"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson
My advice from the other side is that there's too many unknowns to plan out your career. Fields shift in terms of content and culture, and you don't know what you like until you're really in the middle of it.
By a lot of metrics, I've achieved plan A, but found out, after a lot of work, that I am not a good fit for it and that plan B has a lot of similar problems. I never had a plan Z.
I'm not saying this is a bad idea, just that for the specific HackerNews demographic it may be a bit of an anti-pattern.
I'm 40, have been working in technology for close to 20 years, and have had the great fortune to have stayed employed for most of those years, but for the entirety of this I've considered myself "underemployed". I've woken up each day thinking "boy I could be doing so much more if only I wasn't limited by [ ROLE | COMPANY | GEOGRAPHY | BOSS | ETC ]. Don't get me wrong--I feel grateful that tech is one of those careers where you at least have a chance to improve where you are, but these opportunities are still few, far between, and you have to pound the pavement to find them. You do need to plan and you need to ask the right questions of yourself. I like this article because it provides some structure for your plan and helps you to think about the good questions to ask yourself.
My entire professional life I've never had trouble finding, often very fulfilling work with great compensation. But I always had a niggling feeling that I could be doing more. Planning helped me to realize that my true goal is to make an impact (even a small one) on millions of people, so now I'm taking the steps to make that happen.
Also, to paraphrase Eisenhower, it's often not the plans which are most beneficial but there mere act of planning. My plans usually turn to rubbish, but the process of planning helps me to center and crystalize my thinking.
5 years later I achieved that goal.
My plan was nowhere near the detail of this but there were steps along the way. Things changed a lot, and not everything was done in the order I originally planned.
With that said, having a clear vision of where I wanted to be and loosely how I was going to get there meant that I could turn down opportunities that may have led me astray, or which didn't further my career/life goals.
YMMV.
I have projects like that, i.e. have been scratching my own itch. Sadly none of them have taken off financially or otherwise despite the great effort.
If I had to start a business/project just for "fast growth" I'd be totally clueless how to ago about it?
Is it just about picking the "hottest shit" whatever that is at the moment and trying to ride that wave?
However, doing so requires strong entrepreneurial insights. I don't recommend it for first-time founders, as starting a company for the sake of starting a company is often a recipe for building something nobody wants.
absolutely crucial advice right dere. distractions can be dream destroying(or enlightening or both)
I'm assuming he was referring to
> My last startup was Elto, a marketplace to connect small business owners to freelance web designers. Elto was acquired by GoDaddy in 2015.
A work/life balance is what some people enjoy, while others want a work/work or life/life balance.
For example, I am not interested in being worth X millions when I'm 60 at the cost of skipping >50% of life. Even money doesn't help with certain objectives (especially when you must trade time).
You have to balance what you want to have accomplished in life vs what you want while living life.
This is a great phrase, I find it very insightful. I've never thought about it like that, but I can tell this is a phrase that will alter how I think about my future/life. Thanks for that.
I was just having a discussion with someone on HN who considered $200k pre-tax to be affluent, and suggested that if you couldn't save $80k post-tax annually, you're doing it wrong. Having lived at $30k, $200k, and now more, I know that $200k isn't as lofty as it sounds. The dollars never seem long enough.
It's all about living a life worth living. Part of that is buying time by paying for services - from remodeling, to plumbing and electrical, to landscaping and tree maintenance, to cleaning.
Once you have a family and sufficient means, the projects that you used to DIY to save money become tasks that you hire out to save time. Do I want to spend the next six to eight weekends building a massive Ipe deck, saving thousands of dollars, or do I want to pay someone to build it in two weeks so that I have weekends devoted to family, friends, and hobbies? Do I want to spend several hours a week cleaning the entire house, or do I want to pay someone to clean it while I am at work?
This can also be applied to subjective enjoyment. Do I want to drive an A-to-B economy car, or do I want to drive a high performance vehicle which I subjectively enjoy driving?
I usually choose buying time and buying enjoyment.
And to take a different track than the anti-materialist route, I would ask you to think about how not taking advantage of that salary to save an amount of money that could be the salary of a few people put together is basically abandoning a ton of leverage to just leave a job or take other risks that would be infeasible to someone who's standard of living closely tracks their salary.
