Why I don’t make long-term plans

Since I recently moved from Beijing to the Bay Area, everyone is asking me if the move is “permanent”.

When I did the opposite move four years ago, I was asked the exact same question, every day. Back then, I wrote the blog post “The ‘Potted Plant’ Mindset”, where I said:

“Why do I need to stay in any place ‘permanently’? While most people find the process of being uprooted painful, I actually came to enjoy the process of adjusting to a new culture and new environment. Instead of fearing and avoiding change, I now embrace and welcome change. And I consider this a major competitive advantage in our fast-changing world today. Embrace unpredictability, don’t over-plan, and consider it a privilege to delete the word ‘permanent’ from your dictionary.”

Four years later, my view is still the same. I’m philosophically opposed to doing any long-term planning. Here’s why, and what I think we should do instead:

1. It’s futile to do any planning in this world

The fact that we’re living in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world has been talked about ad nauseam, so I won’t repeat it here. But in the past, it was mostly discussed in the business world. Now it’s starting to affect every one of us, in very real ways.

In the last four years, the world started to change so fast that sometimes it feels like spinning out of control.

How could you have predicted the pandemic? How could you have predicted a game-changing technology like ChatGPT? How could you have predicted the world order and the power dynamics between big nations? How could you have predicted wars and the potential for more wars?

I spent covid in China, when sudden lockdowns and policy changes became a fact of life. During covid, people would sometimes ask me about my travel plans in the next week, and I would say “I don’t even know if I can get out of my house this afternoon”.

Against this backdrop, it’s simply futile to make long-term plans. How can I say a move is “permanent” when I don’t even know what my circumstances will be six months from now?

2. Planning often means limiting yourself

When making a plan, you’re constrained by what you know today and what the world is like today.

But in five years, the world will have changed and you will have changed. New industries will appear. New job types will be created. New trends will surface. You will be exposed to more fields, more people, more ideas. Your aspirations and interests will change. You will have outgrown your former self. So trying to make a plan about the future will only end up putting yourself in a box.

3. The best way to plan for the future is to focus on the present

When it comes to career planning, I’m a staunch believer of “Do what you do well, and the opportunities will follow.” When you do your job well, you become discoverable. You develop a reputation. Opportunities will naturally come to you.

I joined a VC firm upon graduation because my bosses read the content I wrote in my college internship. I joined ByteDance after that thanks to the referral of folks who followed the content I did at GGV.

Rather than wasting time trying to plan a future that cannot be planned, we should just focus on doing our current job well.

4. In a fast changing world, the best option is to have more options

What can we do to cope with extreme volatility? Instead of predicting our options, we should focus our energy on maximizing our options.

What seems like a great option today could turn out to be a horrible choice a few years down the road, so we need to be able to switch gears quickly.

More options for where to live. More options for which industry to be in. More options for what role to take.

It could mean learning more varied skills, being able to navigate in more cultures, building relationships with more people… so that when the world changes, you won’t be caught flat-footed.

Part of having more options is becoming a generalist. To me, this is also the best way to ensure your job will not be replaced by AI. AI is great at narrow tasks, but less great at integrating across broad disciplines and ideas.

In the book “Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialist world”, David Epstein writes: “Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.”

To become a generalist, we should get used to thinking in terms of “skills”, not “jobs”. For example, writing is a skill, not a job. Even though I consider writing to be a skill of mine, I don’t want to become a full-time writer. The ability to create compelling content is going to be useful in whatever job I might do.

In the same vein, coding is a skill, not a job. Selling is a skill, not a job.

You may not be able to predict the exact job you’ll undertake in 10 years, but the more skills you hone, the better-positioned you will be to grasp the best opportunities when they surface.

Above all, we need flexibility, open-mindedness, and the ability to take changes in stride.

5. Instead of planning, think investing

In the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, he wrote: “All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.” I can’t agree more.

Creating content, learning a language, working out, building a network, doing good work…
These are all things that have compound interest. They may not have immediate short-term benefits, but if you consistently do it over the long term, you’ll reap significant rewards.

Take podcasting as an example. 90% of podcasts don’t get past episode 3. To be in the top 1% of podcasts in the world, you only need to publish 21 episodes.

Just by persisting, you will already be at the top of the pack.

Think of these investments as planning seeds. Someday when someone has some opportunity, they’re going to think of you. You’re not going to be able to predict when, who and where, but rest assure that as long as you keep planting the seeds, one of them will grow into a tree.