Examine your ground level operationalizations

We're always using ground-level operationalizations for our goals whether we're aware of it or not; there is an implicit belief that our immediate actions (when they're goal-oriented) can help us arrive at the high-level goals.

But in most cases, our default strategies are actually very bad at turning raw ingredients (time and energy) into intermediates (skills, credentials) and intermediates into the outcomes we want. I think it's even reasonable to operate with the frame that the majority of "obvious steps"* are very suboptimal for any given metric that we want to advance.

We need to pay close attention to the lower levels of execution if we want to improve our odds. A ten-year plan generates (and requires) behavior all the way down to sub-second attentional movements, and if the lower levels aren't good it's almost impossible to reliably reach the target.

If we simulate a thousand universes for a person who wants to maximize the positive impact they make over their career, most of the best paths probably won't look like "chase increasingly large responsibilities and roles in the best orgs they know." Rather they'll be the ones with frequent exploring, unexpected crazy career transitions, and "by complete coincidence" the person ends up in roles 1,000x as impactful for their goal.

*caveat: as we increasingly improve our path and pathfinding skills our "obvious" decisions and actions start to more and more closely correspond to that-part-of-reality's best-known options, though this is still probabilistic and can't guarantee getting us to our desired destination