Life Plan | Hacker News Reader

Life Plan

spencerfry.com

19 pointsspencerfry13 comments

He "plans" to be CEO of Apple in 15 years' time. He thinks he'll be "on the radar" for this on the strength of

1. a startup doing VoIP;

2. another startup enabling designers, artists, photographers, etc., to put their portfolios online;

3. another unspecified "game changing technology startup" he hopes to start, although he doesn't have any idea what it'll be.

I venture to suggest that this may not be very realistic.

It's not supposed to be realistic, he says it's his wildest fantasy.

Um, no. He says it's always been his wildest dream, and then puts it in something he describes as "what I plan on doing over the next fifty years of my life". Which to me, at least, says not "of course this one isn't really going to happen" but "yeah, this is very ambitious, but I'm seriously going to try to do it". Which is ... well, yes, very ambitious.

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."

Les Brown

The Cynic: or, more likely, you'll end up drifting in space endlessly.

I actually agree with the sentiment though, it'd just be nice to have a saying that's a little bit more scientifically valid.

Technically, if you're in space you're among the stars, at least as seen from earth, even if you're actually far away from them, slowly using up all of your oxygen in a ship which will soon become your tomb.

In those terms, you're pretty much 'amongst the stars' even while on earth, as can be ascertained with a glimpse at the sky at night.

> I actually agree with the sentiment though, it'd just be nice to have a saying that's a little bit more scientifically valid.

If your plan is to drive ten miles and stop, even if it goes perfectly the best you'll get is ten miles away. If you plan to travel to somewhere a thousand miles away by any means possible, even if it doesn't go perfectly smoothly the chances are good that you'll travel a lot more than ten miles which, if you are measuring success as distance from your starting point which many people with a Western set-goal-achieve-goal-feel-success mindset are doing, is an improvement on the outcome of your less ambitious plan.

les brown should learn some basic astronomy.

"If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans" :)

Even though I'm not religious, I think this is true, especially with respect to startups.

True enough, but you've got to love his ambition! He's twenty-five, it's all in front of him. (Of course a lot of HN'ers are probably around that age anyway.)

Plans are useless, planning is essential.

It's always refreshing for me to hear about other startup CEOs talking about investing more than 2-3 years in a web startup, thanks for that. We're coming up on year 2 of our venture. We're making money, but we haven't broached 6 figures yet it sometimes feels like we're a failure. When we got into this, it was supposed to be a 1-2 year commitment, now it looks more like a 4-6 years. At least it's still fun!

now write out a detailed plan on how to achieve it or it will just be a dream and never be achieved.

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