Let’s start this edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries with a rhetorical question:
“How does one go about achieving the goals they’ve set for themselves?”
I’ll give you a few minutes to pause and think about that.
Most folks have already started churning their brains into realistic “brass tacks” solutions. However, the question I asked just now is also sort of the wrong question. Not that I intended to set you readers up for such trick questions in the first place, as the point of this series has always been to enlighten and educate. A lot of people jump right into it like this. But the question of how one goes about achieving goals has a prerequisite that few consider:
“How does one go about choosing and setting achievable goals in the first place?”
This question is a little more apt, as process and structure towards one’s goals is indeed important – as many have surmised above for the first question. Easy answers for the first question could be timelines, phases, or preparation. But simultaneously it can often become difficult to do much more than shout grandiose plans out into the universe, without any real critical thinking behind such big statements.
So for this edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries, we’ll be partially delving into my own progress and my experiences towards some of my many various “impossible” goals. (Especially the big one in regards to Poetry, which I’ve written about before.) But we’ll also take a look at some simple tips and tricks I’ve used across my own life, as helpful tools and insights for your toolbox to make achieving your own dreams easier. Obviously we’ll do so largely in the context of this very website and various literary interpretations of “achievement” we see in the world, but you should explore further where these might apply to other disciplines.
Years ago now, I used to be a teacher – often thrown into PE or Careers/Planning classes despite my more apt subject specialties in History, Drama, and English. (Although I did end up teaching almost every mandatory subject across the Middle Years and Secondary age levels across most of a decade.)
Many of my tips and tricks we’ll explore were developed for literal children, after all!
Now, each unique and individual person on planet Earth is going to have a set of challenges that hamper their ability to even guess at what is or isn’t possible.
Using my own example; as a person with ADHD, our “unique tendencies” usually involve something called “executive dysfunction.” This is to say the impaired version of “executive function,” which is the neurotypical lived life for most. Executive function is the power of your brain to sequence things, meaning without it, like us ADHD folks – people suffer from all sorts of awful daily experiences, from time blindness, to often developing anxiety disorders as a result of this challenging existence they live every single day of their lives!
We all know the standard put downs. “Lazy, Selfish, Slow, Stupid,” and of course all the lovely slurs from the 90s and aughts I was called, that thank fuck are mostly outdated and beaten out of common lexicons.
But why bring up a disability for certain specific folks, when we’re talking about goal setting and literature? How does this have anything to do with the prep work for goal setting?
Well, as somebody who doesn’t have a lot of internal regulation in my body compared to “normal” people, for the first half of my life I was fucking useless. While some of this is due to an abusive childhood with plenty of neglect and trauma thrown in for good measure… I cannot deny that I was the stereotypical gifted kid, turned burnout. In Elementary and early Secondary, I never did my homework, not that many modern teachers assign it specifically these days. But I was clever enough to do the bare minimum to pass most of my subjects, relying on that magic 50% grade.
I lacked motivation, and I lacked passion.
Everything from my Major Depression, then undiagnosed, to the ADHD disabilities up above, set me up to do the exact sort of bed rotting or drifting through life that many ADHD and neurodivergent folks suffer from. Yet despite my many disabilities and the slew of traumas, here I stand, showing that even folks without ideal starting conditions can still succeed!
The point of all this preambling is that you have to put things into your own personal contexts before you even begin to consider what goals are possible for you. If you’re a rich white kid driving a beamer, obviously most goals you set for yourself can be fast-tracked with enough cash and capital. Look no further than the blatant and rampant nepotism and cronyism in Hollywood and mainstream media!
Inverse to this, a poor kid from the American midwest might have a much more limited selection of what life paths and achievements they can shoot for. Assuming most of rural North America is largely of an Abrahamic religious origin, mostly Catholic and Christian, that poor midwest kid might not even have the autonomy or ability to find their own passions or goals to shoot for within the confines of poverty or an organized religion. If they’re a closeted queer person? The odds are even worse in such contexts.
Like being trapped in a tiny contortionist box, without ever knowing there’s a beautiful world outside it to explore and enjoy.
I’ve personally witnessed some incredibly talented teenagers, across both my various fine arts and theatre classes. Kids that I could see making a go of art as an actual profession. (Inside joke here being that I don’t make more than $5 in a good month from my own art!)
