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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

I literally fell into anti-fraud and email security back in 2012 and spent a totally unexpected chunk of my career around those topics.

The amount of people I've heard of say they want to go into email security is very small.

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I think this demostrates a far more important perspective than "have a vision" - which is easy to explain and almost impossible to execute, which is be curious, intentional and open to lots of things. The curious & open part leads you to new oppportunities, and the intentional part helps you figure out how to evaluate & where to go next.

This sounds like much better advice. Trying to plan out a tech career over decades seems like very premature optimizing. Being curious and making sure you keep learning is not only very pleasant, it’s useful. And when the tech changes, fine, no problem. Most of the big features of my life have not been plannable ahead of time.

Exactly. You can “have a vision” to accelerate full speed and hit the hard wall and just before going full throttle you are offered an opportunity to enter an open door around the corner which you have never even thought about. And that door helps you discover a new vision, that might stick for lifetime.

Also, while the original advice about “vision” sounds reasonable, it also sounds a bit dogmatic. The filpside of “career vision” is “tunnel vision”. And life is not deterministic, it has a much more probabalistic nature. Hence, curiosity and open mind.

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