At the end of 2015, I started writing down what I wanted to achieve in the upcoming year in a spreadsheet every December and began reviewing the previous year’s spreadsheets in 2016.

Over time, I’ve learned that my success rate at achieving big important items within one or two years is negligibly low, but over a 3-4 year span, it’s higher than what intuition would suggest.

The interesting consequence for me has been having to pick the big items carefully - if it’s going to happen over the next 4 years and by then it doesn’t matter as much, it’s not really worth it.

Thinking long term is really hard. I suck at predicting what I would want 5 years from now. I’ve resorted to using a heuristic of “Will this matter irrespective of when I can get there?” as a substitute.

For example, wanting to live closer to my parents and spending more time with them seems like a better pick than wanting to learn how to train an LLM from scratch.