I very much dislike the blanket false optimism of telling children to chase their dreams no matter how big or crazy they might be. It’s fine at young elementary ages to talk about being firefighters, doctors, or astronauts once they grow up; but I’ve seen some pretty delusional folks making bizarre claims long after they should have developed some dose of reality and self awareness. Perhaps that’s why the Millennials and Zoomers now suffer from crushing existential depression, having been told by Boomers their whole lives – that struggling to even pay rent and get groceries is somehow our own fault for not working harder and “pulling up our bootstraps.”
Don’t take it seriously whatsoever!
In reality, many of these leaded-gasoline-guzzling grey-hairs had a fucking cakewalk of a life in a pre-hyperinflation world with good solid wages. Many bought dirt cheap property after the 1980s North American housing crash and then hyperinflated the real estate market via speculation onwards thereafter – so nobody had the same opportunities as them. However, despite their good generational fortune as a global benchmark trend, they then dumped their own consequences of hyperinflation, climate catastrophe, and other such long-term disasters on us younger generations to fix after the problem has gotten pretty bad!
The whole “nest egg” home value bullshit drives me mental! Really reflects the stupidity of the “line only go up” crowd. An entire generation that will be absolutely crushed to dust the moment the real estate market turns, which a la boom and bust cycles, must happen to ease inflation.
Now, before anyone accuses me of being ageist, I actually respect The Greatest or “Silent” generation quite a lot, much more than Baby Boomers by a good margin. They were the ones to battle Nazis in WW2, including even my own dead grandfather, who lied about his age at 16 to go fight in Europe. Now, the PTSD he got from that war brought him back to Canada as a chronic alcoholic and abuser, yes. It was real shitty, especially for my own boomer dad who got beat more than once. Intergenerational Trauma is real. Plus the few remaining are often just as bad as many bigoted boomers when it comes to queerness, race, or disability, and accepting those different from you.
So all that goes to say – if we want to think about setting realistic goals, we must consider our own contexts first and foremost!
We shouldn’t be telling kids in abject poverty that they can do anything, no matter how inspirational a story like Finding Forrester or other Hollywood shit is. I can’t tell you the number of wannabe thug lyfe preteens and teenagers in my classes over the years who thought they’d be millionaires driving lambos by twenty. Yelling “skrrt” like idiots every two seconds and skipping class to hit the bong in the skate park out back when they couldn’t even figure out any sort of path towards such actual wealth! I mean, a lot of it was very white kids appropriating stateside black culture, from speech, to clothing, to personality, so the posturing was often so fucking ridiculous that one could hardly help but laugh. These kids were often bougie white kids who had absolutely zero clue about The Projects, much less any actual hardship!
But the delusions were often real. I often found that many kids, especially when in trouble, would invent lies, and then repeat those lies until they believed said lies to be true. So when a teacher or principal would ask them, they’d just parrot whatever little story they had conjured up!
Context is very important.
But so is self-awareness and self-reflection, two similar things that I am very concerned about in modern society – where social media algorithms have captured every last drop of the dopamine cycle. Farming people for attention and data like corn from the field.
I’ve mostly stopped using TikTok for these algorithmic issues, because every second scroll is either an ad, or some asian person on a greenscreen straight up stealing content. Kinda know we’re fucked as a species when people are literally farming the algorithm in chinese content mills, eh? All to get that sweet sweet dopamine. And to farm high follower counts to be able to sell the account afterwards, obviously. Never forget that in regards to social media, you and your data are the “product.”
Unfortunately, I cannot magically snap my fingers and provide such kids with as much self-awareness as Socrates in an instant. Nor can I snap my fingers and stop Dead Internet Theory from coming true more and more every day.
But what I could do, especially in the Careers class track, was help introduce some methodologies and other tips and tricks to make goals and desired professions seem like they have a clear pathway. (And many such careers requiring post secondary education do have a pretty clear set of prerequisites!)
