ToDos for Future

I have been provoked by a dear friend to think about what I’d want to tell the future me to do. And then after a little bit of thought, I realized this is not easy to answer. These are the times of emotional turmoil brewing inside my head because of whether to move back to India and how to be with family. And not just that, I am usually so bogged down by my daily life and work that I forget to think of the time ahead. While answering, it did hit me that I should take a back seat and scope down this blog to atleast provide thought starters for what I feel my success could look like and what I would want the future avatar of me to focus on.

My first thought is that before giving free advice or dumping expectations like an Indian parent, I’d want to measure my future with metrics to successes or failures at various points of time. So, why not just break down my thoughts into blocks of time. The first part could be immediate future things to be achieved within 2-4 years before 2025. Another could be medium-term i.e. the 2030s (still long though) which could be achieved by 10-12 years from now. And beyond this period, I feel it’s too far to say anything but mostly my future would be towards fulfilling my life goals which resemble Maslow’s self-actualization goals.

Future till 2025

This is a very immediate term future and I do not see anything blocking me to achieve this. Unless there are urgent needs from family or some nasty events, I believe I will work with high energy and passion to achieve these goals. If the following goals are not achieved, then I will feel that I haven’t been honest with my realities!

First, I know I will aim to aggressively aspire to financial independence besides career growth on the corporate ladder. I want to have invested a decent sum of money which could compound in the next 20 years and allow me to buy a home, car and have a happy jobless life post-2030. I have made poor choices to invest in NPS and SRS among others, spreading a thin sum of money in a lot of places. I want to then look back and see a focus on direct equity investment and to have earned a high performing portfolio that can continue to compound.

Second, I want to have started living in my city of choice and settle down. Mostly it will be a metropolis like Bangalore or Singapore, depending on whether I make up my mind to pack bags from Singapore to stay closer to the family which seems likely due to covid.

Last, I also expect to be married by this time in future. Weirdly enough, I can’t fully make up my mind about that event. I have to meet my girlfriend’s parents, have them meet my family and go through a ton of ceremonies and whatnot! Although I have talked to her parents a lot over the phone, meeting people face to face is something that most mortals revere a lot. I want to have been gelled into my life and have fulfilled all sorts of expectations to enjoy relatives company.

Future till 2030

These are intermediate-term goals and plans might change or get thrown completely off the window. I believe I would need some bit of luck and support from people around me to achieve this future. If the following goals aren’t fulfilled, then I will feel that I need to give serious thought to “course correct”!

I aim to be super settled in life by this time with only surprisingly new immediate goals to achieve. Henceforth, I won’t want to breed more burdensome desires such as add-on investments or properties other than fulfilling what’s already in the pipeline.

I would start to think of moving back to India if not already done. This will be more like a course correction. If I haven’t settled back in India, then I will atleast expect to have a plan for foreign permanent residency. For Singapore, it’s not at all dependable since it’s a smaller nation that isn’t likely to have an open permanent residency policy.

I would start to plan bigger things in life, as I have already written about my life goal to open a school which I would run as a startup company. This would most likely be in the city where I would have decided to live longer-term. I do not yet know what it would mean! It could even be just funding schools or scholarships or going hands-on to kickoff my ed-tech startup. Whatever it will be, it must be towards a re-attempt in life towards kicking off another company. This would be a new attempt to reignite what was lit off with the closure filing of EnergieCorp Singapore - my baby startup that died in less than a year.

Future post-2030 / End of Life goal?

Honestly, the 2030s is such a long future that my plans are more likely to go off-goals than see any light of the day. Parroting the obvious here, I would need a huge deal of luck to continue working towards fulfilling even a bit of these goal. But in my mind of 2021, my goals for 2030+ should be to achieve what matters to me and myself as a human.

I would plan to have a super clear path of retiring with one single goal to keep working towards. For example, my school or my startup. I may want to involve other members of my family to do these things with me, more like support unless they are super pumped up.

I want to take the responsibility to build a financial base for the next generation of my siblings and family, my nephews, my niece and support them in their aspirations.

I also want to contribute to what others in my family and friends would be doing. It’s highly speculative though, but if those align with me and excite me, I may just want to join forces with them instead of being a wolf warrior.

Ending thoughts

I have written this note with only my goals in my mind. I am yet to fully explore how the addition of a family member esp the opposite gender might change some of these. I do realize that I will willingly share some parts of their goals as well. Maybe it will make me humane and inclusive. Less likely though, I may alternatively become super aggressive and a productivity maniac. My team’s managers in Facebook are amazing folks and one of them once said to me in the sad year of 2020 which super pumped me up:

If you want to go fast, go solo. If you want to go far, go together.