I started taking goal setting seriously when I started teaching K-12. I had just completed a grad program in English and was just about to finish my second degree in education and I realized that I had not read for fun in years. My life was a mess of professional goals and obligations (conferences, new courses, lectures) and lists of books that I needed to read, not wanted to read. So, after a few adjustment months, I started reading for fun again.

During the Thanksgiving break, I spent a lot of time thinking about Shankar Vedantam’s TED talk. The idea is simple: the person you are is not the same person you will be in 5 or 10 years, maybe even tomorrow. Given that we will all change in myriad ways, many unknowable to us, how can we plan for that future self? Shankar offers simple ideas: stay curious, add humility to your work, and to be brave in our choices. We often forget to look beyond the few minutes each day we have to reflect on our lives; what Shankar is proposing is that we think about the person we will become and start building towards that goal today. Simple, but not common.