For myself, I will often ask myself something along the lines of: "In my current trajectory, will I be doing the same thing in a year? And is that what I want a

For myself, I will often ask myself something along the lines of: "In my current trajectory, will I be doing the same thing in a year? And is that what I want and will I be happy with that?" So I try to imagine the different paths I can take in my current trajectory and if none of the paths interest me, then I know it's time to make changes. Try to draw out a 5 year plan on a spreadsheet. Aim high, but be realistic. My main point is, you don't need to work for a big N company to achieve your goals (unless your goal is to simply work for a big N company). The sooner I realized that, the sooner I was able to start working on my actual goals where the actions are vastly different than those of "getting into big N." e.g. I want to design software, but not necessarily at Google makes it a lot easier to achieve than saying it must be at Google. :)