I don't think that should stop you from planning, but just like death is ultimately inevitable, it is good to be healthily aware of failure (getting punched in the mouth). "Oh well, the movie is going to end, might as well not watch it"
Yeah, being in my 40s and looking at that, my immediate thought was "oh, it seems I'm trying to figure out plan Z, even when I had pretty good plans A and B."
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 didn't have a plan and things have been going great so far. So it's a little different when you're not in a zero-sum adversarial situation like a boxing ring.
Not to down play the usefulness of this, but be careful not to follow others ideas that your ultimate goal in life is X career plan. I have more of a "life plan" than a "career plan" since money and hacks/resourcefulness is pretty easy to the HN crowd relative to many other groups. Especially in the west, it takes talent to starve here.
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.
You should know that this worksheet is just one small sheet of a fairly comprehensive guide system they have in place at 8000 hours. [1] This part is a little limited in scope, but the full guide is well-balanced. It really encourages useful introspection in an area of life that many people decide by inertia. Their guide is definitely not aimed at getting you to being worth X millions, it definitely is about finding a path that you find fulfilling on several levels and on how to have a job that's a positive impact on the world. I'm consistently impressed with 80000 Hours's output.
> 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.
I get the point about picking and choosing where to spend your time and where you delegate things to others, but if living within your means expands with your means to that point, it's no wonder you find what's honestly a windfall to not be lofty.
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's not a matter of salary or saving for me anymore. I've brokered a few patent acquisitions, each of which would have allowed me to stop working altogether. And it was an abrupt transition from earning $200k to netting a somewhat unexpected and fortuitous 8-figures.
BUT, I still stand by my statement that $200k isn't as much as most people think it is. Sure, you can minimize and scrimp on your house, your vehicles, your children's institutional education, etc. and squirrel some money away for a brighter future a couple of decades from now. But that route was never very appealing to me. It felt like I was selling present-me short for the benefit of future-me. Sure I saved money, utilized 401(k)s and Roth IRAs (until I was priced out), heavily took advantage of SEP IRAs, had a liquid safety net, etc.
I'm curious about your experience selling patents. Are you an attorney or the founder of a startup?
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.
Attorney. Extremely large and valuable portfolio in a next-frontier market segment. Began the relationship as a strategy consultant and mentioned a few of my contacts, they drafted and I signed a cap-less brokerage agreement. And it paid off.
Imagine you think on that worksheet and...
"What is a fulfilling career to you" -> "I don't know..."
"What is your most valuable career capital right now?" -> "No idea, if I knew how to turn something I have/can do into capital I wouldn't be planning things on that level would I?"
"What global problems do you think are most pressing" -> How the hell should I know? this is only based on what I read in the media, I have no exposure to those problems.
"Which of your options are best?" -> "What? I don't even know which of the options might be worthwhile, let alone having criteria and confidence to judge them in the absolute..."
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.
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:
When I was 25 years old I made the plan to move to SF, find a technical cofounder and start a fast growth company.
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.
I've always wondered about this, how do people just "decide" to start a company for the sake of itself. I've always though that companies are kinda grown organically, i.e. you have a problem you want/need to solve and it turns out to be also commercially viable.
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?
I know some serial entrepreneurs who do decide to just "start" a company. They usually start with fairly broad research, looking into a lot of different industries, and then when they hear the whiff of an interesting problem dive really deeply into it.
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.
"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"
absolutely crucial advice right dere. distractions can be dream destroying(or enlightening or both)
The key is not to detail your life in minute details. It'll never hold anyway. But having a (long term) goal (starting a company, become viable, sell, ect.) and then actively plan to work towards it. If you want to retire at the age of 50, then work towards that. If you want to climb the 7 tallest mountains, then work towards that. As long as you get a little bit closer to your goal every week, you on the right track.
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.
But you need to be prepared to seize opportunities that are congruent with your aspirations; in fact sometimes you need to make these opportunities happen.
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.
And while you're learning, your attitude and world understanding constantly changes so much that you trash the plans of naive older self almost yearly, no?
Absolutely true.
I have changed and changed and changed, and keep changing my world view over time.
Some of my core principles though (honesty, fairness, empathy, strong family ties, etc.) remain; and hopefully will stay this way forever :).
If you're looking for a more holistic plan, one that doesn't just focus on career, check out Self Authoring (http://www.selfauthoring.com/) and specifically the Future Authoring course. It was put together by clinical and research psychologists, and has been administered to University students with pretty profound results.
I can't help but feel career plans, even inherently flexible ones such as the 80000 hour plan, discourage serendipity and encourage sunk-cost thinking.
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.
In my experience as one who tends towards spirituality, intuition etc over science - this type of path is jut the balance I need to keep moving towards my life's goals. I overly focus on serendipity and synchronicity to where I often don't accomplish much practical
If you mean 'science the world view' which means the philosophical stance that Consciousness (Spirit) is an emergent property of matter (amongst other things), then yes there's a spectrum and they're opposed.
On the other hand if you mean 'science the approach' — then there are many spiritual paths that follow the approach of the presentation of results and a method by which those results may be verified or refuted by a practitioner.
Thanks for explaining! I appreciate the differentiation you've made between the world view and the approach, as I'd forgotten about that. I agree that many spiritual paths do follow a very precise approach. And in fact, I'd reverse this:
> Consciousness (Spirit) is an emergent property of matter
to this:
> Matter is an emergent property of Consciousness/Spirit
It's not super hard to imagine. It's not like awesome jobs grow on trees, or that they're giving them away at the airport. If you're one of the few people in the world who can simply point to their ideal company, declare "I shall work there!" and then [poof] you're there, then congratulations on your good fortune. For the rest of us, finding the next rung on the ladder is an endless struggle, and there are not a lot of practical "how to" resources out there.
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.
Planning isn't just for people who have a hard time finding work. It's not even just for people who are unsatisfied in their work.
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.
Finding work easily doesn't mean that you'll just be automatically swept into the career you want. Some thoughtful planning is important even if it just helps you know what to say no to.
Related question, what's the opposite of sunk cost / escalation of commitment?
In this context, your comment made me think about the counter point, i.e. "I'll be able to make that decision later". Is there a name for procrastination bias?
This was copied out of the book "The Start-up of You" by Reid Hoffman. They point this out on their website, but they should really point it out on this Google Doc as well since it's pretty much entirely unoriginal.
I like this because it provides structure and some more concrete (yet still general) advice. Too much career how-to is wishy-washy cliche: crap like "do what you love" and "follow your passion" and "never stop learning". That's fine if you're looking for spirituality. Not so much if you're looking for a solid step-by-step structure to follow.
Assuming the 10000 hour rule of gaining expertise and toning it down, because in a job you cannot just do deliberate practice for 10K hours :-), I guess a single fulfilling profession for 10 years, where you learn, become good enough to extract mileage out of it and then moving on to a new career, should be plausible.
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.
I'm an electrical engineer 12 years out of college. I did design work for 5 years, became an electronics quality manager in operations, then design validation test manager in R&D, and now questioning what to do with my career ... I'm leaning towards data analytics guru ...
"Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141 could make it easy to connect our local, regional, national, and global goals; and find people with similar objectives and solutions.
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson