Every time I bring this exercise up, someone says this. What's terrifying about thinking about a 10 year plan? Realizing that you don't have one? My wife dec

Every time I bring this exercise up, someone says this. What's terrifying about thinking about a 10 year plan? Realizing that you don't have one? My wife decided she wanted to be a professor when she was in high school. She's three years into a tenure track job. She's been working towards this for nearly 15 years. Building non-trivial skills or things of value takes time and usually requires a plan. All my startups had multi-year plans, even if things didn't work out as we'd envisioned. At one point I decided I wanted to learn to speak other languages. I studied Japanese for a year, got a chance to move to China, and studied Chinese regularly until I got conversational. I wanted (and still want) to study others, but things went in another direction. Another time, I decided I wanted to get better at math. It took me about a year to formulate a clear plan: I decided to get a PhD. There were some barriers (I had dropped out of my undergrad, for example) and it took a while to get on track. That was 8 years ago. I graduated in July. I'm still working on my next plan.