Fifteen Years, Not Five
My husband and I talk about work more than any reasonable couple should.
He recently caught up with an old colleague, the kind of conversation that starts as a courtesy call and turns into something more useful. They were weighing how to approach their next moves, and somewhere in it she told him the trick she uses to sort through options: think about what you want in fifteen years, not five. Not the next job. Not the next title. The version of your career you'll actually be living a decade and a half from now, and whether the choice in front of you is walking you toward it or just away from where you are.
That one line has been rattling around in my head ever since he relayed it to me. Five years is a planning horizon most of us can hold comfortably: a role, a raise, maybe a move. Fifteen years is long enough that the plausible answers change entirely. You stop optimizing for the next rung and start asking what you actually want to have built, learned, or changed by the time you get there. It's a harder question, and I think that's exactly why it's the more honest one.
It also put words to something I already believed but hadn't said out loud in a while: making a difference matters more to me than progress on a ladder. A five-year plan can run on momentum alone. A fifteen-year one needs a reason.
That kind of thinking connects to a mantra I heard years ago that's stuck with me since.
"At work, you either want to be learning or earning, and ideally both. If neither applies, it's time to move on." A mantra from an old colleague, years ago
It's a blunt filter, and I've found it holds up better than most career advice I've collected over the years. The most rewarding jobs I've had were rarely the highest paying or the most prestigious on paper. They were the ones where I was learning the most: figuring out how to solve a problem I didn't have a template for, or finding my way around an obstacle nobody had warned me about. Earning matters, and it's a legitimate answer on its own for a season. But learning is the one that compounds, and it's the one I notice missing first when a job has quietly gone stale.
I think that's also the real answer to a question people ask me more than any other: what actually makes someone good at pulling a story out of complicated work? It isn't a writing trick. It's that I like to ask questions, genuinely, past the point where I already understand the polite version of the answer. The fifteen-year question and the learning-or-earning mantra are both, underneath it, permission to keep asking. What do I actually want. What am I actually getting out of this. Neither has a tidy five-minute answer, and that's rather the point.
My husband and I will probably still be talking about this at dinner next week, and the week after that, the way we talk about most things worth thinking through twice. Fifteen years from now, I'd like to still be the person asking the question, not the one who stopped.