A little bit off topic: Setting goals is something that I'm pretty bad at - at work, I set obvious goals like "finish project X by Y.", but other than that, I have a hard time setting goals in my life. I have some higher level goals - eat healthy, exercise, read a technical book every quarter, but barely anything approaching SMART goals. Because of this, I feel like I lack ambition sometimes. How do you identify goals? What do your goals look like? How do you measure yourself against them?
Like this. Reading a technical book is of little value. Using the knowledge contained in the book to give you the skills you need to get you where you want your life to go is of great value. So the first step is visualising (important) where you see yourself and your future career and then retrospectively determining the skills you need to get there. It's a process I think of like dragging yourself up by your bootstraps. If you can visualise yourself as a successful person, making the intermediate steps to equip yourself for that eventuality is easier.
Make a timeline for the next 10 years. Where are you trying to go? What are you doing to get there? Try to be specific about your plans and actions and how they will realize your goals. This is not an easy exercise. Making a timeline of your past can be helpful for getting perspective. I'm relatively planful, but I have trouble planning more than about 3-5 years out, although a few times I've had pretty clear 8 year plans (some of which actually came to pass). A friend with ADHD got this exercise from his therapist. I think this is a great exercise for anyone.
Every time I bring this exercise up, someone says this. What's terrifying about thinking about a 10 year plan? Realizing that you don't have one?
My wife decided she wanted to be a professor when she was in high school. She's three years into a tenure track job. She's been working towards this for nearly 15 years.
Building non-trivial skills or things of value takes time and usually requires a plan. All my startups had multi-year plans, even if things didn't work out as we'd envisioned.
At one point I decided I wanted to learn to speak other languages. I studied Japanese for a year, got a chance to move to China, and studied Chinese regularly until I got conversational. I wanted (and still want) to study others, but things went in another direction.
Another time, I decided I wanted to get better at math. It took me about a year to formulate a clear plan: I decided to get a PhD. There were some barriers (I had dropped out of my undergrad, for example) and it took a while to get on track. That was 8 years ago. I graduated in July.
