Why 10 Year Plans are Wrong

Ten years ago, when Ben Casnocha and I published The Startup of You, we wrote that we have entered the Age of the Inconceivable, an era in which things we previously couldn’t even have imagined happen again and again and again.

Now that we have updated and are re-releasing the book a decade later, this is only more true. Think pandemics, political upheavals (the Trump presidency, Brexit, and so forth), geopolitical shifts (the continued rise of China, war in Ukraine), and environmental crises (fires, floods, droughts). These challenges that test our adaptability and resilience aren’t outliers. They’re the new normal.

Industries may collapse, politics may shake economies, natural disasters may reshape how we live, new technologies may make age-old professions obsolete, and global pandemics may paralyze life as we know it. Yet despite such upheavals, some organizations and professionals have been able to not just survive, but thrive. They adapt to radically altered market conditions, reassess their aspirations, tap into the resources of their networks, and creatively generate novel opportunities for themselves. We saw this behavior in action during the Covid-19 pandemic. People carved out new livelihoods by catering to sudden shifts in consumer demand for things like masks, virtual tutoring, and sweet baked goods during an overall bitter time, to name just a few. These people responded to shock and uncertainty by relying on their entrepreneurial instincts.

What’s required now is an entrepreneurial mindset paired with the concrete skills of start-up entrepreneurs. If you want to seize the new opportunities and meet the challenges of today’s fractured career landscape, you need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career. The Startup of You is about making the entrepreneurial way work for you. Whatever your version of a successful career is, you can realize your ambitions by thinking and acting like an entrepreneur.

There are real skills needed, and those skills are what I’ll be sharing in the following series of articles. This piece is about why the old ways of career planning don’t work in the Age of the Inconceivable.

The Old Way of Thinking About Careers 

The bestselling career book of all time goes by the whimsical title What Color Is Your Parachute? Its author, Richard Bolles, sums up the main idea this way: “It is important, before you enter the job hunt, to decide exactly what you are looking for—whether you call it your passion, or your purpose in life, or your mission. . . . Passion first, job-hunt later.” Bolles says to listen to your heart. Find your true north by filling out worksheets or engaging in deep, thoughtful introspection. Once you’ve determined your mission, then develop a long-term plan for fulfilling it. You’re urged to figure out who you are and where you want to be in ten years, and then work backward to develop a road map for getting there.

You see similar advice everywhere. Number two of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the end in mind”: You should produce a personal mission statement that puts your goals in focus. In The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren advances the idea that each of us has a singular purpose for being on this planet.

Don’t listen to this advice. It’s not that it’s bad, per se. It’s just incomplete. And impractical.

The parachute philosophy does have strengths. It’s important to have worthy aspirations: If you are passionate about something or care about what you’re contributing to, you’ll very likely have fun, stay committed, and achieve more. This is also the right way to invest for the long term: To find out whether you’re good at something and whether you like it, you need to stick with it for a meaningful period of time.

But while these strengths made the passion/purpose philosophies relevant in the past, today there are huge problems with this approach to career planning.

Why Ten-Year, Passion-Based Planning Is Wrong

First, the parachute approach presumes a static world, as does the advice to “begin with the end in mind.” This is the Age of the Inconceivable, in which constant change is the rule. Deciding where you want to be in ten years and then formulating a plan for getting there might work if our environments were unchanging. It might work if getting from point A to point B in your career were like crossing a lake in a boat on a calm summer’s day. But you’re not on a pedal boat in a tranquil lake; you’re whitewater rafting down level-five rapids in a river that could cause you to capsize at any moment. Conventional career planning can work under conditions of relative stability, but in times of uncertainty and inexorable change, it is severely limiting, if not dangerous.

You will change. The environment around you will change. And your allies and competitors will change.

What you should be asking yourself is not what color your parachute is, but can that parachute keep you aloft in changing and often stormy conditions? The unfortunate truth is that even if your parachute isn’t shredded and tattered already, it could end up stuck in a tree at any moment.

Second, the parachute philosophy presumes that fixed, accurate self-knowledge can be easily attained with introspection. In fact, lofty questions about identity and moral purpose, along with deceptively simple ones like “What am I passionate about?” take time to work out, and the answers frequently evolve over time. Yes, you’ll notice certain themes in your career interests, but it’s unwise, no matter your stage of life, to try to pinpoint a single dream around which your existence should revolve.

Third, just because your heart comes alive at a calling doesn’t mean someone will pay you to do it. If you can’t find someone who wants to employ you to pursue your dream job, or if you can’t financially sustain yourself—that is, earn a salary that allows you to live the lifestyle you prefer—then trying to turn your passion into a career doesn’t really get you very far.

So, what is the most important thing when settling on a professional direction? A competitive advantage and disciplined, adaptive planning, which we call ABZ Planning.

Stay tuned for forthcoming articles where I’ll go into detail about how to develop those capacities.

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Please share in the comments section: How have you conceived of career planning? What might you do differently? 

Text adapted from my book with Ben Casnocha: The Startup of You: Adapt, Take Risks, Grow Your Network, and Transform Your Career (Currency, an imprint of Random House, 2022).