Having said all that, I came to this realization only after ticking a whole bunch of societal and cultural expectation boxes which means I can afford to take my foot off the gas. Trusting your instincts is a much scarier proposition earlier in life, but I still think it's probably the right thing to do.
> Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now
for me that means watching anime, playing video games, reading HN and social media, and maybe writing small programs like solving S.O. questions, And now I look back, have accomplished nothing of significance, and have huge regrets. Regrets that I didn't set goals and work toward them so that I'd be in a better position in my life than I am now.
Not sure the OPs method will change that. In fact the OPs method sounds like using the waterfall method for life planning. That also doesn't sound like it would work for me
Which I guess is to say that GP's "follow your instincts" can also be as difficult as "set goals and hit them", just in different ways.
It is cliche, but system over goals has helped me.. or I guess you could see it as microgoals one does not need to think about much.
Write code for at least X hours per day, read a book for X amount of time, exercise X days a week.
It gives me a checkbox to tick and no overhead in thinking about what goals are achievable, what are desirable.. etc.
I don't think that "follow your instinct" is good advice for everyone, but maybe you should understand it more as a "follow your instinct which productive thing you want to do next".
In your examples, writing small programs is the only truly productive thing, the others are consumptive. I learned all I know about programming (I program for a living) from such projects, some of which took weeks of my time. The trick about the instinct thing is that I trust my instincts when I should move to another productive thing that interests me more. So I may be working on a long term programming project, then my instinct tells me when I continue I will start hating it, so I go and work on a hardware project I haven't finished. Before I can switch I need to ensure a state at which I can pick up later on, so I do that before. This way I have a high number of parallel projects each of which is always left in a state where switching between them feels managable.
Of course finishing them is a goal sometimes, but since I am working on many things and always work on the thing that feels good I finish things regularly and have a good time doing it. I also abandon/trash projects, especially if my understanding of a domain has expanded and my initial idea turns out to be misguided. That is okay, I learned something from that which should be your ultimate goal anyways.
You'll find that it doesn't require much thought at decision points to choose the options (in aggregate) that push you in that direction. As they say, it's about the journey, not the destination.
With that said, it's still difficult because you have to learn to forego long term expectations and/or acquire discipline not to just "stay put" lest you fall back into the habit of stressing over end goals or the comfort of a stress coping loop (anime, video games, etc), respectively.
Similarly, as a goal-oriented person I used a variation of the "Waffle House" method, until I turned 40 not long ago. I still have tons of pages in my personal Wiki with life goals, 5-year goals, goals by year, objectives, GTD lists, etc. It served me well, and I am convinced that it is a valid method, up to a point. In big part thanks to this method I also ticked some "societal and cultural expectation boxes". I would cautiously recommend it to younger people too, provided that it matches their personality.
Then, this goal-orientedness fell apart from about age 38 to 40. Having achieved a number of the goals (reasonable ones, nothing to an excess), suddenly all other "goals" turned into a set of stressors. Some - because I doubt I can ever achieve those, others - because I question whether those are what I really want. I accepted the former, but the latter is harder to figure out. This resulted in a 2-year-long haze. The instinctive approach appeals a lot - I would like to think that I have built enough core values to navigate through life intuitively and respecting who I really am. But it also scares, because it sounds like giving up some some control.
Would love to hear the thoughts of those who went through this already. And with all my love, I sincerely wish everyone who reads this to figure out the life!
I'm 25 and I relate to this in a funny way. I see todo list apps like this. People say they get a high when ticking off a task but for me once you keep ticking off things, daily, things start to feel not worth it. Life starts to feel like checkboxes.
Put simply, it's fine to have goals. But chasing achievement can be unfulfilling. Why? Because all experiences are fleeting. Even if you train for 5 years and win the gold medal, you get to stand on the podium for a few minutes and then life goes on.
It's easy to get people to agree with this intellectually, but you have to really see it on a deep level. There is nothing really to achieve in life. We make goals and cast them out ahead of ourselves in the future, but if that future comes, it doesn't last. We put ourselves on a treadmill of achievement and becoming, then wonder why we feel stressed.
Instead of imagining some future state of completion, work on being aware of how your mind is moving, all the time. Don't chase goals as a way of disproving some fundamental negative assumption about yourself. Don't make happiness contingent on external conditions.
