Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”
This is a common question in interviews and I don’t like it. Yes, it serves as a proxy to gauge the candidate’s motivation. Yes, it tests to see if the candidate understands the corporate ladder and title progression. However, it’s unrealistic:
- It assumes a fairly linear approach to life, learning, and opportunities; not true. Think S-curves.
- It gives a false sense of control and predictability; success = good decisions + luck
- It treats your career like a strategic plan of a consumer packaged goods company. You are not a box of cereal
Medium term = unreliable and worrisome
We often spend our career focusing on the medium term. We focus on the next project, next promotion, next job. We want a faster return on investment (urgency, impatience, selfishness) rather than putting in the thoughtful work to get better at our craft. We obsess about things we have only limited impact on – eager and frustrated with the often-times random results. Yes, I am guilty of this too.
You don’t have to read until the end of this blog post to get to the punch line – medium term should not be your focus. What happens over the next 6 months or 3 years depends on a number of factors often beyond your control. Your boss can change, your project can lose its funding, your family may move, you may take a sabbatical. Things change and the medium-term is the least reliable part of your equation. 
Life keeps accelerating
To say that the world is moving quickly is an understatement. A global pandemic jolted supply chains and dramatically affected consumer purchasing behaviors. The ubiquity of smart phone and wifi has brought internet to hundreds of millions of people in India and Africa. Deep Mind has algorithms learning by themselves, faster.
Uh, do you need me to explain how ChatGPT is disrupting 20% of low-skill white collar work?
Life is a bunch of s-curves
Talk to anyone with grey hair and they will tell you that life is not a straight line:
- Opportunities come when you don’t expect them
- Lovely people come into your life without warning
- You get bored of some things; motivated by others
- Bad managers can nudge you off a career track by accident
- Success is good decisions + luck. Luck matters
longer-term direction
I first heard the advice of “don’t think medium term” over dinner with a good friend. As an executive coach, he excels at asking good questions and getting you to think. I was kvetching about office meaningless work, and he kept encouraging me to think bigger about my career goals (thanks BMS).
- What really gets me excited about the work?
- If the money was the same, what would you really enjoy doing?
- What would you like to spend the next 5 years getting really good at?
- What did you really enjoy doing as a kid?
Shorter-term action
Do the work. Put in the 10,000 hours. If strategy is about creating a sustainable competitive advantage, what can you do to develop yourself? What is your “unfair advantage?” What steps can you take now to make yourself uniquely valuable – create an economic moat around yourself?
I don’t want a business that’s easy for competitors. I want a business with a moat around it with a very valuable castle in the middle. – Warren Buffett
You control the short-term
What you focus on now is up to you. You decide what today will look like. Seth Godin says (paraphrase) that artists need to ship art; they need to get things done. Inaction sucks. If you want to be a linchpin – someone that others value, need, seek the advice of – you need to get things done. Become irreplaceable.
You control the long-term
When it comes to your career, only you can set the goal and direction. You set your own “North Star”. You determine your competitive advantage, and strategic positioning, where and how you will compete. What will my brand be? Who will I seek out? Who will I invest in? It’s all up to you; it’s exciting, empowering, and gives you nowhere to hide.
Short-term input. Long-term output
If I were to draw out this idea, it might looks like this. If you are starting on the left-hand side, there are a lot of steps (some known, and many unknown) between you and your long-term goal. Yes, you can break down your plan into workable miletones, but frankly, the more ambitious and innovative you goal, the less tried-and-true the plan will likely be. Gotta be open to serendipity. Get some hustle on. Make your weather.
Dream bigger and do more today
Don’t limit yourself to the short-term promotion, project, or job. Think about what the economic castle you are going to build for yourself, and using the Buffett analogy, start digging the moat today.