrassment from those mistakes, and go on to make brand-new ones.

Anyway — if you have been listening to this podcast all 10 years… thank you. And if you’ve been listening for a good chunk of that, or even if you’ve just started listening… thank you. It means everything to me.

As a “geriatric millennial” with what I can only assume is now a geriatric podcast, I’ve set and reached a lot of goals over the past decade. And since a 10-year anniversary felt like a milestone, and since I’ve been feeling really cynical about goal-setting lately, I decided that this week I’d be talking about cynicism in goal-setting.

I used to look forward to my annual goal-setting exercises… until this year. This year, for whatever reason (actually, we’ll get into the reason in this week’s podcast episode) I approached goal-setting with hopelessness, disillusionment, and self-loathing. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in feeling this, so I wanted to share my experience and explore what our goals say about us and do to us.

What have your goals looked like in the past? Have you set yourself up for success… or failure? How do we reconcile our hopes, dreams, ambitions, and goals against the realities and limitations we face as human beings?

As always, thank you for listening. I would truly love to hear your thoughts in the comments (below the transcript). And happy anniversary!

Links Mentioned:

• The Write Now Podcast Episode 001:”What’s Keeping You From Writing?”
• The Write Now Podcast Episode 002: “5 Steps To Making Your Writing Goals A Reality”
• The Write Now Podcast Episode 158: “On Being A Slow Writer”
• Omen, A Fantasy Audio Drama: Website | Spotify | Apple

Support The Show

I make The Write Now Podcast for free, on my own time & my own dime, so that anyone, anywhere can enjoy it without ads. If you’d like to support the work I’m doing, please consider becoming a patron over on Patreon! Or, if you prefer, you can also support me on Ko-Fi or via PayPal. 🙂 Thank you!

Full Episode Transcript:

Sarah Rhea Werner (00:00):
This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 163: Cynicism About Goals.

(00:28):
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write.

(00:40):
I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and I’m feeling a little under the weather today, so I might be a little low energy for today’s episode. But I wanted to record today because today is January 13th, 2025. Today is the 10th anniversary, the 10-year anniversary, of when I first launched the first episode of the Write Now Podcast. So this podcast is now officially 10 years old. 10 years! I know that continually saying, “10 years!” over and over again is not going to make it feel any more real or rational or logical or what have you, but wow, for anyone who has been listening for all 10 years of the existence of this podcast — which, yes, has been slightly off and on at times — but if you’ve been listening since 2015, thank you. I am so honored to be on this journey with you.

(01:43):
Holy cow, 10 years. Over those 10 years, I have changed a lot, and you have also probably changed a lot. That is if you’re doing something right, you’ve learned, you’ve grown, you’ve tried new things, you’ve maybe grown in your skill as a writer. You’ve maybe put some work into your craft. You can maybe see a difference now between the writer you are now and the writer you were — not even 10 years ago — the writer that you were seven years ago, the writer that you were five years ago; heck, even the writer you were last year.

(02:19):
There is a meme that has stuck very clearly with me over the years, and it’s a picture of a… I think it’s a husky (I don’t have it in front of me now because that would make too much sense). It’s a picture of a husky wearing a boat’s high and little eyeglasses, and he’s just sitting like a very good boy in front of a whiteboard, and on the whiteboard it says, “If you ever find yourself cringing at something you did in the past, it means you have grown as a person.” I wanted to share that with you because I’m pretty sure if I went back and listened to some of those original episodes of the Write Now podcast, I would cringe pretty hard. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was starting the podcast from absolutely nothing. I was figuring it out as I went. So of course, 10 years ago, there’s going to be some cringe-worthy moments.

(03:13):
And maybe you’ve experienced something like this in your writing, or in other creative projects. You look back at maybe some poems that you wrote in high school, or a novel that you wrote during NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago, or maybe even something you wrote two days ago, and you look at it and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing. This is the most cringe piece of poetry / literature / et cetera that has ever existed. Why did I think this was okay, or even good or cool at the time?” Well, the answer is because you’re still learning. You didn’t know 10 years ago or two days ago what you know today. That’s a good sign. If there is a huge difference between your writing or even who you are as a person from several years ago and the person you are today, that’s growth.

