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.
My experience would be the opposite. I'm not goal oriented
> 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
Your comment actually suggests that your instincts tell you those things are not as valuable, but you might just be following habit and dopamine loops at the current moment.
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.
The opposite of goal setting is not "doing nothing". And with respect, watching TV, playing games, etc is doing nothing.
Rather you should be _doing_ something, something interesting to you. Create, not Consume.
SO questions is a good start. Meaningful answers take time. You might set a goal of 10 questions a day. Some amount that represents meaningful time.
From there, maybe you notice the kinds of questions you like. Are they leading you to an open source project? Or customer support? (There are _very_ well paid support jobs out there, not FAANG pay, but waaay better than what most people earn.)
The point of goals or interests is the same - finding your journey. Sitting around consuming is not journey time. Use whatever approach works for you to start yourself moving.
I feel you. I cannot offer much more than that, but if you care for a friendly advice from someone who is still in the same situation and very much still working on it, setting goals became another way to procrastinate for me.
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 am also used OPs method and it is the reason I now work in a technical job despite having studied art. I just followed my curiosity and that lead to an expert-level understanding in some fields (I later got some formal proof of said expertise).
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.
I think there's a middle ground between trying to follow a path you set for yourself and thoughtlessly wandering by gut feeling: set a direction you want to go, not a destination.
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.
Functionally, not completing goals with a long outset is the same as not setting goals. You were banking on completing those goals and not having them just be a myriad of things you've done (which, as you've said, you've already done).
Thank you for sharing this. I am truly glad to hear that this works for you. This resonates a lot with me, and I hope to acquire the same wisdom.
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!
> 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'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.
Going through the same thing. The body knows what it wants, but you can't always be an unthinking autonomaton grabbing stuff willy-nilly off the store shelf. So just feel it out when you need to just sit on the curb and do whatever, or put yourself in a sandbox and say: "I'm going to go... ___to the boardwalk___, then whatever happens, happens."
I went through a very similar thing at around the same age, and one of the insights that really helped me was meditating on impermanence, and cultivating more mental proprioception (awareness of one's subtle thoughts, "mindfulness", whatever you want to call it.
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.
I have the same experience. Until 30 I was one of those people who schedules every hour of their life, used habit trackers religiously, set SMART goals and recorded metrics of how I spent time. I got settled financially/professionally/personally and over the past few years have dropped the old productivity methods. This year I decided to drop the last of them entirely, with great results. Focusing on the moment at hand and following my instincts has made me a lot happier so far, and is still leading to great opportunities.
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!
idk man, I have the opposite experience. I've always followed my instincts, and am now stuck with consequences of bad decisions that are not easy to undo. My life is good, but I feel like I squandered a real shot to be world class and am now stuck in the top echelon of mediocrity, maybe permanently.
This tracks with my career - highly goal oriented and highly stressful until I sacked it all off for a less intense, more code-focused role a couple of years ago.
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.
I’m not goal oriented and follow my instincts. There’s no way you could get me to write a 5 year plan for myself.
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.
I personally resonate with this take, being a high achiever student in early life and ambitious career seeker into adulthood. While I had my own 'meta' for how to mine certain decades for value (skill buffing, exploration, etc) it is still both scary and liberating to take a step off the planned path knowing deep in your bones it is for the better.
All this middle age crisis stems from having fewer children and even fewer grandchildren.
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.
I am not sure I agree with not having kids being the cause of mid-life crisis. But for balance, as the GP, I will say that I had two kids through the time that I adjusted my approach to life to this less goal oriented approach. They do provide direction to life, make many decisions easier (since I just choose what’ll be best for them) and provide constant distraction from consumption. They also provide an additional tension if you remain goal oriented though since now you have less time to sit and think about your goals and plans and that’s stressful too.
At one point in my life I was very busy with uni and full-time job. I listened to audiobooks, lessons, or just read my notes during commutes. And I was lucky to be allowed to study in my work breaks (away from the "watercooler gang"). I made time. I was very picky with who I spent time with and made sure the human interaction was high quality. Those were some of my most productive years for my side/fun projects. And I was never bored.
Life is not short. We waste most of it in meaningless time sinks. (BTW, thank you for making me remember this)
Being busy acts like a pacemaker. All people I know with big families don't have mid-life crisis. They do get overwhelmed at times. But most have some hobby or passion. Sports, cars, wood-making, or side projects. Kids make you realize time goes by. It's harder to accept life moving on if you are alone. And you are more likely to fall for negative habits. In general, of course there are outliers at both ends of the curve.