This differed from class to class and kid to kid. Teachers are often excellent at Social Engineering like this without even knowing what Social Engineering is! In PE, we used the good old S.M.A.R.T. acronym, because at the end of the day, quantitative data is the best tool for assessing plans authentically. For those who don’t know, the acronym is an old computer science related methodology from the 1980s, and stands for Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
To break this down, it asks for defining factors and components of an overall plan. “Specific” means that the task or goal has to be pretty finite, rather than trying to accomplish enormous goals in a nebulous fashion. Not only do such grand handwaves often fail, they can then lead to depression or disappointment when the true scope and scale of their chosen goal becomes more clear halfway through the process, thereby crushing morale.
For PE classes, the obvious examples were the kids who claim they want to get “yoked” without knowing the actual grunt work, discipline, and dedication required. In these sorts of situations, me or my colleagues would try to narrow the scope for the given kid, asking them to focus on one muscle group or one athletic goal. Instead of “running a marathon,” we might poke or redirect them towards more specific outcomes; such as working up to a 5k first.
For runners, time is often a great way to choose specific parameters.
You could run a mile in thirty minutes? (1.6kms to the mile for the rest of the civilized world outside like the U.S. and Madagascar.) Then the next logical step for you might be to work towards that magic ten minute mile! The more specific the goal, the easier it is to focus on rather than getting lost in the vast jungle of possibility. Weightlifting is also great for this, because as much as I love drop sets and only drop sets, achieving a higher maximum weight is very easy to quantify! Maybe you started with 10lb dumb bells, so perhaps your specific goal is to be able to do 30 reps with 20 or 30 pound dumbbells! (Again, 2.2lbs to the Kilogram for the rest of the civilized world.)
“Measurable” is an extension of this. How are you going to track your progress in the first place? Are you just going to run every day or hit the gym without a set weight or distance to guide yourself by? If your metric is completely subjective, like admiring or hating your body in the mirror after each workout – what are you actually achieving? Teenagers are often terrible at this, and many teachers have to literally scaffold it so hard, as to handhold them through the goal setting design process entirely.
“Assignable” is less important, as it really just asks you to assume responsibility for the process of achieving one’s goals. This mostly tended to be an issue for the checked out kids that like my own younger self, who wanted to just coast along doing the bare minimum – unaware that they were fucking themselves over by forgoing personal growth and practice. These were the sorts of kids that would give some nebulous goal specifically to avoid accountability or responsibility for getting there. Hard for a teacher to check their actual progress when there are zero quantitative data pieces or pre-established guidelines.
But we won’t get into “summative” vs. “formative” assessment here!
“Realistic” is pretty much how it sounds. It includes all the stuff we talked about up above – trying to ground oneself – in order to set goals that aren’t the grandiose claims that equate to literally nothing. If a kid is failing all of their classes, but states proudly that they’re going to be a veterinarian because they like animals, are they naive? Or merely ignorant of the upper level science courses, heavy mathematics, and other biochem required in Post-Secondary Education to even get into the vet training process in the first place?
“Time-Bound” is possibly the most important part of the acronym. It brings us back to that whole qualitative vs. quantitative analysis thing we’ve discussed many times before throughout The Pickup Truck Diaries. It’s really easy to throw out a date somewhere in the future without any actual followthrough on the path leading up to that date. In my own experience, these are the time-blind folks who tend to panic just before a deadline and scramble to meet whatever was agreed upon. Late turn-ins abounded!
Plus, don’t get me started on the “Vancouver Special” of running into somebody, agreeing to get coffee to catch up sometime, and then never speaking or interacting ever again.
Now that you lovely readers have some context, and an example of just one potential system for achieving goals… I’ll use my own artistic frameworks and goals to show how this can all work in reality.
I’ve written on my Poetry aims in another Pickup Truck Diaries article before, so I’m going to do my best not to repeat everything said there verbatim, and keep the guidelines around goal setting as the focus. I might fail, but that’s the point of all this, right? Fear of potential failure is useless cowardice. You simply never know until you try!
For this redirection, we have to travel back in time in a minor flashback about a half a decade. Back when I decided to return to Poetry and Prose after a ten year long hiatus and break from writing of any kind – outside day to day job requirements. See, I had been writing from about thirteen, up until about twenty, even taking part in the Vancouver Slam Poetry scene for a while. I had even written a rough draft of The Marionette Man sci fi book and edited it about six times already by that point! (Yes, the book on my website sat for a decade before I ever did anything with it!)
