With my north star in sight, I threw myself into everything: applying for jobs, scheduling coffee chats, coding my AI fitness app, writing documentation, recruiting potential collaborators, pitching at AI meetups in Seattle, and even moved houses, while trying to keep up with friends.

Driven by the feeling that I need to go to SF gather more information on how startups are functioning and going to AI workshops, hoping to meet someone who might be inspired by what I was building or finding a bigger problem to solve that didn’t feel oversaturated and could potentially be easier to pitch I began driving to SF impusively.

An hour from the California border, doubt started creeping in.

I stopped at Costco for gas and a $1.50 hotdog.
Sitting there, I finally slowed down enough to see: I was moving faster than I was capable of. I wasn’t trying to enjoy any journey. All I was doing was chasing outcomes.

The time to step back, envision my future, and work backwards had finally come.
I was no longer protected by naivete idea that I could do everything everywhere all at once.

Starting a five year career plan seems daunting so beginng by grounding yourself in what you know is always the best move

I started by digging into what drove me

These questions helped me envision where I see myself in 5 years.

Career title: Founder/CEO of a platform conglomerate or parent company
Make an impact on the way people live their lives 
Master skill: Communicate vision to inspire people 
industry: Technology  

Break it down furher I decided to focus on core copetencies around:

Further dividing my efforts into three buckets where I could track and grow my skills:

This allowed me to begin creating a Gannt chart to visualize monthly milestones.
This roadmap helped qualm the urge to cram everything into a single day or constantly switch task to feel productive.

When I later Chatted with UW’s career coach I asked about how he has organized his career plan and he mentioned he had followed Ikigaiprinciples and also recommended me to read this book called stolen focus.

Stolen Focus resonated with me immediately. Ever since the spring of my junior year, I’d felt behind socially, academically, and physically. That’s when I began trying to go to every party I was invited to, moved away from accounting and into learning tech, and also when I had started to take running as a meditative discipline.

That was the moment I began speeding my life up to handle everything, opening pandoras box towards constant distraction, task switching, and the pressure to do more than I could truly manage.

When AI tools emerged, I took instant advantage to cut down on tedious work like formatting my thoughts. But I also began pushing towards it incoporating it into all my workflows, running different agents at once for different task.

While I was feeling productive it only amplified my fragmented focus.

After seeing the costs of fragmented focus, I decided to approach work and design differently. I’m intentionally reducing task switching in my own life, and I’m applying the same principle to the fitness app I’m building with a goal to help users tap into a flow state through exercise.

I hope to encourage users to challenge themselves physically and find flow in fully commiting to their goal by introducing intentional friction and minimizing compulsive engagement with gamified rewards.

This approach reflects the broader vision I want for my career: leading a platform conglomerate that builds products to improve lives across multiple dimensions. Someday, that might even include a “dumb smartphone” powered by different apps I hgelped build designed to foster focus and flow, not hijack attention.

Until next time,