Short excerpt from a YouTube video (Peter Thiel) arguing that people wrongly overweight medium-term, resume-driven career choices. He presents a three-horizon framework: short-term (happiness and learning), medium-term (resume/career signaling), and long-term (meaningful, important work), and advises recalibrating emphasis toward short- and long-term considerations while ignoring the medium-term.
Chapters
What you end up doing when you think of the future as indefinite is that you pick a job that you think will be good on your resume because it will then lead to a different job later on. There's even sort of a credentialing version. We go to grad school, you get a consulting job, and you sort of think of it as sort of this branching tree diagram where you never really do something that you want to do. And so if you think the future on maybe three horizons, one is very short term, there's medium term, and there's very long term. So medium term is, how good is it on your resume? Very short term is, are you going to be happy and will you be learning a lot? And very long term is, are you working on something important or meaningful? And so I think we are in a skewed world where we overweight the medium term and we underweight some combination of the short term and the long term. I would recalibrate it to focus on some combination of short term and long term and forget about the medium term.