I Haven’t Hit My Writing Goals

But I’ve accomplished a lot

Photo by Conner Baker on Unsplash

My writing goal this month was simple: earn $100 here on Medium.

The reason for that specific number? It would put me in the top 7% of writers here, a statistic Medium puts out every month in an email.

I broke it down to roughly how many claps I’d need in a day. I posted frequently. Yet every week, my earnings trended under $25. Some weeks were way under that. I didn’t end up hitting $100 this month. What happened?

I realized that I was ignoring one of the fundamentals of writing:

I can’t control the results, just my output.

I can set a goal to, say, write 25 stories. But I can’t control whether or not I make a specific amount of money.

This can be discouraging when I try hard and think that’s enough to succeed. I felt like I was due. I’ve been posting here for over a year; shouldn’t I be more successful? Other people are.

It reminded me of what Anne Lamott wrote in Bird by Bird:

“I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen. I, who did not do too well too quickly and who was in fact not doing too well over time, was actually in the catbird seat.”…