Benjamin Todd

Long-term planning could even be counterproductive.

There's a risk of becoming fixated on a specific plan and failing to change your plans as your situation changes.

All that said, giving up on planning and setting goals probably isn't wise either.

As Eisenhower said, plans are useless, but planning is essential.

Having some idea of where you'd like to end up can help you spot much better opportunities to advance.

In fact, if you want to have a big positive impact, we'd argue that planning is even more important.

Many of the highest impact roles require specialist career capital you're unlikely to get by accident, such as connections to people in biosecurity or expertise in particular technical skills.

Likewise, getting to the top of many fields often requires decades of focused effort.

This is the planning puzzle.

Most plans will radically change long before they're completed, but we can still benefit from having them.

Given all this, how should you make a good career plan?

Here are our main tips.

A very common response to the planning puzzle is to try to keep your options open.

There is some wisdom in this idea.

If you gain transferable career capital, you'll have more options in the future.

And if you're extremely uncertain what to do, just building transferable career capital and coming back to your plan later is a reasonable course of action.

But through advising thousands of people with their careers, we've seen that it can have some serious pitfalls.

Deciding to just keep your options open can lead to you spending far too long working in a generally prestigious job like consulting that you know you don't want to do long-term and just isn't that relevant to your longer-term goals.

stop you committing, so you end up pursuing a middle-of-the-road job that gives you some flexibility, rather than going for something that might be outstanding in career capital, and so ultimately give you better options.

Or turn into an excuse to not think hard about what's best.