"So, what's your 5-year plan?"

That was the question posed to me by a mentor in January 2021. At the time, I was about seven years into my career, on the "track" in finance.

Climbing slowly up the mountain, I had started to wonder if it was the wrong one. I just didn't seem to have the same energy for the work as most of my colleagues.

But when I thought about my mentor's question, all of my lines of response were effectively logical extensions from what had transpired in my career to date.

Things like:

• Make partner and focus my efforts on an industry I loved
• Transition to focus on early-stage investing (rather than later-stage)
• Build my own investment fund

All of the future mountains I envisioned were (at most) one degree of separation from the mountain I'd been climbing.

When asked to predict my own future, and plan for it, I envisioned a set of scenarios that looked much like the way I was already living, even though I was finding that way unfulfilling and unenergizing.

As I reflect back on that moment now, in July 2026, at the endpoint of that five year plan my mentor asked about, I have an interesting realization:

If you had asked me in January 2021 to predict 100 different scenarios for where I'd be in July 2026, I would have given you 100 very-plausible sounding scenarios—and not a single one of them would have been even remotely correct.

The problem wasn't that I was bad at planning. I'd been a card-carrying planner my whole life. And with a general life arc that had followed most of the pre-set "success pathways" we're told to stick to, planning had been a relatively easy endeavor.

You see, when you try to plan your future, you're not really imagining a new future. You're just extrapolating from your past. The scenarios you envision are natural extensions of what you've already experienced. Rearranged and recomposed, yes, but at their core, the same raw material.

There's a famous saying in finance, "past performance is not indicative of future results," yet every prediction of the future is built on the basis of the past.

The paths I planned for my future in response to my mentor's question were just the narrowly-bounded extensions of the same path I'd been on.

Planning had come easily, but only because I had never questioned the path itself. As soon as I did, the entire process collapsed. All I could do was envision slightly different versions of the same future.

When my path became singular, planning was no longer a viable option.

Because the truth is that your most interesting, asymmetric, singular futures are entirely invisible to you today. The raw material simply doesn't exist yet.

Which leaves us with a real question:

If you can't plan for that future, what are you supposed to do instead?

My answer, strangely, comes from the field of theoretical biology...

The Shadow Future

540 million years ago, there was an explosion.

Not an explosion from an asteroid, volcano, or other natural disaster. An explosion of life.

Up until that point, for the 3.5 billion years or so that scientists believe life had existed on Earth, it had been relatively simple. But then, over the course of 50 million years, a blink of the eye on these cosmic timescales, the complexity and creativity of life exploded forward.

In scientific circles, the period of time is known as the Cambrian Explosion.

In the 1990s, a theoretical biologist named ​Stuart Kauffman​ sought to answer a question that had puzzled scientists since its discovery:

Why had the Cambrian Explosion occurred when it did?

His answer:

Because it couldn't have happened earlier. It wasn't possible yet. The raw material simply did not exist.

Kauffman called his theory the Adjacent Possible. The idea that what is possible next is governed by what is actual now.

Each new development doesn't just exist in a vacuum. It unlocks the next potential series of developments just beyond it. Combinations and extensions that were unimaginable just a few steps earlier now become obvious.

Futures can quickly transition from being outside the bounds of rational prediction to well within them.

From impossible to possible. The Adjacent Possible.

Author Steven Johnson, who popularized the idea in a ​2010 book​, wrote the following:

"The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things."

Coming back to our central question—If you can't plan your future, what are you supposed to do?—that shadow future holds the answer.

Your Adjacent Possible

Just like the Earth, you have an adjacent possible in your life.

It's the set of next possible futures within reach today. It's the people you could meet. The skills you could develop. The outcomes you could create. The rooms you could enter. The environments you could occupy.

All scenarios genuinely and readily available from where you currently stand.

That set of scenarios is, just as the biology example highlighted, a direct line from everything up to this point.

This may sound like a trap. Exactly what I had experienced. You're confined to the simple extensions of your past.

But that interpretation is wrong. It assumes you freeze yourself in the moment. That you attempt to create a long-term plan based on where you stand today. A map for your long-term future.

We're not going to do that. Because it doesn't work.

Every single action you take fundamentally changes the frontier of what's possible next. Every door you walk through. Every skill you build. Every connection you make. Every new environment you enter.

New raw material creates new potential combinations, outcomes, and experiences. And perhaps most importantly, they compound. Each new skill, relationship, or experience doesn't add one potential future, it multiplies them.

So, the real work isn't planning your future, but building the frontier of what's possible. It's not asking yourself about your 5-year plan, but taking action to make the range of 5-year possibilities energizing.

That means focusing on expanding and improving your adjacent possible:

• Expanding means a wider set of potential combinations and experiences.
• Improving means the entire set bends upward in terms of outcomes.

There are three core levers to do so:

1. Skills: Build skills that stack. Skills help you create value. When you create value, you receive value in return. More skills and more unique combinations of those skills means more scalable value creation potential.
2. Network: Form relationships with depth and breadth. Relationships are the key to a thriving life. Most of the asymmetric opportunities you experience in life will be unlocked through a relationship. Sometimes those are close connections, sometimes weak ones. Build and maintain both.
3. Environment: Enter environments that push you. You are a product of your environment. The way you think about the world and your own potential is a direct byproduct of your surroundings. Place yourself in a bigger pond, even if it feels uncomfortable. Especially when it feels uncomfortable.

There is a subtle, but critical, point here:

None of those three levers will allow you to accurately predict all of the doors that will open for you in your life. You have no idea which skill, relationship, or environment will ultimately change your life.

So, stop trying to plan the perfect path.

You can't plan for it. You don't need to know where you're going. You don't need a map for your future.

You just need to take the next step. Use the three levers as a compass. Step with them in mind and the shadow future will expand and improve right in front of your eyes.

So, when a mentor asked me last week about my 5-year plan, I finally had an honest answer:

I don't have one. And I've never been more energized about where I'm going.

Keep the compass. Burn the map.

That's my rule. And I'm sticking to it.

What about you?