(04:07):
I know some people throw away or burn their old stuff that embarrasses them. I know other people who started a podcast the same time I did and have gotten rid of all of their early episodes because they’re embarrassing, or they feel they’re embarrassing. I know other people who have published fictional shows and pulled them from their podcast feeds and remastered them and then rereleased them because again, they know better now than they did back then.

(04:40):
I’m not going to pull any of my Write Now podcast episodes. You can still go back 10 years in the podcast feed and listen to my very first episode of the Write Now Podcast, when I didn’t know how to level my mic and I didn’t know all of that other stuff I have learned in the 10 years since. They’ll still be available out there just because I like the idea of chronicling my own growth. I like the idea of saying, “Yeah, 10 years ago I thought X, Y, and Z, ha ha ha. Wasn’t that silly of me?” So whatever you choose to do with your old cringey, embarrassing writing a I want you to remember, it actually might not be that bad. You might just be your own worst critic. You might just be a very harsh judge of the person that you used to be, and I feel like that’s normal.

(05:32):
I get angry at the me I remember from 10 years ago. Why did you make that decision? Why didn’t you know better? Why didn’t you act more responsibly? Why didn’t you say this instead of that? I think it’s important for us to remember where we came from, how we’ve grown. I think that even if we’ve grown into some really smart, cool, talented people, it’s humbling in a way to remember that we were like that once. So… I don’t know. If you want to burn your old poetry, burn your old poetry — just do it safely. But I don’t know, it might be something that you’ll find you enjoy looking back on in 10 years, in 20 years, as you sort of take a look overall at the person you were and the person you’ve become.

(06:22):
I have a lot of my old poems handwritten in a little journal from second and third grade — so here in the United States, that’s when I’m… how old are you? Eight, nine years old? 7, 8, 9? — and I don’t go back and read it, but I have it because it’s part of me. And again, maybe you’re not that nostalgic. And this is not a plea for you to keep everything you’ve ever written. I have thrown away a lot — I’ve thrown away a lot of what I’ve written over the years. I’ve inadvertently lost or destroyed what I’ve written over the years. I’ve had computers crash, I’ve had hard drives wiped. It’s a thing that we deal with.

(07:00):
The other thing I wanted to bring up is that today in 2025, I feel very grateful that I started this podcast in 2015. When I started the Write Now podcast back in 2015, I almost felt like it was too late for me to start it, that everybody had a podcast at that time, that no one would care what I had to say. But those ended up not being issues.

(07:25):
I am so grateful today that I have a — off-and-on, because if I produced and published a podcast episode every week like I initially intended, there would be a lot more than 163 episodes — but I digress. I was saying how grateful I was that I decided to start and record and publish my first episode of the Write Now Podcast 10 years ago, because it has existed for 10 years. If I would’ve put it off, if I had let my doubts get the best of me and not started it at all, my life would be radically different. Starting this podcast — this is going to sound cheesy, but — starting this podcast completely changed the trajectory of my life in the best way. It turns out, when you make stuff, and you make that stuff with the intention of connecting with and uplifting other people, it comes back to you in a beautiful way.

(08:20):
And B — this is going to sound obvious, but if I hadn’t started this podcast in 2015, I would not be able to sit here in 2025 and be proud of the fact that I have a podcast that’s 10 years old. This podcast might actually be older than some of my listeners (and shout out to you out there — you’re awesome!). I’m saying this because I’m reminded of a saying, and I know I’ve said it on this podcast before, but I’m going to say it again because I think it’s really important: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

(09:02):
So… those of you who have been dreaming of starting a project, those of you who have been doodling and outlining and sort of hedging your way around the project without committing to starting it, I encourage you: start it. I know it’s easier said than done. I know that even having started this podcast 10 years ago, it is super difficult for me today when I’ve had a long day, when I’m facing depression, when there’s just a lot going on in life, it’s exhausting to sit down and even think about recording. But I’m always glad that I did it. I’m always glad that I chose to start something, even if it doesn’t go anywhere near according to what I had initially planned.

