84: Little Jolt of Joy – Lessons, Goals, & Other Ramblings

Lessons, Goals, and a Humbling Review

A little jolt of joy today that ended up somewhere different than where it started. I set out planning to talk about milestones and goals, and how our nonlinear ADHD brains struggle with traditional goal-setting advice, the kind that insists on a big-picture goal broken into actionable steps with markers along the way, always some version of climbing steadily upward. We swim through life instead of climbing it, and our detours often look like setbacks even when they’re really just gathering knowledge and experience we didn’t know we’d need yet.

A goal I never would have set

If you’d asked me back in 2018, when I started my organizing business, whether I’d ever add a podcast to it, the answer would have been an easy no. I wouldn’t have said it would be about organizing specifically, I didn’t feel knowledgeable enough yet, and I wouldn’t have said it would center on ADHD, since I hadn’t fully discovered that about myself at the time. And yet here I am, in a genuinely fulfilling place I could never have planned my way toward. If I’d set that as a rigid goal years ago, I don’t think I would have actually arrived here. Sometimes the meandering path is doing exactly what it needs to do.

A milestone on the horizon, and an unplanned detour

I’m about five weeks out from turning fifty, a real milestone, and I’d planned to ask for your help hitting a few round-number goals alongside it, one hundred episodes, fifty thousand downloads, fifty reviews. All fairly transparent vanity numbers, and I know that. But this morning, right as I sat down with that plan, I received my first three-star review, with no comment at all.

Sitting with an uncomfortable review

The review itself didn’t bother me as much as the silence attached to it. I know this podcast isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine, if it resonates with you, wonderful, and if it doesn’t, that’s fine too. What stung more was not knowing whether to write this reviewer off as someone who simply wasn’t my audience, or to take it as a real, useful signal that I could learn from. I consider myself fairly thick-skinned, and yet I found myself craving an explanation I wasn’t going to get.

The coach who cares enough to yell

This reminded me of something we’ve always told our kids across years of youth sports: never be afraid of the harsh, demanding coach. Those coaches see potential in you, and their frustration comes from watching you not yet push yourself toward it. The coach to actually worry about is the silent one, who has quietly given up and stopped bothering to give feedback at all. That applies just as much to five-star reviews with no comment as it does to a three-star one with no comment, both leave you without anything to actually grow from.

A quote worth sitting with

I came across a line while thinking through all this: a mistake that makes you humble is better than an achievement that makes you arrogant. For those of us with ADHD brains who already field plenty of criticism about what’s left undone or done differently, it’s worth reframing that criticism as evidence that people still see potential in us, rather than as proof we should give up or get defensive. The goal isn’t to avoid all criticism, it’s to keep exploring how our own brains work best, rather than deciding we’re simply bad at something and stopping there.

If you’re the person who left that three-star review, thank you, genuinely, for the humbling lesson. And to everyone else, feedback of any kind, the specific why behind a rating, a note about what didn’t land, a direct message, all of it helps far more than silence ever could.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.