Why career planning is a waste of time

Or why your best guess beats careful planning.

In reality, people frequently don’t know what they want and psychology has proved it. 

We are very poor at what will make us happy in the future, We “miswant.”

The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it’s such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information.



Maybe the Chaos Theory of Career Development makes more sense.

if you ask people about their career decisions, almost 70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events.

This seems to tie in with Purposive Drift: Making it Up as We Go Along by Richard Oliver at Change This

Your life is not a project plan.  Nobody knows where they will be in five years time.

Life is more open, much messier, more ambiguous, more complex, more mysterious, more surprising and filled with more possibilities for good or for ill than we can possibly imagine.



He argues that we revert to “machine-like’ thinking because it promises a world of predictability and certainty to mask the frightening thought of our own fragility.

He says we are all more ignorant than we know and smarter than we think and believes our real compass point  is our sense of well-being.

Making it up as you go along, he calls Purposive Drift and that’s a perfectly reasonable, responsible and realistic approach to life.

Seems to be the one I took.