(09:52):
Having kept a show alive for a decade now feels like I’ve achieved some kind of milestone or goal, and that’s really what I want to talk about with you today. The second episode of the Write Now podcast, the very second episode, which came out in January, 2015, was called “Five Steps To Making Your Writing Goals A Reality.” There are, if you scroll through the years of episodes, a lot of episodes that deal with goal-setting, and that’s because with the way society works, with the way things work for us in this life, setting goals allows us to work within a framework that helps us to name what we want or need and to move toward getting what we want or need. We set a goal, and we work toward achieving that goal.

(10:45):
This is taught to us from a very early age. Our parents maybe have a goal for us — that they want us to learn to walk, learn to talk, learn to clean up our rooms. A lot of these original goals weren’t things that we necessarily consciously decided for ourselves. You don’t see a baby consciously debating sitting in their high chair, “Now, do I really want to learn how to walk? Is that a worthwhile goal for me, a baby?” Some goals are planned out for us and some are maybe a little inevitable. Maybe it’s inevitable that a certain baby will learn how to walk. Maybe that’s how our bodies develop. But it’s still something that we work toward, something that other people want for us, and something that will probably end up being good for us in the long run.

(11:40):
I was thinking about this when I first started setting goals. So many goals were sort of… put upon me, or assigned to me (I don’t know if that’s the right word). But you go to kindergarten, first grade, and at the end of the year — or maybe you don’t know this yet, you will learn by the end of the year — that you will get a report card. And on that report card will be a letter grade (or if you go to some other different type of school that doesn’t use letter grades, whatever the equivalent of that is). Basically, the report card is going to ask, “Did you live up to the expectations that were set for you?”

(12:20):
I felt like the expectation was to get an A in a given subject, to do your absolute best. I wonder now if things have changed. I don’t have children of my own, so I’m not sure how schools are doing this now, but when I was in school, I remember there were motivational posters and signs throughout each school that I went to that said stuff like, “You can do it!” and “Do your best!” and stuff about trying and succeeding and, “Make it a great day or not — the choice is yours.”

(12:58):
There was an emphasis on doing your absolute best for everything in school, and then doing your absolute best for everything outside of school. If you were on a swim team, a baseball team, basketball team, you were expected to do your best in practice and on the field or in the court or in the pool or wherever it was you did the sport. Personally, looking back now, I’m glad that I was encouraged to do my best and to push myself, because I’ve carried those traits into adulthood and they have served me well. But I wonder: did I really need to do my best? Did I need to live up to that expectation? I never agreed to that expectation. I walked into a classroom as a child and immediately, without me having anything to do with it, there was an expectation that Sarah would get an A in the class.

(13:58):
Now, along with goals, there are associated stakes and consequences. And so, what was at stake if I didn’t get an A? Well… I would have a dark future or something. I don’t ever think I asked, “But what if I don’t get an A?” Instead, I threw myself into school and worked super hard to get As, so maybe at that time what was at stake for me was whether I was living up to what my teachers and family expected of me. Or maybe just, if you don’t do this, people will be disappointed in you — and that is literally the worst, most incomprehensible thing ever. And I’m kind of being serious when I say that.

(14:44):
Stakes aside, we all knew that there were consequences for not reaching or meeting the goals that were placed upon us in school. There were consequences. If you got an F, you had to put in extra work over the summer while everyone else got to run around and play. Some kids I knew also faced punishment at home. The consequences for not getting a certain level of grade in a class was being grounded, having their allowance taken away, et cetera.

(15:15):
I suppose in a way, too, this is training for eventually when you graduate and step into the job market. Your employer will expect the very best of you every day. Your boss, figuratively speaking, expects you to get an “A” in their “class”. If you do well, you might get rewarded, you might get a raise, you might get promoted, you might get a bonus. And if you don’t live up to those expectations… well, you’re going to get a trip to HR or you’re going to get demoted or you’re just straight up going to get fired.

(15:50):
Now, perhaps it is with enormous irony that I tell you: when it got to setting personal goals, the place that I learned to do that was the workplace. My first couple of jobs were not the personal-growth-invested type of employment. I was doing data entry, I was doing entry level marketing, nothing that ever really inspired my employer to invest anything more than minimum wage in me. But as I continued in my career and I grew more focused and I grew more talented, employers started to talk about quarterly goals and annual goals and, “Where do you see yourself in five years, Sarah?”

