When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Maybe you wanted to be a cop. Or a doctor. But then in college, you realized that you don’t like biology at all. So in childhood, you thought you’ll keep liking that thing but your future self didn’t agree with that. This mismatch applies to you right now as well. It’s not just limited to your childhood.
6 years back, I really wanted to become a CTO. Fast forward to today, I don’t want to do that at all. This is something the 6-years-younger-me would not be able to comprehend as to what made this drastic change happen.
This data point leads me to accept that maybe I don’t really know what I will end up liking 6 years into the future. The takeaway for me became:
Do more of what you NOW like.
Because you don’t know what you WILL want.
Whenever you’re answering the question where do you see yourself in 5 years, that answer is a proxy to what you wish would be true right now but that might not sit well with a future version of yourself.