Today is December 10th, which means the “Do Something Great in November” Challenge is over!

I am happy to say that I achieved my goal of writing 50,000 words (50,088 words, to be exact) for my novel as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

How did you do with your own November challenge?

More importantly, what did you learn?

Whether you “succeeded” in achieving what you set out to, to me, the real benefit of taking on a huge challenge in a short time frame is the things you can learn about yourself and the new habits you build along the way.

Even if you “failed,” even if you never even got past Day 1, you can still take something away from your experience. Rather than getting down on yourself for not achieving a goal, why not look back and learn from what happened so you can learn?

Even if you didn’t participate in the November challenge, you may still find value in the lessons below. They can be applied to help you be more effective while pursuing your goals or more productive in general.

1) Make Sure the Goal Is Important To You

Whatever...

Though I have had the dream of writing a novel for about thirty years, this was the first time in about twenty that I have seriously sat down and tried to write one. You know what I discovered? I do, in fact, really want to write a novel!

That may not seem like much of a revelation, but how many times have you started on a goal that you had thought about for a long time, only to say to yourself a few days or weeks in, “you know what? I don’t really care about this.”

It’s quite possible that the romanticized notion of what you think the goal is, is actually different from what the goal really is.

The only way to discover that is to actually do something. You can sit around and dream about “being a writer,” but until you force yourself to wake up every morning and sit in the chair and write, you can’t really know what it’s like. The same goes for anything.

If you completed your November goal, did you learn that you do in fact like what you did? Do you want to continue? Or do you think maybe you’d like to move on to something else?

If you didn’t complete it, is it possible that you didn’t because deep down, the goal isn’t that important to you? Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s a good thing to find out sooner rather than later.

My learning: This novel writing goal is important to me, and I now know I must continue it. That knowledge in and of itself was worth the time I took this past month to get it done.

Question for you: Do you have a goal, dream, or career path that you have been burning to pursue for a long time? Have you actually done something about it to make sure that it’s important to you? If not, a small one month trial could be just the thing for you.

2) Realize the Importance of the Environment

The baby I can handle. It's the clutter that kills me!

I have not historically been the most organized person in the world (right now my friends who know me are laughing their heads off in agreement with that statement).

However, I definitely learned the impact the clutter in my home and office has on my focus and creativity. I would periodically take the time to completely empty my table of everything other than my laptop. Those days, the writing would invariably come easier. As days would go by, entropy would rear its ugly head and my table would get more and more covered, and the writing would get harder.

This wasn’t a dramatic “a-ha!” type of thing. Cleaning the clutter off my desk wouldn’t magically make me more creative, and some days I would get into a flow just fine amidst the clutter. But in general, I found a clean environment helped me focus.

There were other environmental factors as well: How I ate, how I slept, whether I was stressing about something. Heck, even the weather and light setups would have an impact. Temperature was huge for me – I’m ok with cold, but if it’s too warm I get nothing done.

So often we feel unmotivated but can’t put our finger on why. Sometimes a simple environmental tweaking can have a big impact on your productivity.

My learning: If I want to be productive, I need a clean work area. Even if the area behind me is cluttered, if things in front of me are clear, I will be much more productive. Ideally this means that I will keep my office de-cluttered all the time. Practically, it may mean that from time to time I will just have to take everything off my desk and plop it on the ground behind me, out of view.

Question for you: What environmental factors impact your focus and productivity? When you got a lot done, what was going on in your environment? When you struggled, could you connect it to something around you? What can you do to increase the former and decrease the latter on a regular basis?

3) Employ “Persistent Starting”

Keep starting

Probably the most useful thing I learned from this month, and an idea that I think could be useful to many of my readers.

It is so useful that, rather than explaining it here, I plan on writing an entire post dedicated to that one idea.

Check back soon (or subscribe via RSS or Email) to make sure you don’t miss it!

I know, I’m such a tease…:-)

4) Redefine What’s Possible

Few things hold people back from achieving all the magnificent things they are capable of as much as their own limiting beliefs about what they are capable of.

On Sunday night, October, 31^st, I was a little scared. Not because it was Halloween or because I had just watched yet another horror movie. No, I was scared because I knew the next morning I would wake up, open up a blank MS Word document, and start typing away on a novel. Writing 50,000 words in a month was a big task, and with everything going on I didn’t know if I would succeed.