(16:35):
I always hated this. I hated this line of questioning for, well, I guess a number of reasons. But first and foremost, I did not like this type of questioning because it was not something I had ever been asked before, and I didn’t know how to answer it. My knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Well, what do you want me to want? What am I supposed to want? Are you trying to ask me if I want to be a senior vice president for this company in five years?”

(17:02):
Basically, this goal-setting exercise was a way that we could set expectations for ourselves within the workplace so that our employer would know: “What kind of worker are you? Do you want a leadership position? Are you interested in being a manager? Are you someone that we should feel justified investing in? Do we want to keep you around? What value will you, employee Sarah, provide to us, the corporation?” And since you are the one who is ostensibly setting these goals, it’s implicit that you agree with them.

(17:37):
Now, as the workplace changed — because just as you and I have changed over the last 10, 20, maybe more than that, years, society has changed, too — and I noticed in the early 2010s that employers were less interested in, “What can you do to make our corporate machine thrive?” and sort of pivoting toward asking, “How can we as a company help you achieve the career that you want?”

(18:09):
It was not a subtle shift, but it was gradual, so it happened kind of slowly, and I watched with great interest. Because when I was in my twenties, early thirties, working for a small marketing company, the fact that they asked me not only, “Sarah, where do you see yourself in this company in five years,” but also, “Sarah, what do you want for yourself over the next five years?” Both of those questions were on our yearly review, and there were some other questions, too, and there were quarterly goals and check-ins and all of that stuff. But I remember that was the first job where I was really asked, “What do you want for yourself?” Not, “What do you think the company wants for you?” but, “What do you want for yourself?”

(18:56):
Now, this is where I might start to get a little cynical, because I think that in asking, “Sarah, in addition to what you want to do for the company, what do you want for yourself? What are your personal goals?” they were really sort of trying to feel around additionally to what kind of worker I was. They didn’t care that it was my goal to read 52 books in a year. They didn’t care that it was my goal to start a writer’s group downtown. What they did care was that Sarah wants to start a podcast. Sarah wants to start freelancing. Sarah wants to start a business. It felt really cool at the time that my employer was interested in my own personal goals, and maybe to some degree they were — I worked with some really great people. But I can’t help but be a little bit cynical now that more expectations were simply being placed upon me, and — for me — it was always so hard to articulate what I wanted because it was not something that I — and perhaps you — had ever been trained to ask.

(20:04):
I have friends today — multiple people who are in their fifties, sixties — who say, “I really still don’t know what I want from life.” My answer is, of course, “Hey, do you want to write a book? Because I can help you with that.” But until I entered this particular job, I had never been encouraged to set goals for myself, to set personal goals, to clearly establish, “I want or need this thing in my life, and I will take the following steps to attain it.” I think a lot of us are still on autopilot. I think a lot of us are still running on not our own personal goals, but the expectations that have been set upon us by society or by our parents or by our school or by our employer. And I’m not going to say that’s a good thing or a bad thing — that’s just how we work. And I didn’t know to question it at the time, because when you’re younger, you don’t know things you don’t know, and no one can blame you for that.

(21:06):
I didn’t know that some of the personal goals I was setting were perceived by the company as good, and others were essentially a red flag. Again, I’ve spoken on this podcast before about how I was taken aside at work after starting the Write Now podcast, after I got really into it and started printing mugs and t-shirts (and when I get into something, I really get into it). So I was really obsessed with creating this podcast, and my employer took me aside and gave me a talking to about how, “Sarah, we love that you have a new hobby, but we need you to be more outwardly focused. We need you to appear as though you are just as excited to work here at this company as you are about producing your own podcast. So we’re going to need you to tone it down or perhaps stop the podcast.”

(22:04):
I didn’t know this at the time, but my starting a creative venture and getting really stoked about it was a red flag to my employer, who knew that they were perhaps not getting my best energy — that I was saving my best creative energy for my own project at home, and not using it to write ads and blog posts for clients at work. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say. I was naive and excited, and I just wanted to do the things that lit me up. On the more positive side of things, they were really aggressive about getting us to meet both corporate and personal goals. They held us accountable. So if you said you wanted to read 52 books in a year, gosh darn it, they were going to push you to read 52 books that year. And if you didn’t do it, there would actually be a serious conversation about, “What got in your way? Why didn’t you achieve your goal? Was 52 books too many books for you to read, given the balance and structure of your life?”

