[sidcool]

I feel the same debilitating anxiety when it comes to planning out career. It's become so bad that I have started ignoring it and instead checking emails and Hacker News for solace. Questions that keep me up:

1. What to learn next?

2. Is this the right career?

3. Shouldn't I be a CTO by now? What a failure!

4. Dude, you forgot about your family!! (Gasping for air)

so on and so forth...

[southerndrift]

Life is not a race. Either nobody is judging you for your choices or whoever is judging you doesn't have the right to do so.

If you ask yourself what you want to do instead of asking yourself what you want to achieve, the conflicts that demand solace should be gone.

That said, it's still a nice game to try to achieve the most. But that's stressful and you should be in a position of choosing that stress, not submitting to it.

[Topolomancer]

This might also be a good time to pitch the 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius again (a time-honoured classic that pops up very often in HN discussions). I cannot stress how much insight is contained in this book---it may help you achieve a healthy detachment from these things.

[kulahan]

>If you ask yourself what you want to do instead of asking yourself what you want to achieve, the conflicts that demand solace should be gone.

Easier said than done. A decade into my career, I still have no idea. I just kinda go with the flow.

[tc7]

Yep, this resonates a lot. Not fun.

I think it's something in those steps, starting with "What to do next", that leads down that rabbit hole.

Maybe try working backwards -- "what do I want my life to be like in a year/2 years?" I think working back helps narrow down the infinite immediate options - some things become obvious must-dos, others not so much.

Years go by really fast. This sucks on one hand, because anxiety and lack of direction can easily suck up a whole year with nothing to show for it. But it's also awesome to view things on longer scales, because you don't have to "be" anything next week, or next month, just slightly better than the week before, and at the end of a year, a lot has changed.

Best of luck!

[sidcool]

Thanks, this helps.

[coldtea]

>3. Shouldn't I be a CTO by now? What a failure!

Compared to how many billion people on earth?

[kkarakk]

no compared to a pool of peers that is measured in the tens of thousands(if i'm being generous). in that case it genuinely becomes a case of "you fucked up at this point in your career and that person didn't"

[coldtea]

>it genuinely becomes a case of "you fucked up at this point in your career and that person didn't"

Of you know, the peers are tens of thousands (including people out of good schools and such), but the positions are like a few hundred or thousand, so statistically you're far less likely to be in that position than to not be.

The key is that even if nobody had "screwed up", there would still be fewer CTO/CEOs that people qualified similarly for that job.