BROADCASTS.com

Today I\u2019m leaning on Olympic marathoner Meb Keflezighi's goal-setting strategies to help us set good writing goals. They\u2019re pretty close to SMART goals, but I like these examples from Meb\u2019s running experience.\n\nIt starts with this:\nA good goal has personal meaning. \nMeb points out that no one gave him a goal or forced a goal onto him. No one said, \u201cYou have to win the 2014 Boston Marathon\u201d or \u201cYou have to make the 2012 Olympic team.\u201d He says, "Those were goals I set for myself. When I told myself, 'I want to win Boston,' it just felt right. I knew that chasing that goal would motivate me to do what was necessary to achieve it and that doing so would require me to do my best."\n\nHe says, "Your goals should have that same pull on you. They should be things you want to achieve for yourself, not to meet someone else\u2019s expectations."\n\nSame with your writing. If you find yourself with a goal, make sure it\u2019s yours. Make sure it has personal meaning. Make sure it\u2019s something you want to pursue for yourself, not because it\u2019s the trend in publishing, or it\u2019s the next logical thing after earning your MFA, or it\u2019s what your friends, parents, spouse or coworkers expect of you.\n\nYour goal has to be yours and it has to feel right. And it should have a pull on you to do what\u2019s necessary to achieve it.\nA good goal is specific. \nRather than say, \u201cI want to run well at Boston,\u201d Meb stated specific goals: win the 2014 Boston Marathon and make the 2012 Olympic team. The great thing about being specific is he knew how to devise a plan to get him there. As a runner, he had exact times to aim for. A more ordinary runner might set a time goal for a\xa0personal best or determine a number of times or number of miles to run per week.\n\nWriters can follow this same approach. We could set a goal of landing our first byline in a local magazine or submitting a short story to a literary journal by January 2017. A writer might want to start a blog and publish an article once a week starting on a specific date. The plan leading up to that might be to identify two or three local magazines that might be a good fit, find their submission guidelines, and outline an article to propose in a query by a certain date.\n\nOr to write a certain number of words in the short story and set a deadline to finish the draft in order to submit within a literary journal\u2019s reading period. That new blogger might plan to write seven posts prior to launching in order to have a little\xa0cushion as he adjusts to the new schedule.\n\nSo to follow Meb\u2019s approach, the first two steps are that the goal has to feel right to you, and works best when it's specific because you can figure out exact steps to lead you to the target you\u2019re aiming for.\nA good goal is challenging but realistic. \nMeb says, "Your goals should require you to reach outside your comfort zone while remaining within the realm of possibility.\u201d In other words, it should stretch you without breaking you or causing you to give up. He warns against aiming too low or too high.\n\nIn his running world, he says an example is if you've run a two-hour half marathon then make your next goal to run another two-hour half marathon, it might not be particularly inspiring as a goal. On the other extreme, to imagine you could lower your time by an hour would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame.\n\nIf a writer is just starting out and has written only three blog posts, it\u2019s probably unrealistic to set a goal of pitching to The New Yorker or National Geographic in a reasonable time frame. But that three-post writer might set the goal of increasing the frequency of how often he posts over the next two months from once a week to twice, or he might set a goal of increasing social media presence to two platforms and trying to guest post at a website open to new voices. That could be challenging, but realistic.\nA good goal has a time element. \nMeb says we need a time element\u2014a deadline\u2014and warns against setting a \u201csomeday\u201d goa...