(23:06):
So I’m grateful that I learned how to set goals and reach them. It was, perhaps ironically, very useful when I left my job and started my own business. I needed seven different income streams? Okay, that was my goal. I got seven different income streams. I need to make this amount of money in order to survive? Okay, I’m going to figure out a way to make this amount of money to survive.

(23:32):
Goal-setting became everything to me. “It’s my goal to travel to this place and speak at this conference because whatever reason.” “It’s my goal to publish this thing here for this reason.” Goal-setting became the way that I lived my life, and I started to think of myself in terms of a very binary success or failure. Did I achieve this goal? If the answer was no, I failed to achieve that goal, there started to become this internalized message of, “I failed to reach this goal; I AM a failure.” Similarly, if I reached a goal, that was success, and I would feel good and I would say, “I AM a success!” And I began to conflate my self-worth with the outcomes of the goals that I was setting.

(24:23):
Maybe this is not something that you deal with or worry about, but I promise I am going somewhere with it. Regardless of whether or not you identify with that, I’ve been self-employed and running my own business for many years now, and every year my husband Tim and I sit down and look at what we want out of the year ahead. We have a goal setting session for our business. So… we want to make this amount of money, we want to do that by doing this, this, and this, we want to release this creative project by this date, et cetera.

(25:02):
And I have to tell you, I sat down to do that this year — just a week ago, actually — and I found myself feeling really cynical about goal setting. And I think a lot of this was because I looked back at 2022 — my goal in 2022 was to finish writing season two of Girl In Space. And then I looked at 2023, and since I didn’t complete this goal in 2022, my goal in 2023 was to finish writing season two of Girl In Space. Then, when that didn’t happen, in 2024, my goal was to finish writing season two of Girl In Space. And then… that didn’t happen.

(25:41):
And I get so caught up in reasons versus excuses, and asking myself, Why didn’t I achieve this goal? I’ve had it for so many years. Am I not doing something correctly? Am I failing? Am I a failure? Am I a failure multiple times over? Am I a 2022, 2023 and 2024 failure? And since I’ve failed to accomplish this goal for so long, can I reasonably expect that I can achieve it in 2025?”

(26:18):
If I was a younger, more energetic version of myself, I would get out my journal and I would start analyzing from previous journals: “What happened? Why didn’t I produce more? What was going on? And are these reasons or are these excuses? Why am I not living up to these goals? Why am I not living up to these expectations I have of myself? Why am I failing? What’s the disconnect? What’s going on there?”

(26:47):
But it’s been an exhausting couple of years, and I’m not the energetic young person that I was years ago. I’m tired and burned out and beginning to wonder: have I simply let myself down one too many times? Have I betrayed myself and my promises to myself one too many times, or two too many times, et cetera? Do I no longer believe in myself? Do I no longer believe that this is something I can do, because I’ve proved to myself over the last few years that this is not something that I can do?

(27:26):
And this little voice began to ask, “Why bother? Why set yourself up for something that’s just going to disappoint you all over again? Why bother setting goals that you’re not going to achieve? You’ve shown us — whoever we are, these voices in your head — you’ve shown us year over year that you can’t do this, and isn’t it foolish to set goals, to set your heart on something, to set stakes for something that you’ve proven before you can’t achieve?”

(27:56):
And I found myself feeling a little cynical about even the process of goal setting itself, like, “Why do we do this to ourselves?” I asked myself. “Why do we build up these huge dreams and hopes year over year, fail to achieve them, and then spiral into feeling worthless or disliking yourself or hating yourself?” I was reminded that I was encouraged to set all of these goals at the workplace because it benefited the workplace.

(28:30):
I remembered another goal-setting experience that hadn’t sat well with me. I was at a conference where a lot of ambitious goal-setting was taking place, and the person leading the conference was leading us through a goal-setting exercise for our work, for our projects, for our creative endeavors, for our personal business. And this person said, “Okay, write down how much money you would like to make in… whatever year was coming up.”