What I loved about doing NaNoWriMo isn’t that I got almost half my novel written (though that is freakin’ cool). It’s that I showed myself it was possible.

This was one of the big reasons I put the Do Something Great in November Challenge out to my blog readers. I wanted people to stretch themselves, just to show themselves that they could.

Probably more so than any other aspect of “Motivational Speaking,” that is what I enjoy the most. Simply doing things that help other people realize they are in fact capable of doing something they did not think they could do.

My learning: Writing a novel is well within my capabilities. As large a task as it seems, I don’t really have any excuse to not complete it now.

Question for you: Is there something you think you would like to do but on some level doubt you can? Then it’s time to give it a try! And consider stretching yourself – don’t dip a toe in the water and see how it feels. Go into it 100%, even if for a short while just to prove to yourself that you can.

5) Accept that Excuses are Stupid (And Will Always Be There)

Now is never a good time to start. Start anyway.

The last week of October, I seriously considered backing out of this project. It seemed like a really big task to take on. On top of that, November was shaping up to be a busy month – some additional work had come in, as did an additional family trip I needed to travel for. Plus there was Thanksgiving to deal with. November was just not looking like a good month to take on a new challenge.

Of course, you know as well as I do that there are always excuses. And those excuses are just that: excuses.

If, on the last day of any month, you ask yourself, “is now a good time to take a whole month and throw myself into a new endeavor?” the answer will almost always be, “no, of course not.”

This doesn’t mean that you won’t have some busier and some quieter times. It just means that there’s never a perfect time to start. Hell, there may never even be a good time to start.

Start anyway.

Even if you have to make your goal smaller, start now. There’s never a good time, there’s only now.

I was lucky in that I had two things that helped me get past my excuses:

1. I wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo, which meant it had to be November.
2. I had publicly declared my participation, which meant I would have to publicly declare my flaking on it.

Those factors won’t always be in place, so I am going to use this experience to remind myself, “There’s never a good time, there’s only now.”

My learning: Here it is, for a third time: There’s never a good time, there’s only now.

Question for you: Are you waiting for the “right time,” or a “good time” to start something. Stop waiting, and get started, There’s only now.

6) Acknowledge that Internal Obstacles can Be More Challenging than External Ones

Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy

I definitely faced some setbacks over the last month. I was away or on the road for eight of the first fourteen days of the month. There was Thanksgiving. There were work assignments. And, as with anyone, there were sudden last minute changes and additions to my schedule.

But you know what was much harder to navigate than all of those external interruptions? That little voice in my head that said, “Take a day off. Why are you bothering? This is a waste of time. Do something more important. You’re too tired today. You have too many other things to worry about. Who cares if you don’t finish?”

And so on, and so on, and so on…

Let me tell you, that little voice was the bane of my November. Some days he would be quiet, but on others he would be whispering to me in full force. There were definitely days where I had the time, energy, and intention of writing, but that damned little voice knocked me off my path.

Of course, the owner of that damned little voice was me.

And therein lies the rub. We are usually our own worst enemy.

All the external obstacles are certainly a pain in the ass. But really, they can be planned for, reacted to, and worked around. It’s our own inner obstacles that we have to watch out for.

I fact, I would go so far as to say that external obstacles only get in your way to the extent that they give fodder for your inner obstacles to build off.

Before you Smart Asses jump in and comment, yes, I understand that there are extreme case. If you have a critical work presentation in the morning and Dr. Doom kidnaps you and straps you to a Doomsday device and you aren’t freed until after the presentation deadline, sure, you got a case for the power of external obstacles. But I’m talking about the day to day stuff people let throw them off track.

Your boss forced you to work late? Yeah, that’s a pain, but the real obstacle is that little voice that says, “It’s too late to go to the gym now,” or, “I’m too frustrated at him to focus on my book.”

My learning: Master (or at least gain some semblance of control over) that little voice in your head, and the external obstacles will be nothing more than minor speed bumps on your road to success.

Question for you? How good are you at managing inner obstacles and that little voice in your head? What can you do to shut that little voice up when it tried to get you off track?

