I've talked with a few friends recently who are wondering about the eternal question "what should I do with my life". Or maybe more simply they asked "what should I do next". The problem with these questions is they are so open-ended as to be nearly impossible for most people to answer. What to do next is very hard to answer if you don't know what you want. And what to do with my life is so vague in that hopefully that journey is very long and more importantly you never know what the last stop will be.
I talked about two concepts that have helped me:
1. A version of Warren Buffet's 5-25
2. Thinking about career in 5 year blocks
## Buffet's 5-25
This has been written in various forms e.g. https://www.mayooshin.com/buffett-5-25-rule/ but boils down to a fairly simple idea.
1. Write down the top 25 (or more) things you want to achieve in life.
2. Stack them in priority order. The order is your priority order, not what other people think.
3. Draw a line under the fifth item.
4. Do those five things and ignore the others completely
Various writers explain this in different ways and put various rules around it. For me I revisit this list about once per year, often at New Year's. Is the list still accurate? Did I achieve any of these and can cross them off the list?
## The 5 year block
I read somewhere that most people tend to spend around five years in various stages of their career. It's not always that people change companies every five years but rather that somewhere in the range of five years you shift. Thinking about that a little and you get phases like learning the ropes, becoming proficient, mastering your craft, getting a bit bored, winding down and moving on. The specific stages or steps don't really matter and five years isn't perfect either.
The main idea though is to stop thinking about "the rest of my life" and start thinking about how many of these blocks do you have left assuming all goes well and you live a normal lifetime. For me, the answer is something like six more blocks. That's a lot. And also not a lot. So I want to ensure that each block has some sort of meaning (to me at least).
## Putting this together
Putting this together and you can see that having a 5-25 list and hence five things to focus on **and** thinking about things in blocks vs. trying to sort out the next 20/30/40 years should feel empowering. It should give you a decent idea about where to focus. And once you know what the destination is, figuring out the route is a lot easier.
I talked about two concepts that have helped me:
1. A version of Warren Buffet's 5-25
2. Thinking about career in 5 year blocks
## Buffet's 5-25
This has been written in various forms e.g. https://www.mayooshin.com/buffett-5-25-rule/ but boils down to a fairly simple idea.
1. Write down the top 25 (or more) things you want to achieve in life.
2. Stack them in priority order. The order is your priority order, not what other people think.
3. Draw a line under the fifth item.
4. Do those five things and ignore the others completely
Various writers explain this in different ways and put various rules around it. For me I revisit this list about once per year, often at New Year's. Is the list still accurate? Did I achieve any of these and can cross them off the list?
## The 5 year block
I read somewhere that most people tend to spend around five years in various stages of their career. It's not always that people change companies every five years but rather that somewhere in the range of five years you shift. Thinking about that a little and you get phases like learning the ropes, becoming proficient, mastering your craft, getting a bit bored, winding down and moving on. The specific stages or steps don't really matter and five years isn't perfect either.
The main idea though is to stop thinking about "the rest of my life" and start thinking about how many of these blocks do you have left assuming all goes well and you live a normal lifetime. For me, the answer is something like six more blocks. That's a lot. And also not a lot. So I want to ensure that each block has some sort of meaning (to me at least).
## Putting this together
Putting this together and you can see that having a 5-25 list and hence five things to focus on **and** thinking about things in blocks vs. trying to sort out the next 20/30/40 years should feel empowering. It should give you a decent idea about where to focus. And once you know what the destination is, figuring out the route is a lot easier.