But unfortunately, since even before that young age of thirteen, I had parents that were not super supportive, if not outright acting as saboteurs. One parent was largely ambivalent, citing a need for a Plan A to go along with Plan B, which is ultimately why I moved into Education. Granted he’s got Autism and ADHD, so logic and rationality are his modus operandi for the most part. I don’t begrudge him that. And honestly this is a stance a lot of Boomer and Gen X parents take with their kids – pushing for stability first, and dreams or passions second.
The other parent actively attacked my work constantly, even as a fucking child! Both parents were the “constructive criticism” types, meaning we rarely ever got praise and instead got a rant or diatribe on what we did wrong, labelled as this imaginary “constructive criticism.” Didn’t matter if it was sports, self expression, or what. We could always expect it afterward. For the past twenty years they’ve also been calling me “Dark” and attacking my self expression, identity, and art however possible. Even though I officially disowned that terrible mentally ill parent around this past christmas, again, for being an ableist, queerphobic piece of shit mostly, they STILL stalk my website and work constantly, which I can pretty clearly see in my backend analytics.
Never forget that your greatest haters will always be more prevalent than your most encouraging fans, at least from my many experiences with the ugly, bigoted, bell curve bulge of average Humanity. Many ignorant people are stubborn, cruel, petty, or worse, and will actively try to bring you down or attack your goals, a la the crabs in a bucket scenario. You might need to build up your grit and resilience, and learn how to tell people stupider than you to shut the fuck up, politely or not.
As you can probably tell, trying to accomplish anything under such toxic parenting or around such toxic fake friends and communities can feel and seem impossible. I cannot count the number of families I encountered with similar toxic relationships even in the twenty-teens! Really talented kids completely fucked over by parents for various reasons.
All this led me to moving away, and staying as far away from these people as possible. Surprisingly, the moment I was a distance away from them and their negative influence, I found joy and passion in creating art again! The wider the space, the better off and more functional I was. Now I refuse to have negative relationships in my life. I only want positive, loving, caring people who support and uplift each other.
Which unfortunately, the majority of my immediate family is not.
It brings us back to our own contexts, remember? Before we even consider which goals might be achievable, we also have to identify roadblocks to our success, even in our immediate circles around us. In some asian communities, I know the pressure on children and youth to “achieve” can be downright exhausting and depressing – with many parents continuing and proliferating mostly patriarchal sexist cultures where men are valued more than women, and a child is treated as a complete failure if they’re not a doctor, lawyer, or some other high prestige, high income career.
Perhaps that’s the one piece of advice I can give you above all else.
You must learn to ignore the naysayers and critics.
Their words are irrelevant, if not just hot air or white noise.
My entire life, via both parents, teachers, and others, I was constantly beaten down mentally and emotionally, and definitely internalized a lot of negative self worth and other trauma.
It wasn’t until I was twenty eight years old that I clued in; after avoiding mental health, counsellors, and medications my whole life as a result of the crazy homeopathic medicine beliefs of an abusive parent. Another form of sabotage across my life, eh? Not only was I indeed different, being diagnosed with new disabilities, but I learned from medical documents I had to pay an old doctor for, that I had actually been diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder and Dyscalculia in my early teens! Those diagnoses were hidden from me of course, aside from the ADHD, called ADD back then.
I cannot count the number of times a covert narcissist parent sabotaged me and my different efforts, all whilst projecting and deflecting their own flaws, faults, and shitty actions onto everybody else anywhere nearby.
You can go read the Pickup Truck Diaries editions on topics like disability and my own mental health journey for more context if you want, but I’m gonna taper off there otherwise.
All this is to say that before I could even begin the process of planning for, or even selecting my life goals, I had numerous hurdles to jump. In your context, perhaps you have positive, supportive, loving parents who actually encourage you and support you in all the ways they can towards achieving your dreams!
Would definitely make starting the whole endeavour easier, no?
These are the personal contexts I’ve been talking about all this time. What factors, both environmental or otherwise, will help or hurt you?
In my case; counselling, medications via a psychiatrist, and more, only came after a pretty significant breakdown, having worked at an Alternate School at the time and seeing some pretty bad shit. The Superintendent was even actively intimidating and harassing me of course, being ableist as fuck. No wonder it was a tough time! I really should have taken her and my former employer to court for the blatant discrimination and ableism… But alas!
