You can’t plan a beach

I’ve never liked the “where do you want to be in five years?” question. It’s not that it’s a difficult question (even through there’s no real right answer). It’s that it might be a wrong question.

Look at the horizon and the farther you try to see, the smaller and murkier things seem. Planning, after all, is guessing. And successful predictions are the product of subtle post-rationalization. That’s why Nate Silver wrote The Signal and the Noise and Daniel Kahneman proved with research that:

After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.

Big pictures are often visionary predictions. Well, most predictions fail.

So while vision demands that you ambitiously look at tomorrow, execution demands that you obsessively look at today. And that’s why a microscopic grain of sand matters so much.

You can’t plan a beach. It’s too overwhelming. But use the right lens and you might find great execution behind its grains of sand. Of course, big pictures, beaches and planning are important. But so is attention to the details right in front of us.