51–60 of 113 posts
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.
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 t…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
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.
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 situati…
My experience is that our needs and wants change over time, and they are shaped by our actions. Overcommiting to a future that we think we want can end up quite badly in my experience.
This 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 situati…
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.
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 t…
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 se…
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.
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?
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?