Maybe it works because we kept our heads down until we were settled, and loosened up after gaining enough experience to develop good instincts? Interesting to hear someone else has taken a similar path with similar results!
Grass is always greener, I guess.
Indeed. Everything has to find their own path.
What I will say is that the previous decade of goal-driven learning has given me a broad skill set that makes it a lot easier to follow my instincts to success.
But I will never pick the fork on the road where I will probably be worse off in 5 years. I won’t take a job where I make good money but sit in a corner doing little, for example. I will regret it.
That’s basically my compromise.
How to find meaning as childless person: help your relatives (Gen Z and Alpha are in crisis right now), help your community, donate blood, help disabled people, volunteer as firefighter. But above all, focus on doing it to people who are themselves pro-social.
Avoid sociopaths and alert people being abused. Just telling them something along the lines of "be careful with that one" is often enough to break the spell.
My advice to people in this situation varies tremendously given their background and what they're trying to learn, but it tends towards the same general method: start with something ultra simple and achievable, repeat it a bunch of times (perhaps with some minor variations) until you're relatively comfortable doing it on your own, then begin to branch out. If you're stuck for ideas, show it to somebody else and see what they think; having a training partner or mentor can help you feel less overwhelmed.
It's much better to understand your current position and which direction you're heading in than to have a long-term plan. Good questions for juniors to be asking are stuff like, "how can I get my foot in the door," "how can I tell a good offer from a bad offer," "what can I do to stop being a 'junior' (i.e. how can I become an asset instead of a gamble)"?
I like the idea of "effectual" / "working forwards" (rather than "causal" / "working backwards") especially when the future is uncertain. To quote Cedric Chin quoting Saras Sarasvathy (via https://commoncog.com/when-action-beats-prediction/):
> If you use causal thinking, you’ll say something like “ok, we’re making carbonara tonight” and then you will work backwards from the end goal (carbonara for, say, five people) to checking for ingredients in your kitchen, to purchasing the ingredients you don’t have, to prepping and cooking carbonara for your dinner party. > > If you use effectual thinking, you’ll say something like “ok, what ingredients and tools do I have right now, and what can I make tonight?” You work forwards from existing resources; the end product is unknown. > >In a business context, causal thinking is “we need to increase sales by 12% by the end of the quarter, what levers do I have available to do that?”; effectual thinking is “we have some spare capacity next quarter: one designer and three software engineers, what crazy new thing could we build that might have value for the company?”
It's not for everyone but it works for me - my path has been very path-dependent and I'm glad to be able to chase interesting and unplanned opportunities.
My experience is that our needs and wants change over time, and they are shaped by our actions. Overcommiting to a future that we think we want can end up quite badly in my experience.
This is gold. :)
Did not expect chez cora to make the front page of HN.
The idea was that the agent would first receive a goal like "go to tile (15, 28)", then use Dijkstra's algorithm to create a "movement plan" - like "move 2 tiles to the right, trigger a jump, move 3 tiles to the left while in the air", etc - and then execute that plan.
My main takeaway was that even in this small toy world, with clearly defined goals, very simple, deterministic "physics", complete information and an "executor" that is 100% reliable and never gets tired or distracted, it didn't work.
The simplified assumptions about the "physics" in the plan-making stage didn't match how the environment actually behaved, and the agent ended up in a different place than planned after a small number of steps.
What worked was to only execute the first few steps of the plan, then throw the rest away and make a new plan from the new location, then repeat, etc etc.
If this stuff didn't even work in a toy world, with a computer, I can't imagine that making detailed steps for a 5 year period in the real world would work, with the planner having even less knowledge about the world to base their plan on.
But all (classic) pathfinding algorithms "teleport around" in the graph in some way, either switching between different candidate routes or backtracking from a dead-end. That makes it impossible to run the algorithm "live", I.e. have the agent navigate to a location as soon as the algorithm got to it.
The worst case is when this ritual produces a rigid set of unrealistic goals that the person almost immediately fails to achieve. This new sense of failure is compounded on top of existing anxieties and now they’re making even less progress than before while being even more sad about it.
The real gains at that point are in connections, reputation, and getting into the habit of physical exercise.
