Facebook’s employee handbook reads the following:
“There is no point in having a 5-year plan in this industry. With each step forward, the landscape you’re walking on changes. So we have a pretty good idea of where we want to be in six months, and where we want to be in 30 years. And every six months, we take another look at where we want to be in 30 years to plan out the next six months.”
v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-bookI see this as a good planning strategy both for Facebook and for life. When asked where I want to be in five years, I find it difficult to give a good answer. I’d like to argue that the idea of a five year plan is flawed.
It’s easy to plan the next six months since the details can be set in stone. You sign a new lease, accept a job offer, or register for the classes you’ll take next semester. For the most part you can’t, and probably wouldn’t want to, take these concrete actions five years in advance. My next six months look like starting a new lease in New York City and continuing to work as a software engineer at Ramp.
I would argue it’s also easy to plan for the next 30 years, although in a different way. When Facebook says they have a good idea of where they want to be in 30 years, I doubt they mean an exact plan of what products to build. Rather, I imagine it’s a broader vision for growth of the company and impact on the world. I see my 30 year planning the same way: what kind of person do I want to be in 30 years? What impact do I want to have?
Over my next 30 years, I want to become an exceptional engineer and operator, build widely impactful technology with a positive impact on the world, and establish deep connections with the most talented people in tech. It’s broad, but a 30 year plan is more of a compass than a map.
The five year plan is where it gets tricky. It’s too far away to be concrete and actionable like a six month plan, but too close to think as ambitiously as a 30 year plan. I can’t say that in five years I want to be “an engineer at X company doing Y” or “a founder in X industry building Z” — at best I could give a tentative array of possible outcomes. Facebook said it best: “With each step forward, the landscape you’re walking on changes.”
So in summary, my five year plan is more like 10 six month plans leveraging my evolving 30 year plan as a guiding compass. It helps me align my ultimate goals with achievable short-term action, allowing the pieces to gradually fall into place along the way.