The Questions I Couldn’t Ask a Year Ago

How the 12-week year framework unexpectedly changed my approach to my self-worth

“Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a month. We overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.”

— Matthew Kelly, The Long View

Photo by Júnior Ferreira on Unsplash

A year ago, I sat down with a new journal and wrote out in painstakingly slow left-handed letters a plan for the next three years of my life. I had just begun work rehabbing a wrist injury that never healed from a back handspring mishap in 2022 and starting a process of 12 weeks with my dominant hand immobilized in a splint. In mid-2023, I’d set aside a decade-plus goal of becoming a published author in favor of trying to adapt one of my stories into a musical, and I was one act into that process.

I’d spent 2024 working with the framework that I deserved to be paid for my creativity, so I was full-tilt on trying to make side hustles and passive income work for me, without actually earning much money at all. I was still asking myself how I could prove my creativity was worth money, and coming up short.

I had just been introduced to the idea of the 12-week year, and after a few weeks of debating whether it would be useful for me, I was ready to commit.

[embed]The 12-Week Year Isn’t Built for Me ADHD, motherhood, creativity, and their incompatibility with straightforward systemsmedium.com

The first step was to create a vision of my future and then narrow it down to three years from then, making it as specific as possible. In the end, this is what I decided on.

By September 3, 2027:

— My musical has been through several workshops

— My YouTube channel is monetized

— I’m a recognized Notion creator

— I have about 3,000 followers on Medium

— I have developed a gym/yoga skill I’ve never had

— I have at least 6 months of income in cash

— I contribute at least 10% of my income to my retirement fund

I notice two things about those three-year goals now. One of them I chose intentionally when writing them. The other was subconscious.

First, I intentionally took everything to do with becoming a traditionally published author out of my goals. I’d been pursuing that with not even an inkling of success since 2012, and I decided in 2024 it was high time I set it away. I’d put in my 10,000 hours. It wasn’t good enough. Novel-writing wasn’t going to be my path to financial and creative freedom, so it was off the table.

Second, I put seven goals on that list, but really I only had three: heal from my injuries and get back to the sport I love, even if it means pivoting from gymnastics to yoga; make something of my musical; and be financially at peace. YouTube, Notion, Medium, an emergency fund, a retirement fund… I had no idea how absolutely stressed about money I was, because I hid it under other goals that didn’t seem like they were “make money,” but they were.

One year — or four years, in the 12-week-year system — later, and where I am astonishes me. It’s not just that I’ve made significant progress on almost all of these goals, even though I have. It’s that the past year has totally changed not only my approach to goals, but also what I believe I am both capable and worthy of. It changed the questions I ask myself.

For various reasons, not least of which was I saw an advertisement that basically was asking for someone with exactly my skillset, I went accepted a full-time job on May 15, after ten years and two months of freelancing.

Part of getting myself to the point where I could even apply came from my 12-week goal to work through The Artist’s Way, where I spent 12 weeks telling myself, every single day, that my ability to define myself as a creative person was not tied to my ability to support myself financially. I could be my own patron. It was okay to be financially stable, to know what my technical skills are worth and get paid accordingly — and, importantly, it turned out, to get paid to be analytical so that my creative energy could belong to me.

That change alone meant I could hit the actually important financial goals: setting aside enough for a decent cash emergency fund and contributing to my retirement at the rate I wanted to be.

As to my other goals? I definitely found throughlines that worked.

Where a year ago I had half a libretto with lyrics and a few sketches of melodies, right now I have a complete, revised libretto for the whole musical, with 19 songs, 11 of them notated with accompaniment, a tentative cast for the demos, rough demos for five songs, and contacts to reach out to as the show develops.

Consistent work at the next right thing plays a significant part in hitting goals.

My occupational therapist told me last December it would be unwise for me to even make “do a pushup” a goal because I was getting too old, the strength I lost when I tore my TFCC was gone forever, and I needed to accept that I would never go back to what I once was capable of. Last week, I did a round-off back layout off a trampoline into a foam pit for the first time since 2022. I also did a handstand pushup.

Stubbornness plays an important role in hitting goals.

Thanks almost entirely to one story Medium pushed for me, I already hit my three-year goal of 3,000 followers here, even without writing consistently.

Luck plays an important role in hitting goals.

But what I find most compelling is that by focusing on only three months at a time, I had the flexibility to look at my goals and re-evaluate what’s been working and what hasn’t. To my surprise, I was itching for something I’d intentionally buried.

I missed Enchantress.

[embed]Edit with Me: Enchantress An introduction to the bookmedium.com

I missed novel-writing, specifically. I missed a book I knew I didn’t quite get right. I had a new question to ask: did a year away from writing novels bring any clarity that would help me finish the book?

The reason we underestimate what a decade can bring is because we don’t have enough information to be asking the right questions.

In 2013, when I decided I would try to get my first novel published, I overestimated what I could do in a year. But I see in retrospect I didn’t have the right information to track what I could accomplish in a decade. I had given myself until 2018 to get a publishing deal and start publishing a book a year. That was my 10-year goal.

I didn’t get there. But I taught myself story structure. I wrote seven or eight novels. I failed at publishing them, and a friend encouraged me to return to my original love of songwriting. I took that nudge and decided to adapt my closest-to-almost-successful novel into a musical. Before that, I’d never in a million years thought that writing musicals was even an option for me. I didn’t know women, especially women without classical training at university, were allowed to write musicals. And yet everything I’d learned in that decade of novel-writing became the foundation that allowed me to write an entire show in less than two years.

Relatively ironically, the 12-week-year framework, which requires focusing on far shorter timeframes, allows for much faster progress toward bigger long-term goals.

Yet even with everything empirical I accomplished, my biggest changes have been in my internal reframing.

“I am not a failed novelist; everything I’ve learned has been foundational in everything I’m doing now. I deserve to be successful financially and I don’t have to tie that to creative success. I can pursue outward success without tying my internal measures of success to it.”

These lessons mean far more to me even than the binder full of Draft 9 of Enchantress, the 100+ pages of notation I didn’t know how to create two years ago, the handstands I can do again. I can carry them into the next decade of creative work.

As to what it holds for me? The only thing I know is that I probably can’t fathom the right questions to ask.