(28:57):
And I remember, I sat there, and I was like, “Well, how reasonable should I be with this? We’re talking about how much money do I want to make; it’s like, well, why would I cut myself off? Why would I set an upper limit?” Not that I’m a greedy person. I was just very curious, for the purposes of this exercise, what they thought was possible and what they were trying to get at. And the person leading this workshop basically said, “Well, write down as much as you want it to be.” And I felt myself pushing back, and I said, “Okay, right, but I don’t have a limited amount of time and energy. What can I expect ballpark-wise that would be reasonable?”

(29:38):
And it ended up, the sort of point of this exercise was to have you write down a number, an amount of money you wanted to make in the upcoming year, and look at it and internalize it in a way that you would manifest that amount of money in your work. And so I wrote down $1 million just for the heck of it, and I said, “Okay, I want to make $1 million in… whatever year it was.” And they said, “Great. Now what kind of stakes are you going to set for yourself? What’s going to happen if you don’t make $1 million in the upcoming year?” And I was like, “I don’t know! I’m not exactly married to this number. I don’t seriously think I can make a million dollars in a year.” And they said, “Well, that sounds like limited thinking to me.”

(30:24):
And I found myself thinking, all this is going to do is set me up for failure. Establishing a million-dollar net revenue in the upcoming year isn’t feasible with what I have to work with. I would just be setting myself up to be disappointed with myself, to hate myself, by the end of next year.

(30:45):
And I realized later that there’s a difference between setting a goal and making a wish. And my feelings of cynicism about goals deepened a little bit because I thought, “Why are they encouraging us to set unreasonable goals? What is the purpose behind this?” And I realized that they were setting themselves up to be the good guys. Like, “Oh, we encouraged you to set big goals. We encouraged you to dream. It’s not our fault if you didn’t live up to those goals — you set them. It’s not our fault that you didn’t reach them.” These were wishes with stakes attached. We were setting ourselves up for something we weren’t going to get, and we were also setting ourselves up to be the bad guy when we didn’t get them.

(31:33):
And I started feeling really cynical about goals in general. Why do we bother? Why are we doing this? What if I just went out into this coming year with no goals? What if I just… existed? What if I just said, “Screw it, I’m just going to get up every day like I do and write, and not reach toward anything. What’s wrong with that?” But that felt wrong, too, because I recognize the only way I’ve ever gotten anything accomplished was by setting a goal. Back in 2017, I set a goal that I was going to leave my job and work for myself. In 2014, I had a goal that I wanted to make a podcast about writing that I would launch in January, 2015. Way back in school, whether I set this goal for myself or not, I had a goal to get straight As, and I was going to do that by doing all of my homework, paying attention in class, getting As on tests — there was a roadmap to follow. There were steps. And I wasn’t just throwing myself at a target that was a million miles away and hoping that I would hit it, because that’s a wish.

(32:47):
A goal without a plan, without a roadmap, is just a wish.

(32:51):
Maybe that should have been enough to pull me out of my cynicism and despair. But with where I was at the time, I was feeling cynical and angry and hopeless and helpless. So I reached out to a friend, a friend who, like me, is in business for themselves, and who I knew had been dealing with a lot of their own exhaustion and cynicism and weariness and hopelessness about not only their own goals and their work, but the state of the world. They also have a chronic illness. And I just needed to talk to somebody who understood.

(33:30):
And I said, “Jen, what am I doing? What are any of us doing?” And I went into it. I told her I had set a goal to finish Girl In Space season two in 2022. And then when I failed to do that, it was my goal in 2023, and then my goal in 2024, and now it was 2025, et cetera, et cetera. I told her, “I have failed for… what, four years now to do this? What makes 2025 any different?” And she said, “Back up — Sarah, do you really believe that you are a failure?”

(34:08):
And in my heart, I said, “Yes,” but I knew that that would lead to a very uncomfortable conversation with Jen. And so I said, “No, of course not. I’m not a failure, but I feel like I have failed continuously at doing things that I wanted to do, and felt it was possible for me to do.” And I said, “Perhaps these feelings of having failed myself and my expectations have led to me feeling like a failure.” And I wanted her to know, like, I am not a failure as a person, because that would just be silly. I’m a human being. I breathe. I sleep. I eat. I’m functional as a human being. I’m not a failure as a human being. But I am a failure at some of these other things.

