Hey, novelists, this is serious stuff. In 1979 the Harvard Business School surveyed their graduates and turned up some shocking news: only 3% of them had set “clear written goals” and a plan for achieving them.
13% had goals, but hadn’t written them down. But here was the shocker: 84% of them had no specific goals at all.
10 years later, the same grads were surveyed again: “The 13 percent of the class who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84 percent who had no goals at all.”
The 3% who had clear, written goals were earning, on average, 10 times as much as the other 97 percent put together.
If that’s not enough to make you run, not walk, to your desk to start setting goals, you’d better have another pot of coffee.
Want more? Zig Ziglar, the motivational guru, details 5 “lessons” in goal setting. It’s a specific, step by step planning formula for coming up with productive goals. (to blog link 2).
Frankly, it never occurred to me that jotting down a set of written goals and refining them as Ziglar directs could be so powerful.
Novelists, fiction writers…I have a question for you. Can Ziglar’s process work for us? After all, don’t we often profit from serendipity and delay?
Take outlines, for example. I’ve come to think of them NOT as what they appear to be– highly specified story goals–but as road maps to guide our daily probes into darkness.
Why a road map? Because novelists are called upon to make constant changes of direction based on nothing firmer than intuition. We are constantly revising our story goals, in response to instinct alone. Without a road map, we might disappear down too many long, irrelevant dirt roads.
What do you think? Can Ziglar’s process work for you? I’m going to try it. I still believe that clear goals are powerful motivators as well as organizing tools, even if they keep changing.
What about you? Written or not, what are your fiction goals for 2009?
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