When you're lost in tech, stop obsessing over tools and start with a vivid image of yourself in 5 years. Build a directed acyclic graph backward from that vision to concrete tasks you can do this week.
Stop trying to figure out your career by studying technology. You're doing it backwards. Tech is just hammers and nails - the real question is what you want to build. Most people have no idea what they'll be doing in 5 years, and trying to find that answer by obsessing over AI, frameworks, or job markets is like trying to build a house by staring at your toolbox.
The method here is brutally simple: take two days off in the middle of the week, don't tell anyone, and go sit somewhere meaningful to you. Imagine yourself 5 years from now at the moment you'd feel most proud. Not based on your current trajectory, not based on what your parents want, not attached to anyone else's expectations - just the version of yourself that makes your chest burst with pride. Write everything down until there's nothing left to say. Then go to a restaurant that will tolerate you all day and turn that image into 2-3 specific 5-year goals, interpolate backward to 3-year goals, then 1-year goals.
Now you build a directed acyclic graph. Top node is where you are right now with real numbers. Bottom nodes are your 1-year goals. In between, you map every single step you think you need to take, assuming every day for the next year will be a bad day and luck is against you. Create hundreds of these steps. When you hit vague "knot points" that feel unclear, research them until you can break them into smaller, concrete steps. Take the first steps from that graph and put them in this month's tasks. Then take this month's tasks and put them in this week. Then take this week's tasks and pick a few for tomorrow.
The stressful part: if you actually do this, there's no one to blame but yourself. Not your mom, not your teacher, not your boss. Every night before bed, you load tomorrow's tasks. Every Sunday afternoon, you tend to this plan like a garden - review the week, check the month, revise the graph and the 1-3-5 year goals based on what you learned. The tasks become so concrete that you could forget your yearly goals and it wouldn't matter. You just have two categories of work now: stuff that brings you closer to where you want to be, and everything else.
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