I opened up an old notebook this morning, and skimmed to the last page I had notes on. The note just read ‘Remember to predict the future’. Past me needs to get better at leaving me notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was running a friend through the question of ‘Where do you want to be in 10 years time?’ last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are so many jobs that ask this question during interviews, which is how we got onto the subject, and she said that she hates the question. She doesn’t *want* to be working in her current field, she doesn’t *want* to be in her current location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The point of the 10 year plan is this: Your professional life is a project. You are setting the scope of that 10 year project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I explained to her that what she was giving me were a lot of ‘Won’t Haves’ from the Moscow prioritisation, but that I was hearing no kind of ‘Must Have’ points: Everything was about what she didn’t want and nothing was focused on what she actually wants in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It got me thinking about my own 10 year plan and reflecting on the last 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
10 years ago last month, I graduated with honours, a fully qualified Chemist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was working for Hassnet at the time and was already doing the LPM thing when we had cases in, and then took up a local job in the midlands, really putting my degree to use. It was soul crushing. I could have designed a machine to do my job for me. I was so depressed there that I burst into tears on several occasions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To put that in context; I was 25 – I had been working since I was 15. First with newspaper deliveries (I was terrible with that one), then hospitality (which I was great<\/strong> at), and during my time at college, I would do studies during the day, leave college and go to my job as a manager at the coffee shop, then leave there and go home to either work a case if we had stuff in, or to study more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was under the stress of three different competing priorities most of the time, and never cracked, but this one place, with this one awful manager got to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was the day I started looking into better business practices. By the end of the year I had packed that in, trained my replacements (They brought on 2 people to do the work I had been doing solo) and gone to seek my fortune in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n