When I was 13 years old my friend, Bryan, purchased a pair of black framed sunglasses with yellow lenses.
He wore them constantly, even indoors.
One day a middle-school teacher scolded him for wearing the glasses in class.
“But I like them,” Bryan responded. “They make the world yellow.”
The teacher looked at him and, without flinching, said, “The world is not yellow, Bryan.”
My 13-year-old mind was so struck by the hilarity of the phrase, and the seriousness with which the teacher said it, that the moment was branded into my brain forever.
In fact, the phrase even became the name of the punk rock band I played guitar in throughout high school. Divorced from the context of Bryan’s yellow glasses, “the world is not yellow” could take on a variety of meanings for fans of the band.
In my own mind, what it meant was that life isn’t perfect, as much as we may want it to be. Murphy’s Law, “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong,” is just another way of saying, “The world is not yellow.”
This concept may be a bit of a downer, but it is an important one to keep in mind, particularly when planning out the timeline for a project like writing a book.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when establishing milestones and deadlines for a book-length project is assuming everything is going to go according to plan.
I made this mistake myself recently. I took on a new ghostwriting project at the beginning of December, and set a goal for myself of finishing a first draft of the book by the end of January. Having written over ten books, at this point I can confidently predict the pace at which I can get a draft written.
Everything was going as planned until last week when, one by one, each of my three kids caught the flu. Sure enough, before long, I had it as well.
Between the sweating, chills, coughing, vomiting, painful joints, and total exhaustion, I lost an entire week of work on the book. This lost week resulted in me missing my deadline of finishing the first draft by February.
The mistake I made was creating a deadline for myself that didn’t build in enough slack, i.e. extra time to deal with unexpected occurrences like my own illness or that of my kids.
As a writing coach, I should have known better.
I have written about how life always gets in the way, and how we need to stay nimble in the face of unexpected challenges.
Don’t set goals for yourself dependent on everything going according to plan. Instead, build in enough wiggle room to account for whatever life is going to throw at you.
After all, unless you happen to own a set of shades with yellow lenses, the world is not yellow.
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