I Failed

This post is a rough transcript of my video on this same topic. If you’d rather watch than read, you can do so here.

Six months ago, I made an ambitious goal. I decided I would have 52 videos on my YouTube channel by the end of 2021.

I made a big deal about it, too. I declared this goal to the world. I shouted about it. I made a video all about it then another video about how important it was to have chosen such a difficult goal. I wrote blog posts about it. I posted on all my social media feeds. I didn’t just make an ambitious goal. I unveiled an ambitious goal with fanfare.

Here’s what past me had to say:

I believe goals that stretch us create the potential for magic.

That doesn’t mean I’m advocating for working inhumane hours or sacrificing balance in the name of chasing absurd expectations. I just think that, especially for creatives, it can be really useful to set goals just ambitious enough that it doesn’t seem like achieving them will be easy.

I seem like someone going into a challenge with clear eyes, ready for the work ahead, don’t I? Like someone who is motivated and primed for success?

That’s how I felt when I set the goal. I knew that succeeding would be hard and require a lot of commitment, but I was confident I could do it. And then, just a few weeks after I set my intention, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. And in addition to that diagnosis radical altering daily life in our household, it also triggered a mental health crisis for me.

I won’t go so far as to say that achieving the goal I’d set would have been impossible given those circumstances, but I will say that it became so far removed from the top of my priority list that I didn’t even mourn the loss. And I don’t think anyone would look at what happened in my life and blame me for shifting my priorities. I don’t even blame me, and I’m harder on myself than anyone else out there.

But this is still true: I set a goal and I failed at it. I ended 2021 having made only 24 videos on channel. That’s less than half the number I set out as my target.

The reasons I initially set that goal hadn’t changed—I wanted to grow my online audience, to improve my content creation skillset, and to build a body of work that would make a difference in the lives of others. So was the left turn my life took in 2021 enough to make me abandon my path to those outcomes? What could I have done differently?

I’ve thought a lot about my answers to those questions and I hope my conclusions can be of use to someone other than just me. We all face failure, and we all can learn something in the face of it.

In answer to the first question, there’s really no point in wondering whether my life circumstances were “enough” to cause me to fail. Picking nits over whether it was enough is simply looking for ways to castigate myself, to lay guilt and blame because I think that’s what I deserve. I didn’t achieve the goal I set. Everything that led up to it clearly was
”enough” to make that failure happen because…it happened.

What could I have done differently? I think that’s another wrong question to ask. I can’t change the past. I can only use the past to inform how I approach similar problems going forward. It makes more sense to ask, “What will I do differently to increase my chances of achieving the next goal I set?” And the best answer I can come up with to that is: set a different kind of goal.

When I said that I wanted to have 52 videos on my channel by the end of the year, I thought I was setting a perfect goal. I based it on my knowledge of SMART goal setting - it was specific, measurable, attainable, relevant to my long-term aims, and time-based. These sorts of goals are effective as a management tool for achieving corporate objectives, but my experience has taught that they’re not so great as an individual motivator.

Last autumn, it quickly became clear that I wouldn’t be able to reach the goal I’d set. Being an individual rather than an organization, I didn’t have the option of diverting more resources towards achieving the goal when it fell off track. I lost all motivation to move forward at all.

Imagine if, instead of attempting to reach a specific quota by the end of the year, I had aimed simply to upload a new video every Monday and Thursday. We can call this a goal if we want to, but it’s really more of a system. In his 2018 book, Atomic Habits (affiliate link), James Clear suggests that it’s much more effective to focus on systems than to aim for goals. Goals, he argues, are useful for setting the direction of our efforts, but systems are what actually allow us to progress in that direction.

Creating a system for uploading twice a week would have made each Monday and each Thursday a new opportunity to succeed. Instead of feeling I was falling further and further behind, I would have provided myself with chance after chance to make progress.

Maybe that wouldn’t have resulted in more than the 24 videos I ended up with, but I suspect it would have. Or maybe it would have caused me to reevaluate and commit to a system of uploading just once a week, which still would have resulted in more content than I actually created. Habits are more enduring than arbitrary targets.

In fact, I’ve already shifted course to just this sort of a system. This year, I’ve made a commitment to create content on a weekly basis, uploading every Thursday, and I’ve found my consistency growing with time. Missing a week doesn’t derail me entirely, it makes me more determined, so as not to miss two in a row.

Six months ago, I made a goal and I failed at it. And yet, here I am. This piece will be released on schedule on a Thursday afternoon, just like the one before that and the one before that.

Take that, failure!