Your Five-Year Goals Are Givens, Not Aspirations
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Self Improvement, Writing, Creativity, Productivity, Goals

I like five year goals. The time line is far enough away to be useful — you can do pretty much anything in five years. It’s close enough to be meaningful — you can hold five years in your head.

My life took a big pivot just about five years ago. I made some goals for myself that year. Big goals that changed my life. In the last five years, I’ve finished graduate school, started a six-figure business, gotten completely out of consumer debt, and sold two novels to a major publisher.

Those were my five-year goals.

Now that it’s been five years, I thought it would be interesting to look back at my 2015 goals and think about how they went.

Five years ago, all I really wanted was to be a writer again.

My last book had published two years earlier, in 2013. My publisher had declined to offer me a contract for the third book in my series. That meant that my whole career as a novelist at that point consisted of two-thirds of what felt to me like a failed trilogy.

I was working as a teacher’s assistant in a special needs high school classroom. The teacher I worked under was burned out and frustrated. I earned two dollars less per hour than my son did at his Walmart job.

I was miserable. For the first time in my life (almost literally), I wasn’t writing fiction. At all.

I knew two things. I needed to get out of my job situation and the best chance I had for doing that was to write another book. One that would sell and give me an advance that would let me quit and just be a writer again for a while.

I had a blog at the time. It was called Going Reno and it was the only writing I was still doing at the time. It was a lifestyle-type blog for disorganized people, but I decided to write a novel and to blog about it every week. Step-by-step.

That series, even though it had nothing to do with the topic of my blog, caught fire. Those posts were by far the most popular I’d ever written. People were joining my email list, so they could get the next installment.

These were my goals in 2015.

I wanted to quit my job with the school district.

I wanted to write a book that would help me find another agent (I’d cut ties with mine in 2014.)

I wanted that book to sell to a publisher.

I wanted to turn my blog series about writing a novel into a class.

I wanted that class to make $50,000 a year.

I wanted to be out of consumer debt.

I wanted 10,000 people on my email list.

I wanted to finish my degree.

When I looked at that list of goals, I saw one connective thread that wove through them all. My overarching five-year goal was to design my life in such a way that I never had to have a crappy day job again.

Five years ago, I created a roadmap to get me there.

My overarching goal has not changed. The roadmap to it has.

There are things happening in my life today that I couldn’t have predicted in 2015.

I had zero idea, for instance, that my husband and I would move our family to Pennsylvania in 2018. That wasn’t anywhere, at all, on my radar. Talk about a roadmap change.

That move happened because our rent in Reno went up by 20 percent in the same week that my husband was laid off of his job. Another roadmap change that we didn’t see coming. We loved Reno and weren’t thinking about a major move at all.

Ninja Writers started out to be a way for me to get out of my terrible day job, so that I could be a writer again. I knew I was going to teach a class, but I thought it would all be in service of me getting to where I could support my family with novels.

I didn’t know that I’d love teaching so much. Or that the community that came out of Ninja Writers would be so extraordinary.

That list of five-year goals represented my givens.

Your five-year goals are the things you know you want. They’re pretty permanent.

While I couldn’t have known which book I’d write and sell, there was very, very little chance that sometime in five years I’d decide that I didn’t want to be a writer at all anymore. Same goes with quitting my crappy day job or building an audience or earning a decent living.

My five-year goals were my givens.

It started with quitting my job. That was my highest priority, because it was the thing that was causing me the most trouble in the moment. Because that marker was so close to the start of my journey, it was a pretty straight shot.

I didn’t need to replace much income, since my job had such low pay. I was willing to quit the moment I had the income replacement — I was confident that I’d be able to earn enough the next month or find another barely-above-minimum-wage job to replace the one I was giving up, if I had to.

The book goal, as is the nature of this type of goal, was a windier road. I wrote two young adult books in the first two years. One landed me an agent, who started to send it out to publishers and then promptly decided she wasn’t going to represent YA books anymore. The other got some attention, but no bites.

This is a good example of a goal where I had some control, but not enough to make it happen on my own timeline. I could control my work ethic. I wouldn’t control whether someone else wanted to represent my work.

My education goal took time, but was a pretty straight shot. I took classes at UNR and got within 9 credits of my BA — and then was offered a place in an MFA program. I graduated with my MFA in 2018. That was a pretty straight forward goal that really only required me to show up and do the work.

What I couldn’t anticipate was that I’d write a middle grade book during my MFA program that would finally help me meet my publishing goals. I signed with an agent in 2017 and she sold that book.

I couldn’t have anticipated in 2015 that Ninja Writers would become a membership community and that I’d stop selling that big how-to-write-a-novel class with big launches. I didn’t even know that membership communities were a thing.

I reached my business goals — just not in the way that I thought I would. Mostly because until I got on the road, I had no idea the side trips and road stops I’d take. I also had no idea which detours I might come up against.

But I did know where I was going.

So, what are your five-year goals?

How you get to them might change. There are things you just can’t anticipate five years out, or even five months or weeks. But if you have a clear idea of what those markers are — your givens — then you’ll continue to move toward them.

If I want to go visit my family in Las Vegas, the easiest thing is to get on an airplane in Buffalo and get off it in Las Vegas. But maybe I want to drive there. In that case, I basically get on the highway and head due west, if I want the easiest route.

But maybe things happen.

I could head north first and drive through Canada. Or south and make my way through Mexico. It would take a long time, but I’d still get there. As long as I head southwest or northwest.

I could even head east and I’ll get there as long as I keep going long enough.

The problem would come if I get started south and never made it to my westward markers.

It’s a given that if I want to get from Pennsylvania to Nevada, I have to make it west in some way. If nothing pulls me west, I could find myself driving around and around the world (metaphorically speaking!) without ever getting close to Nevada.

Your five year goals keep you headed in the right direction — one way or the other. You need to know your givens. They are your guiding lights.