TL;DR

• - This is not an article about top 5 action to create a perfect development plan.
• - This is a summary of abstract inspirations that may help you.
• - At the end I’m sharing my own plan.

Have you ever written a development plan? for years I was writing mine based on the moment that I was living, looking for courses and articles that could help me. Time passed by and I no longer felt that those objectives represented me anymore, I no longer felt that the course that I was taking was the right one to give me the skill that I was planning to get. To be fair, in many moments those plans helped me to achieve some goal, but I always felt that I was missing something, years later I learned that I was missing the look for the whole journey.

THE JOURNEY

Some time ago I reached the milestone of over a decade working as a software engineer, and for the first time in my career, I found a manager that made me deep questions that I couldn’t answer. “Why are you waking up and coming to work with us? What’s your mission? What are your principles?”, those questions look obvious by being inside of us, but some times are hard to express them in words. In my case, it took months until those words start to come out and start to make sense. The result of this was a vision a lot more deep and clear about where I am, and where I am going. After that the decisions on what to do next become a lot easier to be made.

GOLDEN CIRCLE

Simon Sinek delighted many people with his TED Talk about how great leaders inspire action, through the “golden circle” and the question “Why?”. Among his examples are Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers. If you don’t know what I’m talking about go watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4. The point is why we don’t apply the same concept to ourselves to increase our self-knowledge and to create our future plans?

WHITE PAPER

As I said before looking inside and extracting your motivations, fears, and your whys may be a hard task, what helped me to do it was a white paper, left by the side of my laptop. At first, I wrote the topics and questions that I would like to populate, and it took a few days until the first content words start to appear and the plan was taking form.

MENTORS AND INSPIRATIONS

Regardless of how are you going to proceed with your development plan, if you will look inside or not, one thing was unanimous in my research to understand how people that I admire conquered what they have, all of them always had mentors that helped them on the journey, guiding and sharing valuable experiences. Another important factor is to look into people who inspire you and keep an eye on their publications.

PUTTING ALL TOGETHER

After all the explanations here we go my development plan for the first semester of 2020, this plan is alive and continuous as long it makes sense for me.

Cheers!