(34:55):
And she said, “Okay, I get that. I’ve been through that. A lot of people have been through that. But Sarah, what if you haven’t even failed at this project? What if there’s something else going on here? What if there’s several things going on here? What if you set an unreasonable goal for yourself? And also, what if some other things happened along the way?”

(35:20):
If you’re anything like me, it is very easy for you to focus on your failures and your shortcomings, and to completely forget and ignore the wins and the good things you do. I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t say why we do something like that — I think it has something to do with the negativity bias, which has us focus on the negatives and the mistakes we make so that we can continue to learn and evolve.

(35:45):
And she said, “Okay, back up. What did you do? What were you able to do on your way to NOT meeting this goal last year? What got in the way? Write down everything that got in the way.” And this is the kind of friend where, when we meet over coffee, we both bring our journals because we learn from each other. And so I sat there while Jen sipped her coffee, and I wrote down things — things that I had done and ignored or forgotten — and I filled up a whole page.

(36:16):
I didn’t finish season two of Girl In Space in 2022 because I wrote a book — I wrote 135,000 word book. I was producing other projects. I don’t know if you’ve heard it yet, but I am the executive producer for Omen, a Fantasy Audio Drama, which is helmed by my husband and creative partner, Tim, which I can link to in the show notes for this episode. (I think it’s a very good show, but maybe I’m biased.) I did some freelance projects here and there. I do marketing consulting. I build websites. I do some writing coaching. I spoke at this conference and that conference. And honestly, if you go back to episode 158 of the Write Now podcast, I am admittedly a slow writer, which is less a matter of typing slowly and more, a matter of it, taking a long time for thoughts and ideas and story to coalesce in my brain.

(37:11):
And I showed this list to Jen, and she said, “Does any of this indicate to you that you are a failure?” And I said, “Well, no. BUT, I still feel like one. I should have been done writing Girl In Space season two, back in 2022, 2023 at the most.”

(37:30):
I can’t remember if I’ve talked about this on the Write Now podcast or not, but I have a long history with the word “should.” I also have some very lovely and generous people in my life who call me out when I use the word “should.” And she said, “Okay, Sarah, you feel like you ‘should’ have been done with this season the past year, the year before that… Who established that ‘should’?” And I said, “Well, I did. I feel like everyone else writes a lot faster than I do. Their brains work better. It was a ‘should’ because that was my goal.”

(38:04):
And she asked the question that I think I had been hiding from for actual years. Given my circumstances, my energy, my brain, the way I work — was finishing season two of Girl In Space by a certain deadline — was that a real goal, or was it a wish? Was it something that was reasonable or unreasonable of me to expect of myself?

(38:33):
And that was the dissonance. That was the disconnect. I very conveniently… well, “forgot” is maybe not the right word — “ignored”. I very conveniently ignored several things that I had learned to be true about myself over the years. And just like at that business conference, I wrote down a million dollars without a plan on how I was going to get there. I just sat down every day and wrote as much as I could. But if I backed it up and I looked at the number of words I was writing per day with all the other things going on with my life circumstances… if I was honest about that, I would’ve realized a lot earlier that I had set an unreasonable goal that I had instead made a wish. And by not supernaturally making that wish come true, I had grown cynical about goal-setting.

(39:24):
And so I said, “Ah, Jen, I DID fail at setting a reasonable goal.” And she said, “Okay, in the past, maybe, yeah — but now what are you going to do about it? How are you going to move forward?” And I realized, as angry at myself as I was for having worked so hard toward an unreasonable goal, I wasn’t going to spend the upcoming year sitting in a corner and crying about it. Not that there’s anything wrong with crying — I could sit in the corner and cry for a little bit, feel my feelings, take a deep breath, and then get up and do something about it.

(40:01):
So after my coffee with Jen, I went home and, despite not having the energy and chutzpah that I had in years past, I sat down and I did this: I opened my journal and I said, “Okay, how do I set a reasonable goal?” And with so many other things in writing and in life, I had to learn how to do it all over again.