In old-style charities people with families are a majority. But the fashionable new and ephemeral NGOs are usually full of singles (mostly posing). Again, in general.
And I should listen to my own advise. You are right. I am just another guy and shouldn't give advice on life to complete strangers, on the internet. Good night.
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)"?
I agree. Looking back five years, I couldn't have imagined where I am today.
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.
It's worse than that, it assumes that where you want to be in 5 years won't change during that time.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote a toy program once, in which an agent should navigate on its own through a 2D platformer environment. Jump over obstacles/holes, climb stairs, etc.
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.
I don't think so. A* just let's you add domain knowledge to the process of selecting the next candidate to explore.
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.
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.
I think the key word here is undergrad research setting. Having an advisor or a department or DGS or Dean breathing down your neck and tumbleweeds in your bank account is an entirely different can of worms.
It seems to me creating a 5y list of daily goals is a recipe to immediately be behind on 1000s on tasks within a few weeks. The thing about estimates is the best case scenario is they take 0 time, worst case is unlimited. When you are planning 5y of tasks when you don't really even know what you're doing, a large majority will completely explode once you dig into them. I've never seen a detailed 5y plan hold up in any area, I'm sceptical to what extent the author has actually done so.
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.
Yeah this is how it works for me, for sure - as much as I like to frame my penchant for planning and scheduling and lists, the underlying truth is it’s a coping method for anxiety.
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.
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.
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 :)
In Step 5, it's a bit of a "first, draw 3 circles, then draw the rest of the owl, but here's a picture of the space shuttle instead".
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.
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.
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
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.
Different strokes and all that. Some people are really goal driven and NEED that north star to aim for.
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.
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.
I don't think that's the case. I think an implied point is separating the "I want to be programming computers in 5 years" folks from the "I want a stable job with good pay" folks. If you are in the latter point, then the entry-rung to the ladder disappearing means you should probably switch majors!
As long as the U.S. government does nothing to address outsourcing, this issue will remain permanent. People often blame AI, but it is a much smaller problem compared to the outsourcing of jobs to countries like India or the Philippines.
I'm sure someone will say this, but of course, having a plan is useless, but planning itself is priceless.
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
Any time you encounter a self help piece ask yourself, "Does this advice assume I have significant motivation, concentration, and persistence?" If so, drop it right in the trash. If you had that 9/10 you'd be doing something pretty effective already.
It's really tough right now, because it's not at all clear what to learn.
For most of the last century, if your objective for a college education included at least a middle class living standard, there were choices you could make which offered a high probability of that. This is no longer true.
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.
There's an important difference between UBI and social welfare: UBI is for everyone including working people so you can work to earn income on top of UBI. Vs traditional welfare income transfers where it might not be worth getting a low income side job since its income would be deducted from your welfare payments. And it's not socially stigmatizing since everyone gets UBI.
Long term goals are fine, but it is more reasonable to focus on near term endeavors that serve your long term goals. Those near term projects should be broken into manageable steps. This more flexible method allows for greater risk tolerance and opportunities to reexamine goals.
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.
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 think writing a little bit everyday is much more productive and introspective than writing endlessly for a 48 hour solo retreat (the retreat part is not a bad idea!)
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.
The longer you have to take to decide between Option A and Option B, the less overwhelmingly obvious the chasm between A and B is to you.
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.
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.
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?
It's the writing pattern of younger Gen Z and older Gen Alpha. Combined with minimal-to-no punctuation, it can be very distracting to read. However, this is typically used in informal settings like group chats. It is very odd to see it in formal, serious, or professional settings outside of, again, DMs and the like.
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.
Sometimes there's some sort of JS/CSS rendering trick that has broken on the page. However in this case words like "I'll" still contain their capital.
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 seen the argument made that "when people talk and text, they don't use punctuation." This seems like nonsense to me, since when people talk they inflect in rather varied ways, and there is punctuation in texts every time the "send" button is hit. 2300 years ago, the Greeks didn't have punctuation, and they had to invent it!
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I’ve felt pretty lost before too, like stuck in this maze of endless paths. That line about not chasing tools but getting closer to the person you want to be really hit me. A lot of times it’s not that we don’t plan enough, it’s just that we rarely slow down and really listen to ourselves. This approach feels simple but grounding.
Could've been written better, and also, it is posed as something new and illuminating - that style too could've been changed. But kinda agree on the high points.
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 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 advice is it’s what worked once for one person, filtered through their unreliable memory then retold in a way that favors them and ignores all the detours.
These type of posts have never worked for me. I open these every single time thinking "wait maybe this time it is different, wait no this time it has to be different" still waiting...(insert skull meme)
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.
