Five years is an interesting unit of time to think about. Short enough to feel concrete, long enough to allow for genuine transformation. Where will you be in five years? What will you have built, broken, learned, abandoned?
The Danger of Projection
Most five-year projections are wrong, and they are wrong in a specific way: they extrapolate the present rather than imagining genuine change. You look at where you are, add incremental improvement, and call it a plan. The problem is that five years rarely produces incremental anything. It produces reversals, surprises, and opportunities you could not have anticipated from where you stand today.
The people I know who are doing interesting things five years on are almost never doing what they planned. They are doing something adjacent, something that emerged from an unexpected encounter or a crisis they navigated or a door that opened because they happened to be standing in the right place.
What Planning Is Actually For
This is not an argument against planning. Planning is useful not because the plan survives contact with reality — it usually does not — but because the process of planning clarifies what you actually want. The map is wrong; the exercise of making it is valuable.
Five years hence, I will probably not be exactly where I am aiming. But the aiming will have mattered. It always does.