My advice to young people: focus on activities that have some combination of the traits: eventually mandatory, reduce uncertainty about the future, leave open further choices that interest you, benefit you if accomplished sooner.
There are definitely times where I don’t NEED to plan things out in such a strict detailed way, in order to achieve a good outcome; but i do it anyway because it soothes me.
And as you say, internalizing that ‘approach, not outcome’ and ‘journey, not destination’ outlook is definitely what makes this little arrangement ‘work’ for me. It really helps failures to feel more like learning opportunities, less like let downs or blows to my self-worth.
I suppose this might work for some, but it comes off as excessively performative and not actually practical.
I agree with you that five years might as well be a lifetime. The point of this exercise is to define how you want that lifetime to end, then step backwards through it until you know what you're doing tomorrow. The plan for five years ("be a CTO") only matters insofar as it tells you your plan in three years ("be in a position where you report to the board"), one year ("be a lead engineer"), one month ("be confident in passing a job interview and be sending my CV out"), and tomorrow ("message Todd and ask if he'll run a mock interview for me, do some leetcode, message the Acme group chat").
You honestly might as well throw out any plans beyond the one year mark. Either they're important and you can recreate them, or they've changed and you should recreate them. The process of planning is more important than its output.
- keeping in mind the direction I want to advance, but
- determining which activities I should repeat every day to move in that direction,
- executing those activities consistently (every day) and regularly (according to rules/principles, as I learn/discover them), and
- gradually refining that execution with practice.
To me, it feels a bit like walking across your house in the dark: you know where you'd like to go, but you can only feel your way there a step at a time, you run into things, but you course-correct and keep moving forward.
Keep it simple.
Some paraphrases:
Tyson: Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. (A PERT chart with hundreds of nodes, planned in advance, is almost certain to fall apart.)
Patton: A good plan, violently executed now.
Von Clausewitz: The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in Heat: A guy told me one time, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."
Even if your heart is set on becoming the greatest at X and have the scrapbooks and timelines to prove it, don't hesitate to go for Y instead if it feels better and excites you more than doggedly sticking to The Plan
Semantically, that example "DAG" graph looks like a data flow diagram (not a state diagram, nor a control flowchart), which is more for modeling ongoing processes, often infinite.
The text talking about the "DAG", however, sounds more like it wants a Gantt chart. And a Gantt chart will start with hierarchical decomposition (i.e., starting with a big task, and breaking it down into progressively smaller pieces, recursively). And have interdependencies among those subtasks (e.g., task get-first-job.get-network-engineer-job can't start until task learn-networking.get-network-engineer-certification.take-the-test produces the cert; and that task has a dependency on studying for the exam). This will also show you what can and can't be parallelized. And when you start putting durations and resource allocations on your Gantt, you can even estimate when you'll hit various milestones.
If you made an example diagram for accomplishing life goals, rather than picking a random "DAG", then it would be more clear to the reader.
But I don’t get the second part. Do we really need to be so goal oriented in tech specifically? I mean maybe if you wanted to go from being a programmer to a professional wrestler, I could see it. But if you’re just trying to keep your career going, just do what’s useful at work / school right now, and explore what interests you.
I'm not in that group. I just go with the feels and flow and if something interests me, I go there and investigate if it's fun.
If I had followed my "plan" from a decade+ ago, I'd be a middle manager / scrum master in a small/medium company with an ulcer and SSRIs. Maybe next in line for regional manager.
Had an opportunity to do something different and more varied, took it. Haven't regretted for a second.
The reality you must accept is that life will just happen to you, and not just unexpected events, but transitions in your own needs, desires, and wants. Your plans will change.
One part of the planning fallacy that is perhaps understated is how much your internal locus will change over time. There are periods in your life where you chase money, status, impact, etc. And then there are other periods in your life where you chase knowledge, understanding, stillness.
Just know the tradeoff you make with any approach and structure.
The biggest challenge with the approach the OP explains is that you tend to have a very instrumentalist way of looking at the world. Every day, every interaction is in service of these goals. Obsession isn't healthy forever but it is useful in periods
About US half of college graduates end up in jobs that don't really require a college education. It's worse in some other countries, such as Egypt and India. The phrase "elite overproduction" is sometimes used. That's not a new idea; see Eric Hoffer's "Working and Thinking on the Waterfront", where he talks about "intellectuals" from the standpoint of a longshoreman. It's become more of an issue as the educational establishment expanded. Historically, there's a surplus of smart people. Only from about 1955 to 2005 was there a general shortage.
