They say there are only two people you should truly listen to in your life. Not your closest family, not your customers, but yourself at age 8 and 80.
Age 8 represents your dreams (lookahead), and 80 represents your memories (lookbehind). It’s obviously not a literal thing, or I would be screwed, because I’ve never really had any dreams the way I currently view them.
Metaphor or not, it’s okay to have nascently formed dreams. It’s a perfectly valid dream to go to the moon or be a trillionaire. I think there exists selfish dreams and selfless dreams though, and I basically only had selfish dreams. Now, at 22, a lot of my dreams are more selfless.
To elaborate, I think selfish dreams focus on the result. Money, power, fame, material possessions, even achievements. You need not think too hard about how you get there. Selfless dreams on the other hand, necessarily involve some sort of individual agency, because ideally you would be the one to make it happen. You don’t think to lay out all the steps, but you do need to actually insert yourself into the process. Some kids definitely dream that cancer will be cured by some random scientific team to save their ailing relative or something, but that’s out of scope.
Why do I make the distinction? Because I believe that selfless dreams turn into visions, and you need to be armed with visions as an adult. Selfish dreams can spawn visions, but aren’t useful on their own. Here, I define vision as sort of your “20 year plan.” What is something you want to get done in the next few decades that only you can accomplish1, and that the world would be worse off without?
8 year olds are not really capable of formulating this, but their dreams act as good precursors to visions, especially if they’re already selfless. At that age, I was dreaming about having my own self-sufficient flying car with a Star Trek fabricator onboard. I mention this because I always had a lack of long term vision for myself, despite having selfish dreams as most people do. I’ve never really sat down and pondered what I wanted to get done that only I can do1.
I’ve changed a lot in the last 6 months. I think it was the culmination of everything I’ve learnt in the last 3 years. Meeting my 8 year old self, he would probably be surprised at how long it takes to get through the schooling system on an average schedule. I’m not saying I would be prepared for engineering work at age 15, but we need to hire more high school interns across the board2.
Meeting my 80 year old self, I would have no idea what he would say. Maybe this is unnatural, but I’ve always had trouble imagining my older selves. Keeping to the rule of thumb though, I would try to maximize how well I treat and love people, and implement my vision as fiercely as I can.
As for my vision, it’s probably this as of writing:
I want to shape the social computing landscape such that machine intelligence enhances the best of existing social patterns and paradigms while not amplifying the worst of human behaviour. I wish to do this by building effective products and services that create incentive structures aligning with these goals. I would be the one capable of doing this because I will seek to become the expert of the blend between social computing, effective incentive structures, and human behaviour.
I’ll work on getting it to sound fancier.
1 This is not meant to be taken literally.
2 My main reasoning: 1. makes choosing post-secondary paths easier, 2. makes post-secondary more effective/valuable, 3. so much human talent-hours are wasted in high school.