In choosing to buy the degree of things you buy and dismissing the sort of leverage a more "frugal" lifestyle could buy you (quotes because I'm using frugal in terms of still spending 6 figures a year), you're selling freedom of a different sort.
(That said, I don't know enough about you or what you spend your money on or what percentage of your income you're spending outside of what you detailed in your post to suggest you do anything other than think about that angle. I don't mean to suggest anything negative about your character.)
It is very rare to hear of anyone who successfully sold an IP portfolio, and I'm guessing you were either the inventor, or the overall price was quite high for you to get such a large amount for selling them.
Do you assist people to sell their IP today?
Etc. Etc. You get my point: based on my observations of decision making of people around me, our real difficulty is not in asking those questions, rather it's that we simply do not know what the answers might be. We have no insight. We don't know our greatest strengths (or weaknesses), we don't know what's our biggest career capital, we have no idea what the ideal career for us would look like etc.
We have little way of knowing other than trying things out and seeing how they work out. It's easy to say "ask yourself question X", but the problem for people is that they simply do not have answers to those kinds of questions.
So what can be done about this? Maybe if you get an experienced mentor who will guide you through answering those questions, that would be progress. I would love to see tools for that kind of thinking.
And then somewhere down the life you change that phrase to "knowing what you need" and you start all over again.
while they are not complete blank slates at this point, their range of future possibilities have not been significantly narrowed at this point
I've tried to put some thought into how to direct them such that their future possibilities won't be narrowed simply by wasting time aimlessly trying one thing after
here is the best I've come up with:
1) develop universal skills
There are some skills that are universally useful, regardless of what they wind up doing, My immediate thoughts about what would make these up are: reading skills, persuasive speaking skills (selling/negotiating), persuasive writing skills, some basic knowledge of the main ideas of human psychology, basic knowledge of the main ideas of rationality and logic, basic knowledge of the main ideas of probability and math, (added later after I considered it more), probably some basic financial literacy, probably some basic economic theory, (another edit) knowledge about processes to improve creativity
until you reach perhaps the top 10% of ability in each of those skills, any time you spend improving those skills will have good ROI, regardless of what you wind up doing in life
2) read a lot, and pay attention to the law of attraction
more skeptical readers will think this is BS, and in strict terms, it probably is bs, but it strikes me as useful bs
what I mean by this pay attention to what naturally peaks your curiosity, to what you don't have to make your self want to learn more about
our attention streams strike me as a mysterious but powerful force, sometimes you have to fight against them and do things that don't really capture your interests, but the less energy you can spend trying to redirect you attention, the more energy you can spend productively
3) the library is an amazing resource, when something captures you interest, dive as deep as you can for free at the library, dive deep at the library before you dive deep in life,
think being a programmer would be a good path?
Googling "book list for computer programmers" go through the first page, try to find 5 books the seem to repeat on those lists
read them, still interested? yes? great, now you have a lot more information to take next steps. no? that's ok, now you know a lot more about what computer programmers do
you can do this for any path in life, its a significantly cheaper method, in both time and money, for trying out a lot of career paths than getting formal credentials, and then getting a professional job in something (not that you shouldn't do those things, but those are expensive steps, you should take cheaper steps first)
I think this is an interesting blog post about diving deep:
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/12/breakdancing-universe/
I think this is another interesting link, only tangentially related http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/
Planning therefore is important, but because so many things in between happen, your plan should consist of a far reaching vision so as to allow you to learn along the way, including taking paths that may end up in temporary setbacks. If you don't fail, you don't learn.
Anyone out here who has done that, much like Tarzan, holding onto the one career while switching to another? I have not yet given this a deep thought, but it looks cool to have multiple professions in a one lifespan but am not sure how to do it. Or is it that as life/age happens and we just have to stick to 1 career/profession. Any thoughts appreciated.
> 1. What global problems do you think are most pressing?
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets w/ statistical indicators, AKA GlobalGoals, are for the whole world through 2030.
I quite like the idea of an "ABZ" plan. It's often far too easy to think things will just carry on as is. Thinking about these things, for me the "Z" in particular, is something I don't think people do enough until it's too late. Thanks for providing a template doc like this as a low friction way to actually start doing it.
I'm out.
