2024 goals: to share or not to share?
Intention is good. If you are intentional about it.
December is full of reflection. We saw everyone’s Spotify Wrapped recaps and marveled at how much music others listen to.
We perused through our friends’ Goodreads, Letterboxd, and Peloton year-end reports and realized we all generate a lot of data to consume, count, and share from the year.
And we all watched some beautifully produced year-end recap videos — and maybe some thought maybe their life isn’t much of a movie.
I shared those kinds of recaps, too (Spotify Wrapped, books I read, 2023 sizzle reel), and after being notoriously anti-resolution for years (except the year I gave up making small talk about the weather — that was a doozy), I’ve come around to the notion of taking stock of how things are going and reassessing where I want to go around this time of year.
Intention is good. If you are intentional about it.
We should all have career goals and personal goals, and those probably intersect quite a lot. Which is good. In the past few years, I’ve blended mine and found a lot of value in thinking through macro goals that allow me to show up as a fully formed human in work, family, friendships, and play.
Never mind the January 1st kickoff date. Anytime in Q1 is a good time to start. As I shared in my annual Holiday Homework assignment at the end of the year, sometimes it can be more fruitful to take it a quarter at a time:
Write down 1-3 goals for Q1. Setting some achievable goals for January, February, and March is plenty. Resolutions don’t stick, but measurable goals do.
📢 Sharing Your Goals = More Successful Ones
There is research out there that says sharing your goals with others is important to accomplishing them. The American Society of Training and Development found that people are 65 percent more likely to meet a goal after sharing a commitment with someone else — and that number shoots to 95 percent when you set a deadline for the goal and start to share regular progress on the goal.
🤐 Not Sharing Your Goals = More Success Ones?
There is also research out there that says sharing your goals with others can be troublesome to accomplishing them and you should keep them locked up.
Researchers at NYU found the simple act of sharing your goal publicly can make you less likely to do the work to achieve it because when you receive premature praise for setting the goal you may not follow through. Of course that happens. It does feel good to tell someone your amazing goal and then feel like you’ve already accomplished it.
There’s also research that if you’re a beginner, getting negative feedback could stop you. So be careful who you share with. So be strategic about who you share your deepest desires, because they can quash your momentum. FUN!
That’s a good reminder for all of us to BE GENTLE with others’ goals when you hear them.
✄ Cutting Down The Big Goals Into Doable Ones
So with these kinds of variable things, there isn’t a standard approach, and when the pop-psychology memes in your feed can persuade you either way depending on the power of the Instagram meme of the moment, you have to decide what makes sense for you.
Here’s a cool infographic I found that may give you some ideas on how to compartmentalize steps toward those big audacious goals:
I like this because it demands a big dream. Helps you set goals against it. And then creates very small steps to get there. We shared this graphic with our entire agency on Monday.
🏆 Okay, So What Are Your Q1 Goals, Greg?
As I’ve shared before, I tend to set goals by quarter, hold them loosely, and evaluate them by quarter. For Q1 2024, I wrote them on my marker board and created a dumb acronym to remember them: DEMS.
Do it for fun: Play is one of my core drivers, and I intend to continue playing, tinkering, experimenting, and having fun whenever possible in *all the things.*
Expect success: Sometimes I can get in the mindset of overthinking or couching an idea or theory based on all the things that could hold it back. I intend to set an attitude of expecting success versus being ready for something to fail.
Make a splash: Another one of my core drivers is to affect culture, and I intend to do so through breakthrough ideas that cause ripples.
Scale through others: Sometimes in leadership, you can find yourself feeling like you have to do it all, or wait for the right time or person. I intend to help my ideas and passions scale by enabling others to do their best work… now.
So these are my four for Q1. What are yours?
And if you feel like it would be helpful, feel free to leave a comment (or hit reply if you want to keep it 1:1) and share. I’ll be gentle and supportive. I promise.
Cheers to Q1 2024! 🥂 LFG!
🤖 Catch Greg at CES Next Week
I’ve been attending CES off and on since 2008. You can see my Twitter thread from last year here. And since I’m not publishing on Twitter anymore, you can follow me on Threads to see my thread from this year in action. I already have a couple of press interviews set up from the show floor, and if you want to learn about the new technology that will affect culture in 2024, be sure to sign up for The Social Lights newsletter for my formal recap on behalf of the agency.
🔥 Quick Hits
The Wall Street Journal wrote a story about how “no one is posting as much on social media anymore,” to which Instagram founder Adam Mosseri replied:
“People are sharing to feeds less, but to stories more and (even photos and videos) in messages even more still. On Instagram notes have quickly become a big thing, particularly for young people. So it's not so much that people are sharing less, but rather than they're sharing differently.” ← this is good context.
Over the holiday break, I re-read this piece in The Drum about how Brands recycling Gen Z insights for Gen Alpha are in for a rude awakening, including some good notes about gaming and social world building:
“For Gen Z, gaming is a way to escape. Research from 2022 showed more than half of Gen Z respondents feel more like themselves in the ‘metaverse’ than in real life. That effort to disconnect from the real world is strong and apparent.”
“On the other hand, Alphas see gaming as an opportunity for creation. They believe it’s a time to express themselves in ways like building unique new worlds and leveraging the games to foster their imagination. It’s not a method of escape but a method of making dreams come to life in a virtual setting.”
I got a lot out of this piece in Insider about how artists and creatives in the workforce are more prone to imposter syndrome, and especially this key quote about how this perfectly natural phenomenon can even make you better at your job (within reason!!):
“A peer-reviewed paper from a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published earlier this year showed a link between people who embodied self-doubting thoughts at work and higher competencies, especially regarding interpersonal skills. The paper found that these people demonstrated an "other-focused" mindset that prioritized listening to others, asking questions, showing empathy, and being encouraging to other employees.”
Good read: Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games
Mobile Game of the Week: 1D Pac-Man
Thread of the Week: Jurassic Park, but all the characters are dinosaurs.
TikTok of the Week: Who let the dog out.
See you in the future!
Greg