Title:  I&#x27;d like to hear some ideas on how to get myself unstuck.
Before I get into it, I want to recognize how privileged this whole story is, and that myself 15y ago would laugh at how much this reeks of 1st world problems.<p>I&#x27;m having a hard time deciding what to do, both personally and professionally.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m conflicted about lifestyles I want to obtain. One day I&#x27;m ambitious and want to devote my life to building generational wealth, only to dream of a humble house and spending my time cooking simple meals. It&#x27;s not that I think I wouldn&#x27;t find some happiness in any of those possibilities – what bothers me is that I cannot completely decide where on that spectrum I&#x27;d like to aim for. A good example of this is the question of living in the US (on H1b&#x2F;L1) vs. Europe, where I bounce between the two on a weekly basis, making it hard to either move or come to peace with where I am and move on.<p>Professionally it&#x27;s a similar story.
I started coding in middle-school, and acquired generalist skills by working on many things throughout high school &#x2F; college. I was and still am ambitious, albeit I lately started understanding it&#x27;s a double-edged sword in a way.<p>Now I&#x27;m in late-twenties, came to FAANG straight from school, working on distributed systems at scale. My job is good, I get enough opportunities, get recognized very often, and there&#x27;s room for me to grow. The shipping velocity and lack of accountability is not great but I don&#x27;t think I can impact the culture enough for a meaningful change. Organizational overhead is frequently a mess and building trust with an ever-changing list of line managers and TLs takes away too much energy. Looking around, there aren&#x27;t too many people I like or am excited about working with, but that tends to change often. 
I used to think there were times where all I wanted to do was clear – learn more about databases, or build distributed systems, or coach and mentor peers, or get more money, or build effective teams, or start a self-bootstrapped side business to squeeze more money out of my skills, etc. I used to be more excited about tech as well, now it all seems less meaningful.<p>In the past year or so, I&#x27;ve struggled to define a meaningful &amp; fulfilling direction. My answer to &quot;what do you want to do?&quot; is rarely consistent for more than a few days in a row. I now realize I never really knew what I was after, and I was just lucky to be happy with whatever I had stumbled upon. Do I want to pursue being a depth IC, manager, founding engineer in startups, or even a founder myself? Hard to control scope in these decisions. Thinking this over day-to-day is a recipe for anxiety and endless analysis-paralysis.<p>Most of my life I have had to work hard to create opportunities for myself, and open as many doors as possible. I was lucky to open quite a few. I now understand that I need to deliberately close some of the doors to move forward, and it goes against what got me here, hence so much friction.<p>I&#x27;m looking for fresh perspectives on conceptualizing or thinking about situations like this. Frameworks that peers and mentors often provide assume that I know what I want to do, and are concerned more with how to do it.<p>How do I limit the scope of my decisions? How do I ensure I can backtrack in case of a bad decision? What is even a bad decision? How to find things (or thing) that I want to do and be sure to do it for longer than a week? How do I commit without looking back? How to think productively about dependencies between these decisions?<p>Curious to hear stories as well. Where were you stuck, and how did it play out?<p>Many thanks, HN.
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