Where Do You See Yourself 5 Years From Now?

Don't you just LOVE that question?

There was a point in my life in which I had had 10 jobs in 10 years. Many of those jobs came from a series of interviews, more interviews for jobs than I would have ever have liked to go on.

One of their all time favorite questions was "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" I hated that question. I hated it then, and I still hate it now.

Of course some people will tell you that how a person answers that question will tell you more than the answer itself. At the same time, how in the world do we know what we will be doing next month, much less 5 years from now?

If you had asked me 5 years ago where I would be now, I would never have said in Maryland. I would never had said actively blogging. I never would have said recovering from chemo and ovarian cancer. I never would have said sitting here, talking to you about this question with a big picture of me beside it. If you had asked me what I would have been doing in 2005 back in 2000, I wouldn't have told you that I would be making my living as a hypnotist. If you had asked me when I was 25 what I thought it would be like in 5 years, I would have told you I would have liked to have been married and with kids.

So much of my life has not gone as any 5 year plan would have dictated. 5 years ago I was still in hiding. I knew there were things I wanted to do, but I never knew that getting there would mean going through the things I have. The one thing I would have said is that I would like to be an author and a speaker, though. And, of course, that means I would have eventually needed to get out of hiding.

Maybe there is some value in the question. But how do you tell someone you are hoping to get a job with that you may want nothing to do with them in 5 years? The tide, from the sounds of it, has changed a bit as it seems most companies no longer expect you to stick around. But back when I was doing it, you wanted anyone who hired you to think you weren't going anywhere - even if you were averaging a new job every year, or so.

We make life such a game. We make up all of these freaking rules, and then we try to figure out how to game them. We try to figure out how to win when it might make more sense for us to just be who we are. It would probably leave us feeling happier and more content. We would waste less of our energy. We could - bottom line - just be ourselves instead of whoever we become in the pursuit of a "win."

There is another reason this whole 5 year thing bothers me these days, and it has to do with the cancer thing. There are those who talk about 5 year survival from cancer. It is a statistic of cancers that seems bantered about a lot. I try not to think about it.

After all, none of us knows if we have 5 years from today. Many of think we do. But there really is no way to know with absolute certainty, at least not the kind of certainty we have when we answer the question, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"