Tobi Lütke, who founded Shopify, tweeted: “People overestimate vision and underestimate what you can build when you follow your curiosity one step at a time for a decade+.”
Shopify started as an online snowboard shop. Tobi wanted to sell snowboards, the shop software available was bad, so he built his own. Other shops asked if they could use it. That’s the company. There was no master plan, just a next step that was interesting, repeated for a long time.
For example: the “where do you see yourself in five years” question makes a lot of people feel like they’re supposed to have an answer, and feel behind when they don’t. You don’t need one. You need the next thing you’re curious about: the tool you’d like to learn, the team whose work you keep reading about, the problem at work that annoys you enough that you’d fix it for free.
Take that step, see what it leads to, take the next one. The plan shows up afterwards, when you look back!
