Best longterm goal? Not having one

I have recently watched this video by Jason Lengstorf where he chats with Maggie Appleton and she talks a lot about how she never had any clear longterm goals in her career, and how that actually was a good thing and possibly the key to her happiness. That got me thinking...

I've never been someone who plans ahead a lot. I had no idea what to do for a living when I finished high school. I never really made any plans of "getting married before I'm 25" or "owning a house before I'm 30". After I began working as a developer, I never really followed a roadmap or knew what kind of developer I wanted to be 5 years down the road. I mostly went with my gut and focused on the things I enjoyed doing.

I started my career mainly as a backend developer, and everything was fun to me back then. As I had to touch the frontend more and more during my work, I realized I really liked that. So I decided to get into it! Not long after I was a primarily frontend developer, working on big web apps and making important architectural decisions. Fast-forward a few years, I got really into the "front of the frontend" side of things, and now I build websites (not web apps) for a living! I even do some designing every once in a while.

Looking from outside, that may look like I wasted the first years of my career learning things I don't use anymore. If I had planned ahead and had a set goal in mind, surely I could have achieved so much more by now, right?

The thing is, back then I had very little idea of what I liked. Backend was fun to me because it was new, but quickly it became clear that what I enjoyed was something else. And I knew next to nothing about frontend development because every other developer I knew was backend-focused. So, how was I supposed to know I'd enjoy working on the frontend more? Right, I wouldn't.

So, maybe, probably, I'd have spent years focusing on my goal of becoming the best backend developer, while not really enjoying it that much. And knowing myself, I just know that I could never do my best work if I didn't enjoy what I was doing. I'd have sacrificed all the fun I had along the way, and probably still feel not good enough by now.

This anecdote was focused on web development, but it really could apply to most longterm goals in life.

My wife and I always wanted to live abroad. We thought of Canada, but eventually decided we were going to live in Germany instead. The first step was getting our EU citizenship, which would then be followed by us leaving everything in Brazil behind and diving into the unknown in a different continent. It was our longterm goal for many years.

Eventually we figured out that we weren't living our life in Brazil to the fullest because of that. We weren't trying to find a better apartment because we'd move abroad. We didn't get better furniture because we'd move abroad. We didn't start studying what we wanted because we'd move abroad. Essentially we were making some of the best years of our lives worse just because we had a set idea in mind since many years before.

We changed that, and started actually doing what we could to enjoy our lives here more. The end result? We realized we really liked living here and that longterm goal of moving to another country was not that important, or at least not that urgent. It was such a relief to get that pressure off our shoulders. It even played a huge part in giving me a feeling of belonging somewhere.

I consider myself a pretty happy person. I do think a lot of it comes from me never really expecting much from myself, and from internalizing the phrase "the journey is the reward" pretty early in life. Not expecting much from myself is not necessarily a lack of self-confidence, it might actually be the opposite: I trust myself to become a better, wiser person with time. And that wiser Matt is way more well-informed to make life decisions than dumb old me.

So much is expected of us by other people already that I feel that often the kindest thing you can do to yourself is to not expect anything. Future you has a way better idea of what they want than present you does. The best thing you can do for future you is to keep chasing what you like. Make your brain happy. It usually makes good life decisions when you're happy.

Goals are not inherently a bad thing. They keep us moving forward. But while dreaming of the treasure at the end of the rainbow, don't miss the breathtaking beauty of the rainbow itself.