Short-Term Planning
In the many job interviews I’ve had over the years, I always dreaded the question “Where do you want to be in ten years?” I never had a clue, and really still am not clear, and doubted that the interviewer could have answered the question if I posed it to her. The answer was always something ambitious and beyond the scope of work I was applying for, and it always seemed to satisfy.
I doubt that there are many people who can truly answer that question, and if there are, I have to wonder how many of them arrive at that place ten years down the road. Most of the people I know haven’t been with the same company for ten years, let alone in the same career. And quite a few are doing something very different from what they prepared for in college. Wayne Dyer used to ask “Would you go to an 18 year-old for career advice?”, yet we all make choices at that age that we are not equipped to make.
Which brings me to the subject of this blog. In his book Range, David Epstein documents how the happiest and most successful people make career choices based on sampling. It is very difficult to know if you are going to enjoy, excel or fit with a career or company until you have some experience. Successful people aren’t afraid to take a chance on doing something that may not work out. They take a chance and move onto something else if it doesn’t work out. And in today’s job market, it is the breadth of experience that brings greater value to employers. Having an outsider’s view into a new situation is beneficial. People with broad experience in different disciplines bring viewpoints that don’t exist to teams that have been buried in the same problems and solutions for years. And after sampling several career paths, they arrive in place where they are happier than someone who stays where they are because that’s what they’ve always done.
So don’t think so hard about the next ten years. What would you really like to be doing right now?