This is the opposite of what helped me to stop feeling lost in life. I grew up very goal oriented and executed towards those goals with focus and determination. Around when I turned 40 I realized I wasn't all that happy and I'd spent my entire life so far living for rewards that would come in the future. The problem is that those rewards didn't give sustaining satisfaction. They pass remarkably quickly when you get to them. I stopped feeling lost when I gave up trying to plan my life out and gave up setting goals. Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now. This keeps me living more contentedly in the present and I still get things done.
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.
This may work for the author, and for other people, but I would never give this advice. It supposes you are able to articulate where you want to be in five years, and have the ability to break that down into actionable tasks. Most people just want to have a stable job, apartment/house, and good relationship. Any further breakdown is often guessing, unrealistic, or outright fantasy.
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.
Yeah I especially would not expect a lost college student to be able to plan what a solid footing in the industry looks like. If you don't know what a "product manager" is, you're not going to have any idea what a reasonable career path might involve.
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)"?
The author is working out his personal demons through planning actualization. I hope it works out for him and I would be interested in a followup. In my own experience the best laid plans remain just that..... life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.
Did not expect chez cora to make the front page of HN.
This is sidestepping that the market for CS degrees has gone from new grads making more than median income to some of the highest unemployment among college grads. I hope this is temporary, but the problem right now isn't focus or goal setting. It's that the entry rung to the ladder ceased to exist.
People underestimate how important just setting some time aside to think about and commit to a goal is. That part of this post I like, people often overlook that a big part of making a big decision is that commitment and putting yourself in the mind space. The part that I don’t like is trying to pack 5 years of planning into 48 hours and breaking it down to daily goals. If you weren’t overwhelmed before you are now. You don’t know what you don’t know, a week or a month go by and you realize there is a better path or a different but related goal that is actually what you want. Would recommend instead: do the vision quest or whatever you want to call it to either decide you don’t want to do what it is your doing or commit to what it is you are doing. if it is the latter decide on one impactful thing you can start today to get yourself closer, reflect at the end of the week and adjust as needed until you die.
In my experience, the best case scenario for students (or anyone) who do these elaborate planning rituals is that it serves as a catharsis that moves their anxieties from their brain to some paper. Relieved, they loosen up and get back to making progress while forgetting about their detailed 5-year plan
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.
Having supervised high-achieving students in undergrad research settings, I just tell them to chill out, be a whole person with friends and hobbies, and lots of things will just fall into place. The fact that they're where they are (i.e., fancy university, research group, yadda yadda) shows they're the kind of person to take initiative. The fact that they worry shows that they care. They're already way ahead.
The real gains at that point are in connections, reputation, and getting into the habit of physical exercise.
Back in 2006 when I was in YC I wrote down a handful of goals. I looked at those goals daily. Just envisioned getting them or something even better than them. They seemed so lofty and ridiculous at the time. But oddly, they all became some version of true. Some of them took so much longer (and brought new problems) than I even anticipated, but some version of what I wanted transpired. So any process like this that involves setting down some goals and getting you excited to keep putting down work towards them seems like a pretty good idea :)
Grinding out your goals in a 48-hour vision quest-esque process like this, especially for someone early career or facing larger questions about trajectory, seems odd. Five years is an infinite amount of
time for some people and especially so with pace of change and uncertainty these days.
I suppose this might work for some, but it comes
off as excessively performative and not actually practical.
I did something like this a while back, although it didn't take 48 hours. The point is to move you from that infinite five year timeline where decision paralysis is stopping you from doing anything, and taking you back to three years, then one year, then next month, then tomorrow.
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.
I’m a big fan of the “just take a day or two to do nothing but think” part. We should cherish the fact that we are alive, and being without distractions just experiencing life is very valuable.
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.
Take two days off, once in a year, only for yourself, that’s the thing to take here away - great to do. I would do it without laptop, phone on do not disturb and watching the time fly by. No activity, not making plans, no sports, nothing, maybe a waffle house.
I'm not in tech, but in my experience, I've gotten furthest in the directions of my goals, and my best results, by:
- 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.
For some reason, I see this style of "everything lowercase" more often recently. It distracts me from the content a lot. Was there a reason this style has become more popular?
This feels like the sort of thing that works well for people who don’t need it. If you’re the sort of person who can sit down and plan your next half decade in detail, then execute that plan, you’re probably going to do well regardless. And if you’re the sort of person more like me, this plan will last about two days. Fortunately there are other paths to success.
I had a good strong 3 year run at something that looks similar enough to this around the time I moved across the country and changed careers a couple of decades ago. I've struggled to get that kind of determination again, but I've done it again with personal fitness in the last two years...
The problem with this kind of detailed long-term planning is that you won’t possibly be able to reverse engineer the exact path you’re going to take. And if you get too attached to your bullet points, lists, charts and graphs, you don’t know how to react when you hit a snag or a fork in the road.
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.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
This is the opposite of what helped me to stop feeling lost in life. I grew up very goal oriented and executed towards those goals with focus and determination. Around when I turned 40 I realized I wasn't all that happy and I'd spent my entire life so far living for rewards that would come in the future. The problem is that those rewards didn't give sustaining satisfaction. They pass remarkably quickly when you get to them. I stopped feeling lost when I gave up trying to plan my life out and gave up setting goals. Instead I now just trust my instincts and follow what seems interesting or meaningful to me right now. This keeps me living more contentedly in the present and I still get things done.
