Sometimes Your Goals Find You

New year, New You.  The season is perfect for setting some personal goals. Maybe it is losing weight (or at least committing to live healthier). Maybe you will commit to a new hobby Julie & Julia style.  Maybe it is setting a professional goal. All of this can be hard work to seek out and set that perfect goal for your new year’s resolution. However, one thing to remember is Sometimes your goals find you.

I am a writer.  Not all the time, but recently I published a book along with Jeffrey Camm, called Data Duped.  It’s a great book (trust me), on a great topic (Data, Misinformation, oh my!) and it could not come at a better time.  AI is spinning like magic and the trust people have in things they see and read is at an all-time low and our strongest personal safeguard is for us all to build our own data defense. This is the central theme of our book and surprisingly even to myself, we didn’t start out to write a book.

When an Idea Meets a Purpose

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk about our book along with some other fabulous authors at Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, NC.  The theme of the evening was to bring together authors associated with Wake Forest University and give brief (timed) presentations to the audience. It was like speed dating between writers and readers and it was fantastic. The topics ranged from climate change to the nuances of the Spanish language, but what grabbed my attention most was hearing about many of the writers’ personal journeys to authorship. It was not always a deliberate goal.

For some, their book began as a passion project. A paper written on a topic that someone else thought was interesting, prompted a discussion towards writing more.  Another, turned an article into a TEDx talk and eventually a whole book project. Their journeys, like ours, resulted in writing a book without that being the initial goal.  We started out guiding students and later saw a need to guide a wider audience.  Truly an example of “one thing leads to another”.

Follow the Data

According to one study, 41% of people make resolutions, with only 9% succeeding by year’s end. These are not great outcomes and the conclusions are usually the same each year as to why:

• Unrealistic goals that were too big, or too far off to reach
• Lacking regular reinforcement and feedback
• Time commitments

The data suggests it is better to think of your goals in broader terms and resolutions in smaller achievable parts. When all the parts align with a larger goal, then achieving one part – such as publishing an article – can lead to the next achievable part, and so on.

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So, if you struggling with how to (re?) define the new you and your goals for 2024 consider this: your accomplishments of the year ahead are part what you planned, and part how you leaned into opportunities that, well sometimes just present themselves.  Sometimes having an elaborate plan is great, other times having just an outline is better.

About Me:

Derek Gibson co-authored Data Duped: How to Avoid Being Hoodwinked by Misinformation along with Jeffrey Camm which is available from Rowman and Littlefield.  Available here and on Amazon. Learn more at DataDuped.org.