Now, of course, we have "AI". We have no idea how good "AI" will be in four years. It's already reducing hiring of new graduates. We have no idea what happens next. Even the popular crap jobs, Uber and Amazon warehouses, already peaked and are declining.
And don't talk about "Universal Basic Income". It used to be called "the dole" or "welfare". You get a free apartment in a crappy housing project, which is in a bad neighborhood because it's full of people with no job and no future.
Typically we learn things as we challenge ourselves and grow. Executing your process will bring new information to light. I won't generalize universally, but if your goals or worldview hasn't evolved from age 20 to 30, it may suggest a lack of growth. It is similar to how the problem solving process often draws in concerns you hadn't initially considered. Sometimes you have to build the prototype before you can understand the full scope of the problem you are solving. Frequently you will find a more relevant problem in this stage of exploration.
Individuals are not large institutions. "5 year plans" are famously deployed by central planners in command and control economies. As an individual, you have an advantage in dynamism. Institutions typically have an obligation to provide consistent, predictable forward guidance. This allows the individuals within those institutions to plan their lives accordingly.
For these reasons, I've always found the suggestion of a "5 year plan" to be ridiculous for my usage. Perhaps it makes more sense for individuals who wish to position themselves as employees for life. Even for them, a goal of adding today's hottest buzzwords to a resume doesn't guarantee that those buzzwords will be relevant in 5-10 years. For entrepreneurs and creators, an iterative approach may be more appropriate.
Maintaining a journal that I write into daily is one of the best things I've ever done. It is so easy for me to reflect on why I feel the things I feel, especially when something happens that is significant enough to write about in the moment.
If you're already in college and you still have no idea what you'd like to do as a young person in your life, I would - and did - take that as strong evidence that I should just focus on executing and follow life's default goals for a while. They've been selected by competitive pressures I couldn't hope to reproduce with my own brain, so they're probably pretty good vehicles to midwit enlightenment.
You already know what these are: Finish high school, and college if possible; get a day job and try to focus on being good at it instead of angry at it. Get your own place. Find a life partner. Have some kids. Rise up the ranks at your day job if you're cut out for it, but there's no shame in just holding down the fort if you aren't. Etc, etc. It works well! You don't have to pretend to be special, you can just focus on being good.
I personally only made it about thirty seconds before I had to stop reading the article. The excessive line breaks and paragraphs-that-are-just-run-on-sentences on top of sporadic sentence casing and missing punctuation presents the writer as partly illiterate. I just can't shake the feeling that I'm reading the words of an, for lack of a graceful term, idiot.
In this context (not an immediate interactive chat) I find these issues awkward and disrespectful to the reader, the same as if the piece was filled with typos.
When the author treats a post as worthless throwaway text which isn't worth fixing even when they have plenty of opportunity... Why would that be worth the time of a stranger to read?
I’ve stayed prepared for opportunities. But I can’t say I’ve had a plan.
Just figure out what you want. That is your "goal". It does not need to be 1,2,5 years - can be anything. Things can change and are always in flux. Be open to changing both your goals and/or your daily habits. Change goals when you achieve or grow out of them, change habits when they aren't getting you closer to your goals or not helping you enjoy the journey.
Work backwards from your goals and break them down into something you can do as daily habits. The daily habits should have very STRICT success metrics in the direction of the goals' success metrics. If you do not have STRICT metrics for both the GOALs and the DAILY ACTIONs, you do not have good FEEDBACK.
If you do not have good FEEDBACK, you can spend a lot of time, even years - which I did, doing things that FEEL like you're working towards something with nothing to show at the end. There HAS to be a way to SHOW to yourself whether you are making progress or not. In too many things in life I have at times felt bad about my life not being a certain way, when I actually look at what I've done - like truly sit down and note things down, I realize my mind has been playing tricks on me - years of a lot of apparent struggle, but not much truly done - perhaps just a bit here and there.
