Imane's Job Plan Told Her Nothing She Could Actually Use

Imane Sarkis opened a blank document, typed the heading "Five-Year Plan," and began filling in the rows. Current role. Target role. Skills gap. Development actions. Estimated timeline. She worked down the columns with care, cross-referenced two job postings, and saved the file. Eighteen months later she opened it by accident and found that every target had been replaced by a different target, and the skills gap had been filled with skills she no longer wanted.

A plan is a prediction about a self you haven't met yet, made under conditions that no longer exist by the time you arrive. The problem isn't commitment, it's information: before you have done the work, you don't know whether the work will produce enjoyment or mere relief that it's over. Those feel identical from outside. Enjoyment — real enjoyment, the kind that pulls attention forward — only shows itself under load, when the challenge is high enough to demand full engagement and the feedback is immediate enough to keep you in the task. A plan cannot generate that information. Only doing can.

A plan is a prediction about a self you haven't met yet, made under conditions that no longer exist by the time you arrive.

This is what the designer Bill Moggridge understood when he built the practice of prototyping into the early culture at IDEO. His argument, documented in his 2007 book Designing Interactions, was that a rough physical model answers questions a diagram never can, because it puts you in actual contact with the problem. The same logic holds for a career: a month spent freelancing one project, or sitting in on a field you're curious about, or building one small thing in a new domain, returns information that five years of planning cannot touch.

You are halfway through a conversation with someone whose path sounds right. The title, the industry, the rhythm of the work. Notice what is happening in your attention right now. If you are collecting data to update a plan, attention is already drifting outward, filing things away for later. If instead you are feeling the pull toward a specific next action. A small test, a real one, with a clear time limit and a signal you'll recognize. That is the difference between planning and experimenting. Imane eventually ran three experiments in eight months, each under six weeks. The third one didn't stop.

The plan feels like safety because it defers the test. The experiment feels like risk because it runs one. What you find out about yourself in six weeks of actual doing is worth more than six years of projecting forward from where you currently stand.