Did not expect chez cora to make the front page of HN.
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.
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.
I think this is good advice, for nearly anyone.
I’ve stayed prepared for opportunities. But I can’t say I’ve had a plan.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
bigyabai•1h ago