I have always been infinitely better at ideas than follow-through. I would devolve into a hot mess of remorse if I lost sleep over all the thought-seeds I have scattered across the earth without harvesting them. Plant that shit for somebody else. Nobody wants it? Oh well.

This is part of why I actively force myself to keep some thoughts and plans a secret. I’m aware that this runs contrary to all popular wisdom that we become our boldest, most excellent, and life-coach-approved selves by sharing all the things, but that hasn’t proved entirely true for me.

Emphasis on “for me.” I’m certain that there wouldn’t be so many people telling me that I need to share every big dream with the world if there weren’t plenty of people who found this productive or helpful. Congratulations to all of the incredibly strong-willed, decisive people who can’t tolerate the idea of publicly declaring a goal and not seeing it through.

I can be a foolishly proud and competitive person but that is one bit of fool-hearty pride I have managed to evade. I’m much more guilty of trying to justify secret goals — goals I should abandon, but whose inevitable floating away into nothingness when they go unrealized and unexpressed saddens me because I have a warped, strangely sentimental view of everything. (I am the person who will stand by an atrocious television show because I can invest feelings in just about anything.) I’m pretty good at saying, “Yeah, that was really stupid. Here’s 100 reasons why that was really stupid!” to past, publicly-declared goals that I feel need to be abandoned.

I am, of course, being a bit glib about the personalities of these much more dedicated people. The conventional wisdom I’m questioning probably includes a lengthy section on why we should be sharing specific goals and ideas that we think are the best forever.

As a feelsy, creative person, though, all the ideas are the best forever and most important. Being bad at prioritizing is, unsurprisingly, a common companion to the ideas-over-follow-through flaw. In theory, the Declaration of Goal strategy should work for me; I’m much better at prioritizing when other people are involved. 99% of my motivation for all things is FEELINGS, and usually some sense of obligation to others to can compel me forward long after I might have otherwise checked out.

However, publicly declaring a goal here on the blog or anywhere else doesn’t actually invest anyone else in the goal emotionally. Not truly. They are invested only insofar as they are people who care about me and my future happiness. The actual outcome, then, still only matters to me. Generally speaking, people who will become invested for the sake of my future happiness haven’t tied their capacity to be happy for me to my completion of a task that I personally established. If I don’t care that I haven’t done the thing, then why would anybody else care?

There are a handful of people who would probably be amused/appreciative of seeing me fail at something. I think this pride-driver is another key component of this motivator and why it works for other people. I also have little concern for that because if that sort of thing makes you happy, then great. I’m not talking about people openly expressing mean things or wishing me ill will, but if — for whatever reason — someone gets a little a schadenfreude glee at my expense, then so be it. Great. I’m glad I could improve your day a little. I’m sorry for the thing I did that makes you feel that way about me? Or maybe I’m not. It doesn’t matter either way.

(Sidebar on my sidebar: I actively wish good things on people that I’ve gossiped about. I feel like I gave them unfair bad karma and it must somehow be cosmically repaid. It’s a damn shame I’m not religious because I’d be SUPER GOOD at religious guilt. It’s mostly just part of a sick, self-centered world view that causes something in my head to say, “See! Look how great this person is. Now don’t you feel like an asshole?” whenever such a person celebrates a personal victory on Facebook. “YES, REPENTANT INTERNAL MONOLOGUE. OBVIOUSLY I ALREADY DID FEEL LIKE AN ASSHOLE OR YOU WOULDN’T EXIST.”)

All of that being said, sharing my goals and plans isn’t a useless endeavor for me. It just doesn’t function in that forcing-me-to-do-the-thing way that I so often hear it discussed. For me, sharing an idea is most useful as a sort of Idea Workshop. “Hello, friends! I plan to do X. Is X a good idea? Should I add Y and Z, or would that just be insane?” (“Z? Girl, calm down with all that Z noise! Y should make this much more feasible, though! More importantly, have you considered L? I know it’s in the first half of the alphabet, but think about it.”)

This is probably true of a lot of blanket advice for how you should live your life. There are always an endless array of personal variables, and this isn’t to say that generalized advice is bad because we’re all such special snowflakes, but it is my way of saying that you’ve got to figure out what works for you.