The official blog of Michelle Tuckett, word ninja.

Goals are powerful things. And I believe they are equally powerfully misunderstood.

Most of us when we think about a goal associate it with failure, with meeting with supervisors and guidance counselors, of failed weight loss attempts, massive dreams turned gripping defeats.

The mere word GOAL is enough to turn the stomach of many people.

But a goal is merely a thing to conquer – a place to get to, a chance to stretch ourselves, a lesson to learn from in either the triumph or the falling short.

Goals are things that give us a direction to go in, to try it out, to see how it feels. Goals keep our lives heading into the direction of challenge, letting us hop from one to another like stones in a river.

They aren’t moving targets, they are destinations to get to, things to win the battle over. A goal, like a story, has a beginning, middle, and end – and often, like the stories we write, have side paths and winding narratives and dead ends.

As long as we remember the goal, these obstacles will not phase us, we can keep going to the end.

NaNoWriMo is just another goal. It is a thing to conquer, a destination to get to, a stone on the path of life that takes us toward the plans we have, the things we want out of these short lives.

Like I said, goals are powerful things.

Handled well, without overreaching, and without giving up, they can take us anywere, one small step at a time.

Last year, I set a goal of making all my necessary income from writing by the end of 2015, and now I’m a freelance writer.

The year before I set the goal of getting over my stage fright and social phobia by singing karaoke at least once a month (and I still do – it’s better than therapy).

Something like 13 years ago, I set the goal of writing my first 50,000 words in a month. I knew one day I wanted to be a writer; it was the first water-slick stone for me to step upon.

I don’t know what happens next, but I do know it all started with a little attempt at writing a terrible, meandering, messy pile of words between the first and 30th of November.