7) Look Forward, Not Back

Excuse me sir, but your future is the other way...

You know what’s depressing to me about this whole process? I have wanted to write a novel for almost my whole life. Being conservative in my estimates and looking just at my adult life, let’s say that’s 180 months (15 years x 12 months per year). In those 180 months, I wrote 0 words.

0.

Zero.

Zilch.

In one month I wrote 50,000 words.

Do the math: I could have (or should have) written 9,000,000 words by now.

9 MILLION!

Let’s say a book is 150,000 words (yes, it’s a bit long, but I’m verbose, and that makes the math easier). That would be the equivalent of 60 books.

SIXTY BOOKS!

Yes, this is an exaggerated and simplified model. But what if my output was just 1/10^th of that? That’s still six books.

It’s easy to look backwards and be depressed and feel like a failure when you focus on all the “what ifs” and “if onlys.”

Stop it!

There’s no point to it. You can’t change the past. Sure, study it and learn from it, but don’t beat yourself up over it. Just use that to fuel your motivation to not let the future continue pass you by as you don’t take action.

My learning: Stop wishing I had done thing differently. Instead, focus on doing things differently right now.

Question for you: Where is your focus? Are you looking backwards or forwards? What can you do right now, today, to not repeat the mistakes of the past?

8) Focus on Process, Not Product

Life's a journey. Take it one step at a time.

Whether you achieved your goal or not, if you do nothing else different from this point forward then the November challenge may have just been a big waste of time.

If you’re goal was truly a “one-off” thing, like “I need write and mail 300 of these wedding thank you cards,” then that’s great, you don’t really have to do something different.

However, if you were going after something more permanent, then the “end goal” is really just a milestone on your road to real success.

Remember, your goal shouldn’t be “to achieve the goal.” Your goal should be “to build the habits to make achieving both this and future goals easy.”

I won’t go so far as to say I have built the habit of writing fiction everyday; I haven’t. But I am working on that, and I am moving in that direction. How do I know? Because in the first six “working” days of December, after NaNoWriMo was over, I continued to write. I dropped my daily word count goal from 2500 words to 1000 words, but I am still writing, and still building a habit that will serve me for a long time.

Whatever your goal was, have you learned something that you can take with you moving forward? Have you built (or started to build) a habit that will serve you going forward?

My learning: Habits, habits, habits. Building habits is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more important than achieving goals.

Question for you? What habits did you build? What habits can you continue to build?

A Final Word

Phew!

That was a lot of words to explain what I learned from November. You would think I’d want to write less after cranking out a ton of writing all month!

But the truth is, there’s probably even more I could say on the topic. I’m really proud of what I did (even if this novel goes nowhere). I don’t want to be too grandiose and say it was a life-changing experience, but I suppose in some ways it was. Not in the giant, “Oh my God I almost just died so let me change everything about my life way,” but in a much more subtle, “hmm, here are some things I can now do better way.”

If you did the challenge, I hope you felt a similar shift. If not, I hope I:

1. Gave you some ideas you can use as you pursue your goals
2. Motivated you to take on your own “Do Something Great” Challenge.

Please add your comments below, either sharing your November experience or sharing your thoughts about applying these ideas to your own life/business.

Here’s to completing a great November, continuing that on to a great December, and marching on into an amazing 2011!

***
Do you want help doing something great yourself? Then sign up for some Smart Ass Mentoring now!

The problem with goals is that sometimes we achieve them. And when we do, we go right back to where we were when we started. And that sucks…

Today is November 22nd, which makes this Day 22 of the “Do Something Great in November” Challenge. How is it going for you?

For me, I am a bit behind the pace to complete 50,000 words on my novel. However, I knew going in that I would be a little behind (my first two weeks in Nov were a bit crazy), so I am confident I will hit the 50,000 word mark by the end of the month. (For you numbers people, I have written 33,306 words so far. If you break 50,000 words down into 30 days then multiply by 18, you’ll see that I should be at 36,667 words. So a little far behind, but not too bad).

However, all this talk about goals and word counts made me realize something very important:

I lost sight of the the real prize

“What do you mean Avish? I thought your goal was to write 50,000 words, and you seem on pace to do that.”

