Ranjana TN

The permission to obsess

Every time I’ve had a major breakthrough in my life or met with massive success was when I obsessed over something. Whenever I allow myself to go deep into something and allow it to become the thing I eat, sleep, breathe, and live, my life changes and often drastically. Magic happens. I saw this when I first started my startup in 2016. I saw this when I started learning dance at a prestigious dance school in Bangalore. I saw this when I studied Physics and Mathematics at university (I was a gold medalist).

Writing is important to me. This is my vocation and the path I’m going to be on for the rest of my life. So as I was creating my Q3 goals, I knew that I wanted to give myself permission to obsess over my writing goals. I wanted to breathe, think, eat, sleep, and live writing. I wanted to allow myself to really go deep and enjoy the process. I’m seeing myself as the amateur who’s turning into a pro.

Tapping into my Creative Core

My theme for Q3 is Tapping into my Creative Core. So it won’t come as a surprise that my first goal is to, every day, write from a place of creativity, flow, and deep connectedness. There are many terms for this. Deep work. Flow. Tapping into source energy. Whatever it is, my intent is to write from that place.

To enter this place of creativity and flow, I’m going to do the following: Once a day, before I begin to write or do anything related to writing (such as creating the outline for the book I’m working on or doing some writing exercises), I’ll put my phone on DND mode and shut the door. I’m going to then imagine that I’m stepping into a white globe of creative energy. Some days I might imagine a different colour, but white is my favourite so I’m assuming that on most days that’s what I’ll imagine. By stepping into that, I’m entering my creative core. Here, it’s just me, my creative energy, and the words that want to flow. I’ll close my eyes and breathe deeply a few times. If I feel like it, I might do a short meditation too, but that’s not necessary. Once I’ve done that, feeling the energy within the globe, I’ll open my eyes and start writing.

The amateur who’s turning into a pro

The second writing goal is to put in 10 hours a week into studying the craft of fiction-writing. I’ve bought a few courses and I’ll go through them one by one. I’m not going to worry about the number of courses or anything – I’m going to focus on the actual learning and application. If I invest 10 hours a week into studying writing and another 15 hours into writing, that’s 25 hours a week that goes into deliberate practice. That’s 13,000 hours in a decade. Enough to go from an amateur to a pro.

As soon as I view myself as someone who’s training to go pro, my approach to writing changes. It’s the difference between training for the sake of training and training for the Olympics. No, training to be a gold medalist at the Olympics. The seriousness, process, deliberation, mindset – in fact, everything – is different. That’s what I’m looking at when it comes to fiction writing.

Skill Building

The third goal is pretty straightforward. That is to increase my typing speed from my current 40 wpm to 100+ wpm. Why is that? Because 40 wpm just isn’t enough to capture my thoughts at a fast enough pace. It’s holding me back. So I’m going to level up here. This is the process of building an important skill. As I go along, I’m going to identify similar skills that will enable me to level up and keep getting good at writing. That’s the way of the pro.

I spent a ginormous amount of time crafting these goals and I think all of them are obsession-worthy. To say that I’m excited about them is a massive understatement.

What goals can you make obsession-worthy? Where can you give yourself the permission to obsess and watch yourself go from an amateur to a pro? What kind of a life would you be living then?