Despite that struggle, medication brought a tad more executive function into my daily life, and counselling really helped me figure myself and my identity out, after having both concepts crushed and manipulated for decades by toxic relationships. So, like the crazy person I am, I also started my small business and got into writing both poetry and prose again, at the gentle push of therapists. Whilst going through said breakdown.
Now, my first problem with this, was that I very quickly realized that aside from my huge archive of old work, I had to find some sort of pattern or schedule so I wouldn’t do the classic ADHD maneuvers we talked about above – doing huge hyperfocus sessions, then burning out and moving on to something else after the dopamine stream dried up.
Another more generalist problem was and is, that art as a whole is entirely fucking subjective!
As a wannabe indie underground artist, I was pretty determined from the start that I wrote (and still write) for my own dopamine, and have a guideline still in effect even as of now, that I don’t want critics anywhere near me or my work, nor do I ever consider any audience that might read my work. I wanted to write about things that I wanted to write about, fighting back stubbornly against the Capitalist Controls over art and the greater zeitgeist.
Fuck other people’s sticky gross fingers and garbage opinions, this is my Art!
So how does a writer or poet achieve “success” if not derived from public opinion via capitalism?
Well, this is all about goal setting, remember?
So knowing all too well the norms for such a dead art form as the written word, I started digging around the portfolios of some of the most famous writers and poets, to see how they worked and what they produced in a given set timeline. Writing prose was easy enough, being a lover of Asimov and similar OG science fiction writers like Bradbury.
But in the realm of Poetry, I was rather shocked!
Most of the famous “poets” we consider the pinnacle of the art form were woefully lacking in any prolific nature! Edgar Allen Poe? Only about fifty poems total in his entire life! Shakespeare? Only 168 poems give or take in total! The only person with any notable portfolio was Emily Dickinson with her 1800 poems, which of course wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the Guinness Record page, either due to ineptitude, or sexism, who knows.
That prompted the lightbulb moment for me.
If simply writing was already fucky due to such shitty factors, I would try to find some writing or poetry metric that I could quantify!
So I chose to ignore qualitative subjectivity entirely.
Surprisingly, there were very few actual records of overall production or process for many writers and poets. The only thing I could find was that trashy Guinness World Record web page for “Most Prolific Poet.”
Their site stated that Shakespeare was good for 3500 poems, and John Bradburne was number one at 6000 poems give or take. Of course, I already don’t trust any company that has anything to do with the corrupt billionaire oligarch Jim pattison. He nepotistically put his son in charge of both Guinness and Ripleys, as far as I know.
Hatred for billionaires aside, the record was also fucky, because Shakespeare only wrote 168 poems, remember? Mostly all sonnets which are formulaic as fuck. I detest cookie cutter style poetry. Guinness, for some strange reason, was and still is counting Shakespeare’s entire portfolio as poetry. So that 3500 number includes all his plays for some stupid reason.
Now I have to admit, I haven’t read as much of John Bradburne as Shakespeare, with him being a hyper-religious christian through and after his WW2 service. The 6000 number of “poems” largely comes from letter correspondences from his little leper camp in Africa, which he was eventually exiled from. Then he continued to live in a shack outside the camp for like six years until his death.
So, if the content is religious in nature, and knowing organized religion has been hostile to art and any real individual autonomy for the majority of history, should we count such work as sermons instead of poetry?
No clue, but what I can say is that I paid Guinness their five dollars via their shitty website to try and get my goalpost verified.
This was their answer six months later, after I had already passed Shakespeare:
See how they bring up the “subjective” thing I’ve spoken to already?
Sure is easy, to handwave somebody away whilst claiming they need to have institutional or publisher backing, eh? Also hilarious that they claim subjectivity when their own record for “Most Prolific Poet” is already inaccurate and completely subjective, yet still live on the site!
But back to the planning process!
Using this Guinness World Record page as my benchmark, even if the quantitative number values were wholly wrong and incorrect, gave me an actual quantitative goal to work towards.