You are correct, I am on pace to write 50,000 words. However, if you recall back to the original post, writing 50,000 words was just one part of the goal. The big picture, the real goal, the objective I had that would lead not just to a large chunk of a novel but one that would also lead to future and ongoing success, wasn’t about writing a certain number of words.

“It wasn’t?”

No. No it wasn’t.

The real goal was to use this opportunity to break down old habits and build some new ones. I would love to have a novel written (or half written, since 50,000 words would be a tiny novel) by the end of the month. But, I would much rather finish the month having developed habits that would allow me to “be a writer.”

However, as the month has gone by and I fell a bit behind, my mind started to obsess over hitting my word count. I started thinking in terms of, “well, I guess better try to block out three hours this weekend to catch up,” and “if I get back on track on Monday, I’ll still hit 50,000 words by the end of the month.”

Those are fine thoughts if all I cared about was word count. However, by putting that much thought into the end goal, I neglected to think about the habit building aspect. Everything became about that number.

This is a problem for one simple, but important reason:

Goals are temporary; habits are forever.

Let me ask you this: if you were in my position, would you rather finish November with 50,000 words done, and then not write again for a year, or would you rather complete only 25,000 words but have developed the habit of writing 1,000 words every day, continuing beyond November, no matter what?

Of course building the habit is better. Writing 50,000 words every November means at the end of the year, you would have written 50,000 words. Writing 1,000 words a day means at the end of the year you would have written 365,000 words. This doesn’t even take into account the momentum and creative flow consistency brings, as well as the greater improvement you get from regularly engaging in an activity.

The best part of habit building is that everything becomes easier. When I was a kid, I used to hate to brush my teeth before going to sleep. But I did it everyday because my parents forced me to. Eventually, it become such a habit that I did it automatically. For the last 20+ years of my life, it has been such a habit that I find it much more uncomfortable not to brush my teeth.

That’s the power of building habits. If writing first thing in the morning became a habit for me like brushing my teeth, then it will eventually become more uncomfortable to not do it than to do it. It just becomes something you do. There’s no struggle. There’s no procrastination. It becomes automatic.

To me, it’s a no brainer:  Build the habits. Let your results flow out of those habits.

The same principle could be applied to many different areas. Health and fitness. Regular reading. Keeping your house or office organized. Connecting with your lived ones. Marketing.

The list goes on and on.

It can be very easy however, to lose sight of the real prize and start focusing on short term goals.

• “Oh, I’ll skip today but double up tomorrow.”
• “Whatever, it’s not that important that I do this now. I can do it next month.”
• “Wow, I hit my goal so I deserve to slack off for a bit.”

The last one is the worst. There’s nothing wrong with giving yourself a break, but if you take a break without having built a habit, what you’re really doing is unconditioning yourself. If you haven’t built a habit, it will be easy to let one day off become two, which will become three. Before you know it, two weeks have gone by and you haven’t gotten back to on track, and now you’re not sure if you ever will (I have gone through this many times with work out routines…)

With the 8 days remaining in the month, I am adopting a new approach:

1. I will continue to shoot for 2,500 words per day. I still want to achieve the “result goal” of 50,000 words.
2. However, I will make damned sure to not a day go by without writing. I will do my best to write at the same time everyday (for me, that is 7AM). I want to build the habit of writing at 7AM everyday.

The key to making that second one work, however, is that I make no minimum on how long I must write or how many words I need to produce. In fact, for the rest of November, I will set my minimum at one sentence.

You read that right, just one sentence.

Of course I will be shooting for 2,500. But there will be some days (like Thanksgiving Day) where it won’t be practical, convenient, or frankly desirable for me to sit and write for 90-120 minutes). Some mornings I may be way ahead in my word count and have a full day of other things to do. On those days, rather than blowing off the writing altogether, I’ll force myself to fire up the computer and write at least one sentence.

Why? Habit building.

I want to condition my mind to write at 7AM, everyday. The length of time will come later. For now, I’m just starting with the first step: building the habit of writing something ever day.

How about you? Are you pursuing a short term goal, or are you building a long term habit? What is your horizon? Is your eye on the right prize?

I hope your November efforts have been going well. Please share your experiences, thoughts, and challenges in the comments below. Also, let everyone know what habits you are committed to building to help you gain long term success!