What has always worked for me is the exact opposite: no goal from the start, just try as many things that interest you as possible until you have one or two areas that work for you.
Repeat when you’re burned out.
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.
This is definitely something I did when I was younger (DAGs and everything, sans Waffle House - maybe a Vietnamese restaurant named "Vietnamese Restaurant" before it burned down).
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.
Seeing my old home city stirs something in me! Oh how I miss it sometimes.
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.
I'm pretty sure the author hasn't actually followed his own advice. Also, the writing style was atrocious. I wouldn't trust anything said. Seems like the type of post he wrote for himself (nothing wrong with that), but I don't feel that asking a 20-25 year old to have a 5 year plan which is basically 1/4 of their conscious life is something useful or achievable for most.
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.
My experience would be the opposite. I'm not goal oriented
> 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
Your comment actually suggests that your instincts tell you those things are not as valuable, but you might just be following habit and dopamine loops at the current moment.
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.
I concur.
The opposite of goal setting is not "doing nothing". And with respect, watching TV, playing games, etc is doing nothing.
Rather you should be _doing_ something, something interesting to you. Create, not Consume.
SO questions is a good start. Meaningful answers take time. You might set a goal of 10 questions a day. Some amount that represents meaningful time.
From there, maybe you notice the kinds of questions you like. Are they leading you to an open source project? Or customer support? (There are _very_ well paid support jobs out there, not FAANG pay, but waaay better than what most people earn.)
The point of goals or interests is the same - finding your journey. Sitting around consuming is not journey time. Use whatever approach works for you to start yourself moving.
I find my life is best when I balance my creation and consumption. Too much of either leaves me not feeling the best.
I find my life is best when I make time to neither create nor consume, but just to do.
Play board games, go on a walk, play on the floor with my kid, play a sport.
"Doing" doesn't have to be creative or productive!
> Rather you should be _doing_ something, something interesting to you. Create, not Consume.
Yes, I agree. And I'm going to add something so as to not be taken as a nitpick with the above, since I believe that to be right:
You can also consume activities that let you blossom. Softball, SkeeBall, pool, whatever... in addition to creating your own things.
That’s not what “consuming” means, unless you mean spending hours watching TikToks about your favourite sport.
I feel you. I cannot offer much more than that, but if you care for a friendly advice from someone who is still in the same situation and very much still working on it, setting goals became another way to procrastinate for me.
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 am also used OPs method and it is the reason I now work in a technical job despite having studied art. I just followed my curiosity and that lead to an expert-level understanding in some fields (I later got some formal proof of said expertise).
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.
I think there's a middle ground between trying to follow a path you set for yourself and thoughtlessly wandering by gut feeling: set a direction you want to go, not a destination.
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.
Does your instinct really say “watch anime for 6 hours right now”, or does your instinct say something else and you just aren’t listening to it?
Functionally, not completing goals with a long outset is the same as not setting goals. You were banking on completing those goals and not having them just be a myriad of things you've done (which, as you've said, you've already done).
Thank you for sharing this. I am truly glad to hear that this works for you. This resonates a lot with me, and I hope to acquire the same wisdom.
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!
> 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'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.
Going through the same thing. The body knows what it wants, but you can't always be an unthinking autonomaton grabbing stuff willy-nilly off the store shelf. So just feel it out when you need to just sit on the curb and do whatever, or put yourself in a sandbox and say: "I'm going to go... ___to the boardwalk___, then whatever happens, happens."
I went through a very similar thing at around the same age, and one of the insights that really helped me was meditating on impermanence, and cultivating more mental proprioception (awareness of one's subtle thoughts, "mindfulness", whatever you want to call it.
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.
I have the same experience. Until 30 I was one of those people who schedules every hour of their life, used habit trackers religiously, set SMART goals and recorded metrics of how I spent time. I got settled financially/professionally/personally and over the past few years have dropped the old productivity methods. This year I decided to drop the last of them entirely, with great results. Focusing on the moment at hand and following my instincts has made me a lot happier so far, and is still leading to great opportunities.
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!
idk man, I have the opposite experience. I've always followed my instincts, and am now stuck with consequences of bad decisions that are not easy to undo. My life is good, but I feel like I squandered a real shot to be world class and am now stuck in the top echelon of mediocrity, maybe permanently.
Grass is always greener, I guess.
Why are you at azure and not at a frontier ai lab?
> Grass is always greener, I guess.
Indeed. Everything has to find their own path.
This tracks with my career - highly goal oriented and highly stressful until I sacked it all off for a less intense, more code-focused role a couple of years ago.
