Your Future – 3 Years at a Time

Where do you see yourself in 10 years? You’ve probably heard this question come up in job interviews. Or perhaps you’ve been asked – what do you want to do for the rest of your life?

Personally, I always found it very hard to answer these questions. I wonder how accurately can we really predict a 10-year timeframe. When we were 15, did we know everything that would happen to us leading up to our 25 year birthday? Did we anticipate how our interests would change and evolve and all the new things and experiences we’d come across?

Some people know when they are 4 that they want to be a doctor or an astronaut or anybody in between. For the rest of us, the path is less set in stone. Over time, for most of us, life took a series of unexpected turns, we gained new perspectives, our work and family situations may have changed, and we generally started to look at the world differently.

Daniel Gilbert, the author of a book called Stumbling on Happiness, claims that generally, we are pretty poor predictors of what will make us happy in the future. His reasoning is that our imagination fails to realize how things will feel when they actually occur and that the longer the timeframe is, the more likely we’ll be wrong.

In other words, if you try to visualize yourself 15 years from now, where you live, how you feel, and so on – it will be most likely inaccurate (and, surprisingly, can be quite similar to your existing situation).

We can see this happening all around us – people make decisions that they ultimately end up unhappy with. I’ve been around a lot of folks that have gone to study Finance because they were attracted to the prospect of making $100,000 per year. It takes many of them a couple of years to realize that this money doesn’t really matter that much because they are unfulfilled in their personal life and have no time for anything else.

What went wrong? We failed to predict and anticipate what will make us happy down the line.

The 3-Year Timeframe

So, if you can’t accurately predict yourself in 10 years, how should you plan ahead? We still need to setup goals and a general sense direction for ourselves, right?

Yes, we do. We certainly need to better understand in general what kind of things make us happy, but it’s also important to keep in mind that these things change as we change. Having a desire to travel the world today may take a backseat to raising your family when you get your first child.

While not perfect, I try to build my plans and goals around a 3 year term (could be 2, could be 4 – depends on you). Anything longer and I don’t think I can predict what will really be going on then.

Three years is short enough for you to be able to visualize where you’ll end up, but it is long enough to make some real achievements in the meantime.

This is particularly pertinent when you’re thinking about your work opportunities. As I’m writing this, I have an interesting job opportunity with a startup organization on the table that I’m considering taking. It’s great in terms of getting involved in an exciting and different project, playing a key role with the company, and making a contribution to the society.

However, deep down, I know that I want to return to running my own company a couple of years down the line. So, being able to project this in 2-3 year terms and making a conscious decision that after this term, I will re-evaluate my direction makes it a lot easier to commit to this.

There will be, no doubt, people that will be skeptical of approaching this from a 3 year goal perspective. Some may say that you’re jumping around too much from one thing to another without becoming specialized in any. Others may feel that it’s too much work if you try to change your line of work so frequently.

That’s fine. This is not for everybody. Rather, this is for those who are still not entirely sure what they want to ultimately do in their lives and those that want to experience as much as possible by trying themselves in different roles. It’s simply about giving yourself a permission to realize that it’s OK to change directions after a few years.