It's all about the numbers

I know you are confused now, but writing a novel is all about numbers. Number of times your computer crashes without saving a crucial paragraph, number of characters you are tempted to kill for pissing you off, number of hairs pulled in front of a blank page... but above all, there's the number of words.
Once you have a few characters, sort of an outline for the story (not to be confused with a plot, that came much later!) and you have researched a few crucial details (Are there wolves in Finland? What transport should this character use to get from point A to point B? Does my hair look good today?), you start to write. The story is still young and malleable, so after a few days, you notice you've written quite a few pages and start thinking: I wonder how many words we've written. That day, you do the first word count, and you are lost forever. Because you're almost at 10k words and you can't have that, can you? So you write furiously and get over the mark, a milestone, a big achievement, a sign that you are getting somewhere.
From then on, words is all you can think about. I wonder if I can get to 15k by the end of the week? When you think of a new scene for a chapter you are happy that you can add a couple more thousand words. You start comparing your novel's length to other's. You learn that Animal Farm is just 30,000 words long, while War and Peace has 590,233 words. You don't base the writing in the numbers, of course, but you can't help doing a happy dance every time you cross a new limit.