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.
I’m not goal oriented and follow my instincts. There’s no way you could get me to write a 5 year plan for myself.
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.
I personally resonate with this take, being a high achiever student in early life and ambitious career seeker into adulthood. While I had my own 'meta' for how to mine certain decades for value (skill buffing, exploration, etc) it is still both scary and liberating to take a step off the planned path knowing deep in your bones it is for the better.
I absolutely agree with you
All this middle age crisis stems from having fewer children and even fewer grandchildren.
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.
I am not sure I agree with not having kids being the cause of mid-life crisis. But for balance, as the GP, I will say that I had two kids through the time that I adjusted my approach to life to this less goal oriented approach. They do provide direction to life, make many decisions easier (since I just choose what’ll be best for them) and provide constant distraction from consumption. They also provide an additional tension if you remain goal oriented though since now you have less time to sit and think about your goals and plans and that’s stressful too.
Isn't the stereotypical middle age crisis the suburban office worker husband with two kids who buys a sports car to feel young and free?
In that stereotypical mid-life crisis, the kids have grown up/going off to college
How do I find meaning as a child-ful person?
If you have time after work and family, those things apply just the same, of course.
The children tend to make it so that I don't.
They will grow.
At one point in my life I was very busy with uni and full-time job. I listened to audiobooks, lessons, or just read my notes during commutes. And I was lucky to be allowed to study in my work breaks (away from the "watercooler gang"). I made time. I was very picky with who I spent time with and made sure the human interaction was high quality. Those were some of my most productive years for my side/fun projects. And I was never bored.
Life is not short. We waste most of it in meaningless time sinks. (BTW, thank you for making me remember this)
> Life is not short. We waste most of it in meaningless time sinks. (BTW, thank you for making me remember this)
By any chance have you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevitate_Vitae_(Seneca) ? The sentiment expressed here is almost exactly what is expressed here.
This seems directly opposed to the statement that “All this middle age crisis stems from having fewer children and even fewer grandchildren.”
Being busy acts like a pacemaker. All people I know with big families don't have mid-life crisis. They do get overwhelmed at times. But most have some hobby or passion. Sports, cars, wood-making, or side projects. Kids make you realize time goes by. It's harder to accept life moving on if you are alone. And you are more likely to fall for negative habits. In general, of course there are outliers at both ends of the curve.
In old-style charities people with families are a majority. But the fashionable new and ephemeral NGOs are usually full of singles (mostly posing). Again, in general.
And I should listen to my own advise. You are right. I am just another guy and shouldn't give advice on life to complete strangers, on the internet. Good night.
Yeah, but what about your needs?
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)"?
I agree. Looking back five years, I couldn't have imagined where I am today.
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.
It's worse than that, it assumes that where you want to be in 5 years won't change during that time.
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.
> 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. :)
IMO this used to be a problem. But I’ve found LLMs are really good at helping one fill in these knowledge gaps, well enough to get started.
not to cast any shade on the article, which clearly people are liking, but I found it so unrelatable that I abandoned it halfway
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.
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.
I wrote a toy program once, in which an agent should navigate on its own through a 2D platformer environment. Jump over obstacles/holes, climb stairs, etc.
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.
Isn't the A* algorithm something that kinda helps with this? Basically you recalculate the route every "step".
A* still produces a full path ahead of time, it's just potentially more efficient to compute. Recalculating each step would be a layer on top of that.
I don't think so. A* just let's you add domain knowledge to the process of selecting the next candidate to explore.
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.
In optimal control I believe they call these "shooting methods"
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.
I think the key word here is undergrad research setting. Having an advisor or a department or DGS or Dean breathing down your neck and tumbleweeds in your bank account is an entirely different can of worms.
It seems to me creating a 5y list of daily goals is a recipe to immediately be behind on 1000s on tasks within a few weeks. The thing about estimates is the best case scenario is they take 0 time, worst case is unlimited. When you are planning 5y of tasks when you don't really even know what you're doing, a large majority will completely explode once you dig into them. I've never seen a detailed 5y plan hold up in any area, I'm sceptical to what extent the author has actually done so.
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.
Yeah this is how it works for me, for sure - as much as I like to frame my penchant for planning and scheduling and lists, the underlying truth is it’s a coping method for anxiety.
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.
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.
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 :)
In Step 5, it's a bit of a "first, draw 3 circles, then draw the rest of the owl, but here's a picture of the space shuttle instead".
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.
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.
One more quote:
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
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.
Different strokes and all that. Some people are really goal driven and NEED that north star to aim for.
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.
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.
