Are you ever hit with that weird question?
You know the one…
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Well, let’s stop and think about that for a second. What does that even mean? Not that it doesn’t mean anything, but rather the opposite. 5 years is a long time. 5 years ago, I was just catching my stride in college. I was working through my junior year of University, and working a side gig as a server at a little restaurant chain (the one with the really good biscuits) 5 years ago, working through my Bachelor’s in Business, I wouldn’t have believed even The Doctor if he pulled up in his blue box and told me I would be a software engineer.
I wish that last sentence read more like:
I would be a great software engineer But, we’re working on the self-confidence in 2024. That’s gonna be TBD in another blog.
What I’m trying to get at, is that time is short. 2019 doesn’t feel that far. It’s also so, so long. There’s that old metaphor about some infinities being bigger than others. There’s a book that says that time is like that. You can have days where nothing happens, or seconds, instants, where your life changes. So many infinitely long moments packed into 5 years. Woah.
5 years ago, I couldn’t have guessed I would be here. I couldn’t have guessed I would be living on my own and actually doing ok? So how can I say where I’ll be 5 years from now?
I think that I have a better approach that surfaces to my mind from time to time. I wish I could do better about remembering this. I think that overall, it’s better for me to consider not ‘where I want to be in 5 years’, but rather ‘What do I want to have spent time on in these next 5 years?’ Time isn’t money, but it is a currency that we don’t have an infinite amount of. It’s a constantly dwindling resource available to us. I am skilled, I can learn, and I can grow, but I can only do that with focus and attention. This is something I learned from playing guitar. It’s kind of akin to ‘opportunity cost’ in that hobbies and skills take time to foster, and usually the thing that inspired interest in those things isn’t something you can produce when you’re in the early stages of either (or even in the middling stages where you’re plateauing, but that’s a different problem) You can’t reach the height of the mountain if you don’t start hiking, and you won’t reach the destination if you give up.
I want to pick a few trails I want to hike through in the next 5 years:
- Learn game development, make 3 completed games
- Dive deeper into applied machine learning
- Dive deeper into embedded systems engineering
- Learn astronomy and how to research the stars
- Continue improving as a full-stack developer
- Continue drawing and keep attempting to paint
In 5 years, I want to look back and know that I put meaningful time into these things. Setting goals is risky because there’s always the chance you don’t accomplish them. But it’s worth it to have something to shoot for, in my opinion.
Signed