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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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'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
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.
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’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.
For some reason, I see this style of "everything lowercase" more often recently. It distracts me from the content a lot. Was there a reason this style has become more popular?
This 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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
52 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] threadDid not expect chez cora to make the front page of HN.
I suppose this might work for some, but it comes off as excessively performative and not actually practical.
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.
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.
I think this is good advice, for nearly anyone.
I’ve stayed prepared for opportunities. But I can’t say I’ve had a plan.
- keeping in mind the direction I want to advance, but
- determining which activities I should repeat every day to move in that direction,
- executing those activities consistently (every day) and regularly (according to rules/principles, as I learn/discover them), and
- gradually refining that execution with practice.
To me, it feels a bit like walking across your house in the dark: you know where you'd like to go, but you can only feel your way there a step at a time, you run into things, but you course-correct and keep moving forward.
Keep it simple.
Some paraphrases:
Tyson: Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. (A PERT chart with hundreds of nodes, planned in advance, is almost certain to fall apart.)
Patton: A good plan, violently executed now.
Von Clausewitz: The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.
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
When that bump comes, people often abandon the whole plan. So the trouble with goals is that the good (getting you motivated to act) is often outweighed by the bad (draining motivation when the arbitrary goal is not met).
What you really want, in hn-friendly language, is not a 2D point on a map, but a vector. You want to know the general direction that you want to move toward in your life, and then start increasing your velocity.
A point is something you have reached or not (hint: it’s not even satisfying when you hit it). But you can change your vector on a dime. Even if you’re nowhere near your dream life, even in terrible times, you can always instantly pivot and vector in the right direction.
If it makes you feel good, make the big plans and be as detailed as you please. But hold them lightly. And just get moving along your vector.
But I don’t get the second part. Do we really need to be so goal oriented in tech specifically? I mean maybe if you wanted to go from being a programmer to a professional wrestler, I could see it. But if you’re just trying to keep your career going, just do what’s useful at work / school right now, and explore what interests you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.