So I now knew that my first goal post was 3500 poems to steal second place from Shakespeare, and 6000 poems to beat Bradburne and finally steal the actual title of most prolific poet ever.
Those who were paying attention near the start are already thinking:
“Wait, but those are just big numbers that are just as obtuse and obscure! You told us not to make sweeping grandiose claims without knowing the mechanics and processes behind such a declaration!”
Correct, my lovely reader.
So I had to build a practical method for achieving such an enormous goal. My first benchmark I created was a flexible scaling timeline. Doing some quick math, I determined that to hit the entire 6000-poem goal in twelve years of my life, would require writing ten poems a week minimum. But if I was able to churn out twenty five poems a week, I’d nab first place in just a paltry four years instead!
Things really do become more clear when you put quantitative frameworks around them. So as of starting my business, that was the Poetry schedule and structure I followed. I knew that to make any real progress in a shorter time frame, I’d have to write a minimum of ten poems a week, with twenty five being a stretch goal of sorts. I’d like to think that beating all of Shakespeare in just five years, when it took him an entire lifetime in a wholly artistic career to get to such a level, is pretty impressive. But I refuse to give myself kudos or any pat on the back for beating a four hundred year old dead man. Instead, it’s kinda sad to me that my only real rivals on this journey or quest are already long dead.
From there, it was entirely discipline, determination, and resilience. Having actively chosen to ignore critics or audiences entirely, I allowed myself to write poems, often late at night, that were true expressions of my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Since I was shooting for an objective goal, and not some nebulous subjective thing, I found myself not only sticking to the schedule for the most part, but often achieving that twenty five poem extra milestone each week – more often than not in the early years.
Thus, here we are, around five to six years later. As of last month, my website has 3600-ish poems published and available to the public. You can compare the search bar function on my website, which gives total category counts, to the Guinness website if you don’t believe me. I’m just as surprised as you might be! Despite Guinness giving an incorrect “3500” number for me to beat, diligence is what allowed me to get to this first milestone goal post in just five to six years!
What it took to get me to this point, just over midway on my journey, was simply proper quantitative and objective planning, and then maintaining the drive thereafter to follow the structure I had researched and laid out for myself. Other records I hardly planned for at all, in amusing contrast, such as writing “The Rainbow Bible” on a whim! Did I expect a stupid Rainbow and Tribal Tribal Magic The Gathering Commander Resource to end up at half a novel? 63,000+ words? Of course not. But by the time I had finished, it simply was what it was. And it was also the longest resource ever written for the game of MTG, completely by accident!
I bring up “The Rainbow Bible” to show that not every plan or project requires meticulous planning to achieve great things. As individuals, we need to place our time and effort towards the right things, saving our real energy and exertion for the biggest fire we might currently need to put out.
For instance; a University Student should probably plan carefully along specific quantitative lines for graduation, and a career, all throughout their process. That should probably take precedent over wasting such intense consideration and planning on an upcoming rec league soccer game or another hobby!
This edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries is really about setting and achieving goals, and much less about my becoming “The Second Most Prolific Poet In History.” So I kind of feel like the title is a tad misleading now. Bah.
But I do try to stay humble and self aware, even about my humility, so I’m morbidly amused that becoming the “second most” of anything across Humanity in my case is via a mostly dead art form like poetry. I do try to keep “open secret” vibes and purposely keep a very low profile, after all. I also make an effort to avoid shilling myself in almost every way to enjoy my relative isolation and solitude.
I don’t give a shit about any/all audiences, remember?
Again, it’s never about the destination for me, as in my opinion the greatest experience is usually the journey itself. “Taking gold” is largely irrelevant if I haven’t grown or evolved somehow along the path.
But as usual for this series, I’ve run rather long.
So my final words to you, as anyone out there of any origin trying to accomplish a goal, is to remember the quantitative over the qualitative. Make sure that you aren’t just pissing into the wind, by actually crafting solid goals, checkpoints, and feasible realistic outcomes for the things you end up chasing. That is regardless of whether you use a decades old methodology like SMART, or something akin to my own hackneyed structure – regarding weekly quotas for myself.
Me?
I’ll just keep churning out poems, one by one, until I finally pass Bradburne and can revel in my silly, useless little title. But that’s for me to worry about, not you. You have your own goals to chase!
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
