What do I want to be…

I’ve been working a lot on a career development plan (which in this case is over a 12-18 month range), and I’m really excited about both the opportunity that I’m being given to execute my vision as well as the mentoring that I’m receiving in refining both my development as well as my understanding of what I need to accomplish my end goals. Today, however, we took things in a slightly different direction. The question at hand…

What do I want to be in five years time?

Wow, excellent question. One to which the answer has changed a lot over the last few years.

Freshman year of college, my only goal was to be the name of my generation that everyone remembered. An Alexander the Great, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin type. It turns out that one can’t plan to become a piece of history. One has to be the victor who writes history.

Then I think my answer to that question became innovative in nature. I wanted to re-define the way people do things. That’s quite the goal if you think about it. My parents still use Yahoo! for search, but 70% of the market now uses Google instead. Think further to put into perspective how hard it is to change people’s habits. Think racial, gender and economic fights for equality. I don’t want to dive too deeply into the specifics here as it’s still an idea that I’m exploring, but I fundamentally believe that innovation is core to what I want to be.

Today my answer was three part:

• Proud
• Respected
• A Leader

As my hour of writing is over, I’ll dive further into each as part of tomorrow night’s writing.