(40:25):
The exercise became: start with what you want, and work backward from there, staying flexible and remembering that life gets in the way sometimes. Given all of that, what can I reasonably achieve? How can I do my best and even push myself without my goal turning into an impossible wish? What is the balance there? At what point can you strive and improve, but also at what point do you need to simply accept?

(40:56):
I had to accept that I could not sit down and reliably churn out 4,000 words a day, every day, 365 days a year. I’ve tried to do that and failed miserably, because it’s not — for me, at least — a reasonable goal. I can write 4,000 words in a good day if I don’t have any interruptions, if my brain is cooperating with me. But I can’t sustainably do that every day with no break.

(41:25):
So: start with where you want to be. Write that down. Work backward, keeping your responsibilities and personal limitations in mind. Stay flexible. And then work forward again and adjust your goal from there.

(41:40):
There are some circumstances in our lives that we can work toward improving, that we can work toward changing. But there are other realities that I think we have to accept, and we have to build into our goal-setting process. And I’m still working on this myself — I’m not good at this yet.

(41:55):
But… if you have kids to take care of in your life, you have to factor that into your writing goals. You can’t just “Hansel and Gretel” them — you can’t send them into the woods to fend for themselves while you write your masterpiece. So how do I create a goal that honors that limitation of my time and energy, while also honoring my ambitions of what I truly want to achieve? What does that balance look like?

(42:22):
And if you, like me, were or are experiencing some cynicism or hopelessness about your own writing goals, I want you to know that you’re not alone. There’s a lot wrapped up in the goals that we set for ourselves, our capability, our capacity, our ambitions, our hopes, our dreams, our expectations of ourselves, our self-worth, stated or unstated expectations that others may have of us, and a whole boatload of ‘should’s.

(42:55):
But we need to be really careful in our discernment, in our distinction between understanding that, what we’ve set for ourself: is it a reasonable goal or is it simply a wish? And if it is a wish or an unreasonable goal, what can we do to shift that into something that is reasonable and doable?

(43:17):
Because there is a difference, an enormous difference between pushing yourself to pursue a goal and burning yourself out, chasing after a wish. So looking back on what we’ve talked about today, those goals that you found yourself reaching toward and that maybe you found yourself feeling a little cynical about… Who set that goal? Who set that expectation for you? Did you set that? Did someone else set it for you? Did you agree to have that set for you? Did you understand when you were setting that goal that it needed to be realistic, that you needed a plan to get there? (It’s okay if you didn’t, because I just spent the last however-many years chasing an unreasonable goal.)

(44:01):
With that goal, what steps do you need to get there, and what is at stake? Are there any consequences along the way? Are you setting yourself up for success ,or are you setting yourself up for failure?

(44:15):
I know this episode has gone on a little longer than normal episodes, but I feel like there was a lot to talk about here. I would love to hear your own experience with goal-setting, goal-reaching, wish-setting, anything along those lines. Your experience is valid and valuable, and I would love to hear what you have to say. You can get in touch with me by leaving a comment on the show notes for today’s episode — this is episode number 163 — and you can find those show notes either right here in your podcatcher or out on my website at sarahwerner dot com (that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R dot com) and navigating to this episode, episode 163, scrolling down to the bottom of that page, and submitting a comment. I do read and try to respond to every single comment I get on the website. So yeah, I look forward to hearing from you.

(45:13):
I would not be able to make this podcast the way that I do and pay for hosting, et cetera, if it were not for the generous, beautiful donations of people on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third-party donation platform that allows you to give $1 per episode, $2 per episode, whatever you wish, to help produce and distribute this podcast. Specifically, I would like to thank Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferreira, Kim, Mike Tefft, Poppy Brown, Summer, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney McGruder. Thank you all so much for your ongoing donations. You help keep this show available and ad-free to people all over the globe.

(46:02):
If you would like to become a donor to the Write Now podcast, I would love that. You can do that by clicking the link to become a Patreon on Patreon in the show notes for today’s episode. Or, if you are not a fan of Patreon, there are other ways to donate to the show via PayPal and Ko-fi or “coffee” or however it is pronounced. So special, wonderful, beautiful, thanks to the patrons I’ve mentioned, and thank you in advance if this is something that you are considering as well.

(46:34):
And with that, this has been episode 163 of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’d like you to remember — while the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.