Are you ‘Goal Oriented’?

My friend Lilly is kind of unhinged. 

This is why I love her.

She’s a tenant organizer, a uniquely unhinged career path on its own. 

But even for a tenant organizer, Lilly takes what she does… unusually seriously. 

People who know tenant organizers know this description is bone-chilling.

My friend trained her on her first day of work, and was like “OK, here’s the developer we are fighting.” 

Lilly immediately pulled out her phone and looked him up on Facebook. 

“Oh, “ she said. “He has a dog. He does a lot of golfing. Maybe the dog could be leverage in some way? Or hmm... we could do an action at his golf course, where is that? Found it!” 

She had been “at work”…for maybe five minutes max.

Lilly is a person I would describe as “obsessively intense about goals.”

Organizing, in whatever context, kind of… draws that type of person.

—

Here’s another story about Lilly: one time, at Weeklong, she got agitated. 

“I don’t feel like I know what your goals are,” the person said.

When she told us this, somewhat bewildered, me and her boyfriend Noah started laughing hysterically and couldn’t stop. 

Lilly is one of those people who, even if you have zero context for her goals, even if your knowledge of organizing, HUD, affordable housing, the rent crisis in the United States, the book “No Shortcuts,” by union organizer Jane McAleavey, is zero — it doesn’t matter.

 You know her goals.

If you don’t know what Lilly’s goal is in the first 30 seconds of meeting her, 

Something is very wrong. 

One of you might be dead.

“Haha, maybe I should just start carrying around a big banner that says my goals on it? So I can do a balloon drop with it if I need to, if I’m not being clear enough?” she asked us after she got agitated.

She said “haha” but we knew she wasn’t joking.

In her heart she was already Googling “portable balloon drop for sign with goals.”

—

The reason I’m writing about Lilly is because she has come up a lot lately in my whole weird year of trying to be a better person and not burn out while also moving into a wildly ambiguous and competitive career field.

That’s because I am starting to feel like I am finding the map of where I am trying to go. 

It’s a shitty map, like the medieval European ones with dragons in the corner. 

The map is coming together because I’m finding people in this field who I trust. 

Reading their books, or their emails, or their middle of the night tweets, is a godsend in a field where most of the advice reminds me of this Maria Bamford joke. 

Because what these people say is true.

There’s no bullshit.

Which is to say: they’re really, really, clear on their goals. 

Obsessively clear about their goals.

They’re goal oriented. 

Which is a professional way of saying they’re completely unhinged.

— 

People like Lilly are really good at giving advice.

That said, they are fairly reluctant to give you advice, or talk to you at all. 

And sometimes their way of communicating their advice, is… 

A little harsh. Impatient. Exasperated.

Have you ever read “No Shortcuts“? 

The author, organizer Jane McaLevy, exudes this kind of impatience. 

She’s like a supportive math teacher disappointed she has to review basic arithmetic in Honors Geometry. But for The Left.

(It would not surprise me if at some point in her life, Jane McAleavey googled the phrase “portable balloon drop for sign with goals on it.”)

That kind of obsessive focus often comes from having done a lot of things that didn’t work. 

Trying a lot of things aimlessly, flailing around, failing. Being ignored. Being wrong.

So now that they’ve found the map, they wanna get going. 

They want to do the things that move them closer to their goals. 

Their very, very, clear goals.

—

My friend who trained Lilly has a new job now. 

One that he described as “a place where organizers have been doing this job for decades, but aren’t burned out or emotionally broken in someway.”

Everyone on this list already knows that this description sounds impossible.  Utopian. 

“Wow...” I remember saying back to him, sort of at a loss for words.

“Are they… normal?”

His response was immediate. 

“No, absolutely not.” He said. 

“They’re all crazy. But it’s good — the type of crazy that’s really alive. Does that make any sense?”

It did.

Because I know Lilly.

who do you know who is unhinged + goal oriented?

— H

PS — If you’re like, that’s all well and good H, but name names! 

• Anna Sproul-Littimer’s “How to Glow in the Dark,” about the publishing industry, but also about perfectionism/“people pleasing” as emotional violence.

• The Mystery School (“Make Art, Not Content”) whose #1 piece of marketing advice seems to be “tell the damn truth.” Who are some of the people whose writing you find both unhinged + a godsend?