I know there's many counter arguments to the STRICTness and GOAL setting nature of this way of living life. One counter argument is it's too rigid - but I like to think of it as chaos within constraints - btw you can tune the constraints to suit yourself. Another is once you reach a goal then what - I would say then another goal or just improving/maintaining that goal. Another one is Goodhart's Law - to which I say you will slowly learn to set good metrics and to use them as directional measures.
Despite all the problems with metrics and strictness, I think it is still the best way to go. Also I am personally against grandiose systems or too much complexity. I would say the core of it is just being AWARE. As long as you are AWARE of the inputs you're putting in and what outputs you'll get out of em I think it's fine to decide whether to do stuff or not. You can be lazy or free flowing or instinctual or whatever. (Your fast instincts could actually be very well aligned with your slow goals - though those kind of people are super rare I feel).
I think this is good advice, for nearly anyone.
Actually there are several problems with advice!
When that bump comes, people often abandon the whole plan. So the trouble with goals is that the good (getting you motivated to act) is often outweighed by the bad (draining motivation when the arbitrary goal is not met).
What you really want, in hn-friendly language, is not a 2D point on a map, but a vector. You want to know the general direction that you want to move toward in your life, and then start increasing your velocity.
A point is something you have reached or not (hint: it’s not even satisfying when you hit it). But you can change your vector on a dime. Even if you’re nowhere near your dream life, even in terrible times, you can always instantly pivot and vector in the right direction.
If it makes you feel good, make the big plans and be as detailed as you please. But hold them lightly. And just get moving along your vector.
Start at the bottom, at first, say yes to things.
AI cannot say yes to things. It sucks at solving problems. It is good at vomiting up pre-determined solutions
AI cannot smooth over things with customers. AI even if it could, would suck at it.
Get into a support role; it is a fine job and as much as they want to automate it away, they cannot. It often has a path to FTE SWE and the pay is OK.
Wanting things to be true does not make them true.
“Get a promotion this year, be a manager next year, manage the division in three years” is not a plan you can execute.
This is just the old self affirmation stuff you hear all the time: you won't succeed if you want it a bit. You wont succeed if want it and do nothing. You will succeed if you go all in, 100%.
It is BS.
You wont succeed if you go all in, statistically.
You might get a different outcome, but you wont hit your goal.
It is provably false that everyone who goes all succeeds; Not everyone gets to be an astronaut, no matter how hard they work.
The reality is that some people will put a little effort in and succeed, and some people will put a lot in and succeed. Other people will fail.
Your goals are not indicators of future success.
Only actual things that have actually happened are strong signals for future events.
The advice of having goals is helpful, but the much much more important thing to do is measure what actually happens and realistically create goals based on actual reality.
Try things. Measure things. Adopt things that work. Consciously record what you do, how it goes, how long it takes and use that to estimate achievable goals, instead of guessing randomly.
not all strategies work for all brains unfortunately.
but the essence is this:
- untangle yourself from the claws of others' expectations
- imagine vividly someone you would feel proud to merge with in the near future
- distill that image into your very own crooked and muddy golden path
- act now and take control of your life
- periodically look back at the image you hold and course correct where your heart guides you
Also, normally this style of writing would annoy me but I found it very charming and fun, somehow.
These days, I think just visualizing what my "proudest self" in 5 years would be would be enough to help me sort of 'manifest' it without all of the excessive planning bits. The visualizing bit is kind of the hard part.
Given everything happening in the world at the moment the FUD has been strong the last few years making it nerve-racking to plan anything big.
I am not sure I agree with this method, especially for younger people who have never experienced the things they want. When I was twenty, circa 2015, I would have seen myself working for Google.
What 30 year old me knows is that I am happier with tons of free time and agency, not tons of money and a big title.
People often like the general idea but are not ready for the process that leads there. They might not even like what the goal feels like! A lot of kids these days want to be an influencer, until they learn what it entails. A lot of people want FIRE, but are not ready to work 70 hour weeks in their prime years.
One thing that helped me not get lost is something Quebec did right with its education system: make people try different things, not just things that are immediately relevant to their career. CEGEP was a ton of fun. Take unusual lessons, try new hobbies, read outside of your habitual circles. It’s easier to plan your future without tunnel vision.
> if you actually do this you get a very stressful side effect:
> there is no one to blame but yourself
Uh no thanks!
