It’s very important to find what you are good at in 20s and early 30s through iteration and trying different things. As people say, you would need to spend 10,000 hours deliberately on something to become an expert. That means if you spend 40 hours each week doing something, it would take five years to become an expert. It’s partially true. You can keep doing something for 30 years and never become a domain expert if you don’t do it in a right way. You need to deliberate yourself to learn the field and try things that you don’t know. Only if you compare yourself to the past, you can see how long you came and it can help you to become an expert.
My younger self was trying to run away from technical field and go to sales/ biz dev b/c that looks sexy and seems like that’s my key to become a successful executive. It was a flawed thought. In a C-exec suite, there is CTO, CPO and sometime head of manufacturing which is COO. I can be any of these even if I don’t become a CEO one day. And being CEO for a couple of years in a tiny organization gave me a realization about how stressful the role can be and if I want to do it for the sake of doing it. I might enjoy more to become a CTO of an org and run technology teams worldwide. My main goal is large impact with ability to move the needle of innovation a little further than where I started. If I can do it in my lifetime, I would think it as a successful life.