Preparation

When it comes to career plans, we need to have both short-term objectives and long-term objectives. What can be even better if we cast our long-term objectives into short-term objectives? The strategy of chunking works. That's all neat and clean but only on the paper.

If anyone wants to have a glimpse into the future (why not? We worry about it so often), it's kind of helpful to look into job market trends and get skilled accordingly. It's only logical to infer that job opportunities follow where monetary investments have the highest returns. So, identifying opportunities requires one to do thorough research and evaluate opportunities in terms of pay-offs and risks involved.

This brings me to an interesting fact about human nature we are too often short-sighted in our estimates of opportunities that lay before us. We may select the opportunity lying just in front of our eyes, not the better one that lies in the distant future. Why? for fear that we may miss the opportunity in front of us. As far as the opportunity in the distant future is concerned, we become skeptical that the opportunity in the distant future may involve more effort (hence more cost), more risk (more prone to failure), and hence, why bother with it?

There's an upside to seeking distant opportunities, i.e., it involves more learning and focus. One has more options while aiming for distant opportunities. One can chart and get on the path of one's liking but as it requires persevering, we cringe back into comfort. But then, life happens and we get side-tracked and our lofty career plans gather dust on paper.

Since any opportunity whether short-term or long term requires preparation, it reminds me of a quote by Louis Pasteur. Chance favors only the prepared mind. So prepare one must! Being adults, we provide for ourselves and we have the need to survive as well as thrive. Keeping that in view, how is it possible to carve out time & space from our schedules and outside of work when we have other responsibilities? That requires flexibility. A simple strategy can be that one may plan for the week instead of the days and swap productive/urgent time blocks as urgent issues arise without informing. Any strategy needs to involve downtime and recuperation; otherwise, learning gets affected and one's preparation may suffer.

Another important point is to prioritize direction and not worry about the time/speed at which meeting any objective takes that much otherwise, one would lose out on invaluable learning that comes with preparation.