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.
I absolutely agree with you
This may work for the author, and for other people, but I would never give this advice. It supposes you are able to articulate where you want to be in five years, and have the ability to break that down into actionable tasks. Most people just want to have a stable job, apartment/house, and good relationship. Any further breakdown is often guessing, unrealistic, or outright fantasy.
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.
Yeah I especially would not expect a lost college student to be able to plan what a solid footing in the industry looks like. If you don't know what a "product manager" is, you're not going to have any idea what a reasonable career path might involve.
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)"?
> It supposes you are able to articulate where you want to be in five years, and have the ability to break that down into actionable tasks.
This is gold. :)
The author is working out his personal demons through planning actualization. I hope it works out for him and I would be interested in a followup. In my own experience the best laid plans remain just that..... life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.
Did not expect chez cora to make the front page of HN.
This is sidestepping that the market for CS degrees has gone from new grads making more than median income to some of the highest unemployment among college grads. I hope this is temporary, but the problem right now isn't focus or goal setting. It's that the entry rung to the ladder ceased to exist.
People underestimate how important just setting some time aside to think about and commit to a goal is. That part of this post I like, people often overlook that a big part of making a big decision is that commitment and putting yourself in the mind space. The part that I don’t like is trying to pack 5 years of planning into 48 hours and breaking it down to daily goals. If you weren’t overwhelmed before you are now. You don’t know what you don’t know, a week or a month go by and you realize there is a better path or a different but related goal that is actually what you want. Would recommend instead: do the vision quest or whatever you want to call it to either decide you don’t want to do what it is your doing or commit to what it is you are doing. if it is the latter decide on one impactful thing you can start today to get yourself closer, reflect at the end of the week and adjust as needed until you die.
In my experience, the best case scenario for students (or anyone) who do these elaborate planning rituals is that it serves as a catharsis that moves their anxieties from their brain to some paper. Relieved, they loosen up and get back to making progress while forgetting about their detailed 5-year plan
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.
Having supervised high-achieving students in undergrad research settings, I just tell them to chill out, be a whole person with friends and hobbies, and lots of things will just fall into place. The fact that they're where they are (i.e., fancy university, research group, yadda yadda) shows they're the kind of person to take initiative. The fact that they worry shows that they care. They're already way ahead.
The real gains at that point are in connections, reputation, and getting into the habit of physical exercise.
Back in 2006 when I was in YC I wrote down a handful of goals. I looked at those goals daily. Just envisioned getting them or something even better than them. They seemed so lofty and ridiculous at the time. But oddly, they all became some version of true. Some of them took so much longer (and brought new problems) than I even anticipated, but some version of what I wanted transpired. So any process like this that involves setting down some goals and getting you excited to keep putting down work towards them seems like a pretty good idea :)
Grinding out your goals in a 48-hour vision quest-esque process like this, especially for someone early career or facing larger questions about trajectory, seems odd. Five years is an infinite amount of time for some people and especially so with pace of change and uncertainty these days.
I suppose this might work for some, but it comes off as excessively performative and not actually practical.
I did something like this a while back, although it didn't take 48 hours. The point is to move you from that infinite five year timeline where decision paralysis is stopping you from doing anything, and taking you back to three years, then one year, then next month, then tomorrow.
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.
I’m a big fan of the “just take a day or two to do nothing but think” part. We should cherish the fact that we are alive, and being without distractions just experiencing life is very valuable.
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.
Take two days off, once in a year, only for yourself, that’s the thing to take here away - great to do. I would do it without laptop, phone on do not disturb and watching the time fly by. No activity, not making plans, no sports, nothing, maybe a waffle house.
I'm not in tech, but in my experience, I've gotten furthest in the directions of my goals, and my best results, by:
- 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.
I am not a SWE, although I wrote a lot of code for ~5 years as a release engineer/devops guy.
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.
For some reason, I see this style of "everything lowercase" more often recently. It distracts me from the content a lot. Was there a reason this style has become more popular?
My theory: it's a response to the all caps internet stuff which is shouting on the internet, think of it as an attempt to do ASMR for text.
I would literally rather hang myself than do this.
It's so hard to read with all of them lowercases. My eyesight is poor.
This feels like the sort of thing that works well for people who don’t need it. If you’re the sort of person who can sit down and plan your next half decade in detail, then execute that plan, you’re probably going to do well regardless. And if you’re the sort of person more like me, this plan will last about two days. Fortunately there are other paths to success.
If your personal planning ritual is this intensive then I'd hate to see what you go through trying to write some code.
I can’t think of a single period in my adult life of 30 years that I can look back 5 years and say this was all according to plan.
I’ve stayed prepared for opportunities. But I can’t say I’ve had a plan.
I had a good strong 3 year run at something that looks similar enough to this around the time I moved across the country and changed careers a couple of decades ago. I've struggled to get that kind of determination again, but I've done it again with personal fitness in the last two years...
I think this is good advice, for nearly anyone.
The problem with this kind of detailed long-term planning is that you won’t possibly be able to reverse engineer the exact path you’re going to take. And if you get too attached to your bullet points, lists, charts and graphs, you don’t know how to react when you hit a snag or a fork in the road.
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.
[flagged]
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html