It all started with a question in a job interview.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
I froze in my chair at the conference room table, unsure how to respond.
I didn’t have the luxury of thinking five years down the road. I’d recently gotten laid off, less than a year into my marketing career. I was still new in town and devoid of a support network.
I needed this job, now. I needed the income to pay the bills. And I needed the legitimacy of a stable assignment to prove my professional worth.
So, I came up with a boilerplate answer. And I ultimately landed the job.
I was set, but far from settled.
For even as I sat in my cubicle – with a full list of clients to support and a steady salary – I thought about the question from the interview.
I was still in my mid-twenties, but I’d bounced around a bit already. And I’d seen the costs of such transience.
I needed a five-year plan badly.
So, I gave my future some thought. I put a plan together. And I strove to make it a reality.
My journey to better started quietly.
I was doing well enough in my job, but I knew more mastery was on the horizon. So, I earned some Digital Marketing certifications, proudly displaying the badges in my cubicle and on my social media profiles.
Still, I knew that a certification badge could only get me so far. I resolved to think bigger.
So, I took the GMAT and applied to business schools. Then I enrolled in a Masters’ of Business Administration (MBA) program that held classes in the evenings. This allowed me to obtain full marketing training in the classroom and earn a prestigious degree – all without requiring me to quit my job.
I earned my MBA roughly five years after I had hashed out my five-year plan. Now, there was just one more step to fully attain it.
I started looking at other jobs, hoping to land a prestigious role with a prominent company. My post-MBA job, as it were.
I set a hard deadline for myself. By the time the new year arrived, I’d be in a new place professionally. Since the upcoming year was 2020, I dubbed this plan 2.0 in 2020.
But despite my best efforts, I didn’t land that job by the dawn of the new decade. And a few months after New Year’s Day, a global pandemic turned the world upside down.
My five-year plan was now in limbo. I hung on to my existing job for dear life. And my grip tightened further after my employer was acquired by a larger company – leading to job redundancy fears.
Everything I had hoped for was hopelessly off-course.
What on earth was I going to do?
Plans be damned. Seize opportunities.
That’s what I told myself as 2020 faded into the rearview.
The most restrictive portion of the pandemic had passed. My job had not been made redundant. And the holding pattern hanging over my life had started to lift.
So, I jumped on an opportunity to move over to my new employer’s corporate marketing team. I dove headfirst into the new role – making connections, drafting materials, and traveling coast to coast to evangelize the business segment I was now supporting.
Off the clock, I seized the opportunity to exercise more frequently. I joined running clubs, entered in races of longer and longer distances, and started taking home hardware from them.
None of this had been in my prior plans. All of it seemed like a happy accident.
But I wasn’t complaining about the result. I was just hoping the good times would continue.
They didn’t.
Economic headwinds led my employer to reorganize itself several times, with the shifts changing the nature of my role. Meanwhile, a series of injuries stopped my running exploits in their tracks.
Once again, I was trapped. The five-year plan had already stalled out. And now, the Carpe Diem approach had also run aground.
What on earth was I going to do?
What are you chasing?
This question was at the heart of the inquiry into my five-year plan, whether the job interviewer knew it or not.
And even after drafting that plan, I struggled to adequately address the core premise.
I found myself oscillating between prestige and stability over the intervening years, striving for one and falling back on the other when the rug inevitably got yanked from below my feet.
This process left some scars. But as those scars accumulated, my determination only deepened.
I would get this right. I would uncover the answer.
But recently, something has changed. I’ve started to wonder whether I’ve been asking the right question.
You see, I’ve been blessed with a great support network throughout. Family, friends, and peers have been there for me on every step of my winding odyssey through life.
But I’m not so sure the inverse has been true.
Sure, I’ve supported my supporters through the years. But only to a point.
For as I worked on my five-year plan – and the carpe diem era that replaced it – I mostly lost track of what was going on with my friends and family. Sometimes, I lost touch with them entirely for months on end.
It was easy to overlook this development. After all, with every twist and turn in my journey, I grew my social circle.
There were new people to connect with and new sources of support to rely on. So, I missed the obvious signs that things had gone awry with the others in my orbit.
But my eyes are wide open now.
I realize how much what I missed matters, and how little what I was chasing really meant.
Sure, it’s nice to have objectives, and the trappings of a profession can help maintain a lifestyle.
But the connections with our community are the ties that bind. Being there for those who support us — in the good times and the tough ones — is nothing short of essential. It can sustain us — enriching our experience on this rock and enhancing our legacy after we leave it.
So, consider this my re-prioritization.
I might continue to demand more of myself professionally and recreationally. But I will no longer act as this venture is Item 1A, or even 1B.
Where I’ll be in five years is hardly the point. Who will be in my orbit means far more.