On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

I highly recommend reading Didn’t See That Coming by New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hollis. Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt about setting goals:

The only way I know of to actively pursue growth in my life is to set goals both personally and professionally so that I am forced to grow as a person in order for those goals to be made manifest. I challenge myself in this way as a leader, as a mother, and as a friend.

I truly believe that we find purpose in creating traction against a goal we are trying to achieve, so long as the goal is something we care about. When I talk about this subject it sometimes rubs people the wrong way because they associate the word goal with the industries that have adopted it most.

People think that a goal must be for financial gain or weight loss or a bigger promotion or a nicer car since those are the categories in which the term is most used. But the truth is, a goal can be about anything. It doesn’t have to be associated with what you’ve lost or what has caused you hurt.

You can create a goal to show up as a better mother or to grow in your faith. You can create a goal to learn sign language or to pay off your student loans or to repaint your local community center. You can create a goal to learn to make the world’s best carrot cake. It doesn’t matter what the goal is; it only matters that you have one and that it’s something you care about.

Any area of your life that you feel passionately about can be improved upon by adding a specific goal to it, and the beauty is that you’ll start to see the positive effects of your goal-setting long before you actually achieve anything. Once you start to see traction, once you start to see that you’re truly making strides toward something you care about, you will find purpose not in the achievement but in the pursuit.

Source: Didn’t See That Coming, pp. 206-207.