Failure & Reasonable Expectations

This Week's Topic: You're not a failure
Wise words to your past self and those who are struggling

The Key to Success is Great Reasonable Expectations

We're told from the cradle to aim high and dream big. Nothing is unattainable if we put our heart into it. That's charming advice for inspiration and aspiration. It's not so great for implementation. Our big dreams tend to ignore the necessary micro steps. Thus, before we even begin, we've set ourselves up for frustration, disappointment, and...failure. When things don't unfold as we imagined, we deem ourselves incompetent and spiral into surrendering our lofty aspirations. We limp away, defeated, relegating ourselves to the status of a dreamless cog. 

How heartbreaking.

The major flaw in our Grand Plan wasn't that we were stupid. We simply made a mistake. We kept the view at 5,000ft when we had to take the footpath. We didn't plant for the weather, enemy, and terrain. We disregarded our physical and emotional limitations. We didn't acquire the necessary foundational knowledge in advance, so we didn't know what we didn't know. When we don't know better, we don't do better. We sabotaged ourselves from the get-go by setting unrealistic expectations. 

Failing to achieve a goal does not equal being a failure.

We are allowed to make mistakes. Mistakes are a measure of progress, even when we have to take a few steps back to modify our path. Our mistake taught us to take a different fork in the road. Sure, we suffered a loss or two, but time spent learning isn't time wasted. As long as we are willing to reflect on where and how we went wrong, we can revise our plan to correct what we can control. This is how we learn to create reasonable expectations for ourselves and others.

This is when we revise and resume.

We succeed when we do our best. It's fine to compare ourselves to others, but it's not okay to punish ourselves for not achieving their success. It's human nature to gauge our place in family, community, and career through comparisons. We use the experiences of others to identify the milestones on our chosen path, and we strive to achieve similar goals in order to keep ourselves motivated; in order to reward ourselves for the small accomplishments along with the big ones. However, learning, truly learning, means we take in information, analyze it, process it against all our other knowledge and experience, and then customize it before applying it to our circumstances and our individual quirks.

Author, Know Thy Self

In a creative field like ours, it is critical to understand ourselves. Only through recognizing our strengths and foibles, our motivations and distractions, our procrastination triggers and our manic gateways can we set reasonable expectations for ourselves. We are not Nora Roberts nor are we James Patterson. Their methods and their paths are not ours. We are our own delightful oddities and our paths to success are as unique as we are. We are accountable to ourselves. We define what success is for us. The success we define is attainable when we have reasonable expectations of ourselves.

We are not failures.
We are Works in Progress. 

The Right Words at the Right Time - Supporting Newbie Authors

THE CROWN OF THE QUEEN will be available as a stand-alone novella on November 22! (You can preorder now at Amazon, Kobo and Smashwords.) If you already have FOR CROWN AND KINGDOM, this is the exact same novella in that duology with Grace Draven. You can get mine alone for $2.99 or both of us for $3.99. A deal, either way!! If you haven't read it, THE CROWN OF THE QUEEN takes place between THE TALON OF THE HAWK and THE PAGES OF THE MIND. It's told from Dafne's point of view and bridges the events in the aftermath of TALON and sets up her book, which is PAGES.

Our topic this week is "The person(s) most influential on my early writing career."

This is like picking literary influences - there are so many!

But it's been fun to contemplate, thinking about those very early days in my late twenties, when I finally realized I wanted to be a writer instead of a scientist. It was really difficult for me to tell people about that.

Because, well, it sounds silly, right?

In telling people I wanted to write books, I felt like every other person who's ever made noises about "someday writing that novel." And, to be frank, many of the people I talked to about this enormous pivot in my life plans pretty much nodded, smiled, and blew it off as so much wishful thinking. Those were the nice ones.

My PhD adviser - with whom I had a contentious relationship at that point as I struggled to complete my degree - said, "I think writers need a lot of self-discipline, to work steadily on projects over time - are you sure that's for you?"

Ouch.

Others were kinder, but "helpfully" presented statistics on the impossibility of such enterprises. One friend, however, one of my sorority sisters from college, sent me two books on writing. She probably went to a bookstore and asked for something to send a budding writer, because they're two of the classics. More important, she sent a note with them that said, "The only people who are annoying because they talk about writing a novel are the ones who never do it. I know you will."

That meant everything to me.

I could go from there, to those early classes and the various writers who took their time to teach me - because the list is long of teachers who did so much to help me along, which is part of why I teach, in turn - but it was the people who gave their whole-hearted supported who made that initial difference.

It's easy to crap on someone else's silly-seeming dreams. Of course they don't have the writer's discipline yet. That comes over time. Of course the odds are stacked against making a living as a writer. They're even higher for the person who never actually writes the book.

So, this goes out to Sandy Moss, who sent me those first books and - most important - the faith at exactly the right time.

Turns out, you were right! As always.

Much love to you, too, in TTKE.