I don't think that's the case. I think an implied point is separating the "I want to be programming computers in 5 years" folks from the "I want a stable job with good pay" folks. If you are in the latter point, then the entry-rung to the ladder disappearing means you should probably switch majors!
As long as the U.S. government does nothing to address outsourcing, this issue will remain permanent. People often blame AI, but it is a much smaller problem compared to the outsourcing of jobs to countries like India or the Philippines.
I'm sure someone will say this, but of course, having a plan is useless, but planning itself is priceless.
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
Any time you encounter a self help piece ask yourself, "Does this advice assume I have significant motivation, concentration, and persistence?" If so, drop it right in the trash. If you had that 9/10 you'd be doing something pretty effective already.
It's really tough right now, because it's not at all clear what to learn. For most of the last century, if your objective for a college education included at least a middle class living standard, there were choices you could make which offered a high probability of that. This is no longer true.
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.
There's an important difference between UBI and social welfare: UBI is for everyone including working people so you can work to earn income on top of UBI. Vs traditional welfare income transfers where it might not be worth getting a low income side job since its income would be deducted from your welfare payments. And it's not socially stigmatizing since everyone gets UBI.
Long term goals are fine, but it is more reasonable to focus on near term endeavors that serve your long term goals. Those near term projects should be broken into manageable steps. This more flexible method allows for greater risk tolerance and opportunities to reexamine goals.
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.
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 think writing a little bit everyday is much more productive and introspective than writing endlessly for a 48 hour solo retreat (the retreat part is not a bad idea!)
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.
The longer you have to take to decide between Option A and Option B, the less overwhelmingly obvious the chasm between A and B is to you.
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.
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.
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?
It's the writing pattern of younger Gen Z and older Gen Alpha. Combined with minimal-to-no punctuation, it can be very distracting to read. However, this is typically used in informal settings like group chats. It is very odd to see it in formal, serious, or professional settings outside of, again, DMs and the like.
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.
Sometimes there's some sort of JS/CSS rendering trick that has broken on the page. However in this case words like "I'll" still contain their capital.
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 agree — yet here we are on the front page of HN.
To twist a quote: The attention economy can remain irrational longer than I can remain sentient. :p
honestly the worst is when it’s all lowercase AND there are lots of typos.
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've seen the argument made that "when people talk and text, they don't use punctuation." This seems like nonsense to me, since when people talk they inflect in rather varied ways, and there is punctuation in texts every time the "send" button is hit. 2300 years ago, the Greeks didn't have punctuation, and they had to invent it!
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.
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It's so hard to read with all of them lowercases. My eyesight is poor.
Agreed, I actually stopped reading for this reason. The author seems allergic to capitals.
I would literally rather hang myself than do this.
I’ve felt pretty lost before too, like stuck in this maze of endless paths. That line about not chasing tools but getting closer to the person you want to be really hit me. A lot of times it’s not that we don’t plan enough, it’s just that we rarely slow down and really listen to ourselves. This approach feels simple but grounding.
Could've been written better, and also, it is posed as something new and illuminating - that style too could've been changed. But kinda agree on the high points.
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 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.
If your personal planning ritual is this intensive then I'd hate to see what you go through trying to write some code.
yeah this method is flat out not going to work for some people.
The problem with advice is it’s what worked once for one person, filtered through their unreliable memory then retold in a way that favors them and ignores all the detours.
Actually there are several problems with advice!
These type of posts have never worked for me. I open these every single time thinking "wait maybe this time it is different, wait no this time it has to be different" still waiting...(insert skull meme)
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.
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.
What has always worked for me is the exact opposite: no goal from the start, just try as many things that interest you as possible until you have one or two areas that work for you. Repeat when you’re burned out.
This isn't realistic.
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.
Most of the good things in life don’t respond to this kind of thing.
hey everyone author here, I'm really glad to see all the different life structures people have adopted.
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
This is definitely something I did when I was younger (DAGs and everything, sans Waffle House - maybe a Vietnamese restaurant named "Vietnamese Restaurant" before it burned down).
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.
Seeing my old home city stirs something in me! Oh how I miss it sometimes.
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.
I'm pretty sure the author hasn't actually followed his own advice. Also, the writing style was atrocious. I wouldn't trust anything said. Seems like the type of post he wrote for himself (nothing wrong with that), but I don't feel that asking a 20-25 year old to have a 5 year plan which is basically 1/4 of their conscious life is something useful or achievable for most.
> you have to be careful though.
> if you actually do this you get a very stressful side effect:
> there is no one to blame but yourself
Uh no thanks!
[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