you sat with your notebook yesterday and wrote out your five year future.

the city. the house. the kind of work. the energy of your mornings and the quiet of your evenings.

if you haven’t done it yet, stop reading.

come back tomorrow.

‼️ if you haven’t then click here to complete that first.

this piece only makes sense if that vision exists,

not in your head, but on paper.

career frameworks share one big delusion.

people plan their careers in isolation. they start with “what role do I want next?” or “how do i get into X company?”. people treat career moves like shopping for the next item on a menu. but you don’t live in a menu. you live a life. and careers are one part of it.

what happens when you do that? you choose a goal that sounds impressive. what your parents would approve of. what would make a good linkedin update. but you don't know what a day in your life should feel like. so you optimize for proxies. title progression. salary benchmarks. team size. funding rounds.

that causes a lot of problems. you take the promotion because it's there. you chase the salary because it's higher. you switch companies because your friends left the company. three years later, you're successful and miserable. you achieved someone else's definition of winning.

that’s why we began with a visualization. that visualization you wrote is full of clues about what you actually want. not what sounds good in interviews. not what impresses your college friends. what you want a regular fucking day to feel like. because your career decisions need to align with the life you’re designing. not the other way around. if you wrote that you live in a beach facing home with two kids, you’re implicitly deciding on a certain type of income, city, job intensity, and even team size. If you visualized working with ten other sharp operators, you're signalling a specific kind of culture and ownership style.

pull out what you wrote. actually pull it out. this article is useless without it.

let's decode it.

we're breaking your life into three pillars.

work, wealth, and your inner circle.

these are the 3 core pillars of life.

**yes, building this clarity isn’t easy.

but nothing that comes easy is worth doing anyway. to make things easy and actionable i’ve broken this down into 3 parts.**

today, we will decode

your five year life into a wholistic map for work, money, & personal life.

tomorrow, we will map

the milestones that must be true at year 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

day after we will action on

a 12 month execution plan that’s tactical like a product roadmap.

sounds hard? don’t worry.

follow me and just WRITE as we go. you just have to commit to writing things down, clearly. thinking alone is a loophole your brain will exploit.

work (the part you keep lying about)

first, forget the title. the temptation is to jump straight to job titles. don't. you've been doing that your whole career, and here you are. look at what you wrote about your actual workday.

here's what to hunt for: the pace. did you describe back to back meetings with quick decisions? or long stretches of focused work?

look for feeling of the kind of problems you're solving. did they feel like technical puzzles that require deep expertise? or did they feel like business challenges that need strategic thinking? or maybe it felt like people problems that demand emotional intelligence? in your visualization how did you feel about the work?

the scope of impact. some people wrote about features used by millions. others wrote about transforming how their specific team operates. neither is better. but confusing them guarantees frustration.