Snowballing to the Top: Planning Backwards to Go Forwards
This may seem like common sense to most career-hungry undergrads or grad-scheme-hungry graduates, but internships, shadowing schemes, and insight weeks are not isolated experiences. Instead, they’re links in a chain, small but vital pushes that, when compounded, propel us closer to our ambitions. Each experience builds on the last, adding not just to our CVs but to our confidence, network, and skill set. Like a snowball rolling downhill, these seemingly small steps gather momentum, turning into a powerful force that can carve a unique path to the top. Last week, we talked about “the third door”—those creative, non-traditional ways to find or create opportunities. This week, it’s all about what you do after you've “broken in” (again, not literally). Whenever friends or colleagues ask me how I’ve been able to do so much in such a short time frame, my answer is simple: I know where I’m headed. When I was 15, I took a long look at the vast outstretch of time before me and asked myself “where do I want to be at the end of all this”. Once I had that nailed down, I began planning, backwards. One of the most difficult challenges of being a young professional, student, or graduate is coming up with an answer to “so what do you want to do?”. There’s no pressure, and you certainly don’t owe this answer to anyone other than yourself, besides, Huang co-founded Nvidia aged 30 in 1993, and Colonel Sanders 40 when he founded KFC. Planning backwards, however, helped me arrive at my answer at quite an early age.