Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years ?

Link to Complete Note

“Where do you see yourself in five years” has to be the most notoriously inane question most of us have ever been asked.
This is that classic portion of an interview, where you are expected to gaze in a dreamy, wistful way, while efficiently offering up a platter of wholesome, ready-to-eat (and SMART – duh) goal statements.
After I started working, I was placed in the unenviable position of having to both answer and ask the golden question (there – I never saw myself here 5 years ago and yet – ta da – here I am!)
And at this point I noticed a jarring disconnect in all the verbiage surrounding the “Where do you see yourself” question:
How many of us have flipped the question and asked:
“Where do you see me in 5 years ?”
This flipped question invariably attracts the time worn truisms (that are, nevertheless true), such as:
“The onus is on you – you are the architect of your development”
“We are in a dynamic environment; be prepared to adapt to changing expectations”
These declarations are not at all false, but they point towards an inherent imbalance - So, organizations, with all the strategic thinking and predictive analytics at their command find the question above to be impossible to answer and more important, irrelevant. However, one tiny little person during a campus placement interview is expected to play soothsayer, confidently anticipating what the world will look like five years from now, the various alternatives available to him/her in that “World of Five Years From Now”, determining which of those alternatives seems at least mildly interesting and doing a force field analysis of how to jump from here to there – to that fascinating “World of Five Years From Now”
All of this smacks of an inordinate emphasis on the individual’s ability to predict and influence outcomes regardless of changing contexts and worse still, often puts blinkers on our tendency to explore fresh, widely diverging, even seemingly crazy ideas of what the future could be.
I have never understood why it was so incredibly important to “see” myself in a particular place in five (or whatever number of) years – I have never done it and have ended up in newer, exciting and challenging places (where I never expected to be) all the same. To this day, I resolutely have more than four ‘possible’ ambitions (researcher, writer, linguist, manager and more)...
What, then is the more relevant question ? I never ask, “Where do you see yourself in five years ?” in an interview
All I ask, instead, is:
“What is your passion / What are you crazy about” – after all, that is more interesting part, isn’t it ? Knowing someone’s passion is like knowing the ingredients that will eventually make up that heady mix of what they will be five years from now. The same set of ingredients can be mixed, flavored and treated in various possible ways and will potentially be sharpened or blunted by different environmental conditions to derive various possible outcomes – but it’s the ingredients that matter. The rest works itself out. Or doesn’t. Who cares ? For all you can know for sure is the ingredients.