ama #6 - how do i plan for next year?
a curious gap year student seeking structure in an unstructured environment
hey, i’m michael, and i have 10+ years of experience across accelerators at harvard, tks, and cornell. i enjoy working 1-1 with ambitious people. with hundreds of hours spent on coaching calls, i'd thought i'd start open sourcing some perspective.
tl;dr
figure out your best case scenario with end of the year outcomes and work backwards.
if you don’t know what the outcomes are, then map out what you do know right now using nth order thinking.
nth order thinking asks the question “and then what?” do this for every 1-3 months until you map out to the end of the year.
think through different versions of how you spend your time. you can do more than 1 thing, but make sure your priorities are clear. my recommendation is focus on 3 things maximum, otherwise you don’t have priorities.
filter for your #1 thing. what’s the one thing that you want to define this next year for you?
gap year students discover there is no ‘right answer’as it’s all a probability
different students on gap year need different things. everyone i’ve talked to has their own reasons and motivations on why they took a gap year and what they want to do with their time.
some focus on family, others use freedom to explore new projects, and every one seems to discover what’s important to them. they were surprised it was not obvious to them from day 1. they had to learn more about themselves in order to learn more about what they wanted.
some thought they wanted to be geoflexible and travel every month. the novelty and adventure was great for the first 4-5 weeks. after that they missed having the familiarity of place to call home.
some thought they wanted internships, and after a fall term, they realized they didn’t take a gap year to work their time away. they wanted to explore different topics.
others thought they could “do it all themselves.” they’ve seen others teach learn and build projects online. after months of inertia, they found they did not have nor did they want the discipline to be fully independent on full time projects.
the main shock to their perceived world view was losing an authority figure to tell them exactly what to do. there is no teacher in life saying ‘that is 100% the right answer.’ everything has a level of uncertainty.
everyone i talked to had a moment where they discovered how different it was to be solo in a journey to figuring it out.
the uncertainty is new. it’s unsettling. figuring out everything by oneself can be as suffocating as it can be fulfilling. there’s so much freedom in choice that it can be paralyzing. no one is grading your life except you. you have to decide what’s your scorecard.
“how do i plan for next year?” - curious gap year student
i’ve been keeping up great habits. i write daily and weekly reflections, but i’m feeling stuck.
the days go by, and i don’t what to do. being on gap year, feels so open ended. it feels like i can do anything. i also have so many ideas for what i could do: scale my content creation, teach myself coding, or find places to work.
to tell you the truth, it’s overwhelming. what do you think i should do?
—curious gap year student (on a climate research gap year)
practice: use nth order thinking to find your 2024 outcome goals
while i can’t tell you what to do, i’m happy to share a thought experiment to help you figure out how to embrace the discomfort that comes from uncertainty.
neither you nor i have a crystal ball, so we cannot perfectly predict the future. if you fully understand that each plan or goal for the future is your next best guess, then you can change how you are thinking about the problem.
rather than treat it as a test where there’s a right or wrong answer, treat it as a scientific experiment. dream up a larger mission. build a hypothesis to take your first steps. figure out what assumptions you are holding right now, and go for it.
as you think of this as an experiment to run, you’ll realize that you can run this over and over again. this exercise is a living lab notebook, not a fixed set of protocols.
we’re going to use nth order thinking to think through multiple scenarios for your future self.
because i’ve been inspired by trees recently, the goal here is to clearly identify what seedling of desire you want to grow into your next sequoia.
seed = what do you want to accomplish? list all things big and small.
seedling = taking that idea, if you were to prioritize it as your #1 thing working full time on pushing it forward, what could you accomplish in the first three months of next year? now, ask and then what - how about the next three months? and again and again until you hit the end of the year. do this for each seed of desire.
sequoia = take all the thought experiments for each path and figure out what your top priority is, think about if anything is missing, and then get feedback from others to see if you missed anything.
to break it down even further:
make a list of everything you want to do. include everything at first. maybe it’s 5, 10, 20 or more long. once you have the list, filter for your top 5. you might be able to do anything but you can’t do everything.
for each seed, imagine you are treating it like a full time job with a majority of your energy and focus (40+ hrs a week), what could you accomplish in 90 days? and then what’s next in the next 90 days? repeat until each row has a full end of the year path to different goals
at the end of each row, highlight what are the top accomplishments for each idea. reflect if there is anything missing. for example, in content creation do you care more about learning + creating relationships online, or being an entertainer and getting larger audience. there are different tactics for each one.
at the end, treat this as a menu for your future self. don’t order everything on the menu. select your #1 thing. for the example above, my reccomendation in bio + climate is get real world experience by the end of a gap year. 3-4 months with a team will sharpen what you could learn individually, and content can be a side project nights and weekend. the world needs more smart people working on impactful problems, not more minutes logged on streaming platforms (even though content is a great way to learn, it should be a means to an end, not an end in itself).
share and seek feedback from friends and mentors. ask what’s missing. see what they would do differently. this will help you find what makes the most sense for you.
my reccomendation is always be more ambitious in the outcome. brian chesky, ceo of airbnb ($82B) breaks this down well in his latest podcast interview:
we dont just have the principle of add a zero for the sake of it. trying to 10x something to make it quicker, faster, better challenges how you think about the problem. you need to think differently.
to think about how to 10x something, you have to identify the problem, or you won’t know what 10x means.
once you have the problem, you have to deeply understand it in order to understand what you can do.
to deeply understand it, you have to break it down to it’s core components, or what is called first principles reasoning.
add a zero to whatever you’re thinking right now. i know you’ve gotten funding before for a few thousand dollars for proof of concept projects from experiment.com and other sources. my recommendation is add a zero. if your goal is $10k for outside resources for your next lab set up, explore what $100k would look like.
there are a lot of early stage fellowships that will give you additional capital on top of the baseline you have for this gap year. for climate tech, check out:
learning how to enjoy the journey. remember, it’s an ongoing process. no one has it all figured out. understand it’s all about increasing the probability for your future self. and if you fail, learn from it, rinse and repeat.
bonus: some extra resources
the chapter wild numbers in morgan housel’s new book explains probabilistic thinking and why it’s important
the cook and the chef: musk’s secret sauce by tim urban shows probabilisitc thinking x independent thinking in action, especially helpful
if you are totally lost, then this is another good one by tim urban on understanding yourself and understanding future career paths
if you have a question or idea to share below, please do.
my goal is that the comment section is as valuable as the nyt recipe comment section: ie. more perspective + ideas from this particular topic.
or if you want to connect, feel free to send me a note on linkedin.
"at the end, treat this as a menu for your future self. don’t order everything on the menu. select your #1 thing"
Really resonated with this.