Where Do I See Myself in 5 Years – A Response to 2017

In 2017, I wrote a blog post asking where I saw myself in five years. It was a genuine stab at putting some goals down in writing, at a time when I was fresh enough out of my summer camp adventures to still be absolutely buzzing off them, and ambitious enough to think that five years was loads of time to sort everything out.

Reader, it was not loads of time to sort everything out.

The 2017 version of this blog post is sitting somewhere in the archives of andrewwaterhouse.com, preserved in all its aspirational glory. I won’t go through every line here, because some of it aged about as well as a Camp America campfire singalong being remembered five years later — warmly, but with the specific embarrassment of hearing your own old voice. What I can say is that there were some goals in there about writing, about building things, about figuring out what kind of person I was going to be.

The specifics aren’t the point. The point is that 2017 Andrew thought five years was a long horizon, and 2022 Andrew is sitting here thinking where did five years go.

The book is the big one. There’s No Place Like Summer Camp has been in some form since 2016, went through multiple names and revisions, survived a global pandemic and a couple of false starts, and is now — as of this week — actually out. On Amazon. A real thing that real people can buy and read. That’s not a small thing. That’s the kind of goal that takes a very long time to feel real even after it’s happened.

Beyond that: life happened. In the way it tends to. Things I expected to happen didn’t; things I didn’t expect appeared from nowhere. If you want specifics about where things stand and where they’re headed, this episode is worth a listen — because it’s easier to explain in audio than in text, and also because hearing my own mild bewilderment at how quickly five years passes is funnier than reading it.

The interesting part of this exercise is that going through old goals forces you to write new ones. So in the podcast I also lay out where I want to be by 2027, which is — spoiler — further along than I am now in a few specific ways I won’t entirely give away here.

What I will say is that the goals are anchored in the same things they’ve always been anchored in: writing, building, and trying to make something worth people’s time. The summer camp books are part of that. The podcast is part of that. Whatever comes next is part of that.

Five years is both a long time and no time at all, which is an annoying thing to say but is demonstrably true. Write the goals down anyway. You’ll either hit them or you’ll have something interesting to read back and cringe at in five years, and both outcomes are worthwhile.

Book 1: There’s No Place Like Summer Camp Book 2: Camp America: Second Summer Shenanigans