Your Five-Year Plan Is Just Your Past Rearranged
A finance professional learned his forecasts failed because they were built from his past, and turned to biology for a better model.
Curiosity Chronicle · Stop Making a 5 Year Plan (Do This Instead)In January 2021, a mentor asked a finance professional who had spent seven years climbing in finance a simple question about his five-year plan.
His options were to make partner and focus on an industry he loved, to shift from later stage to early stage investing, or to start his own investment fund. All of them stayed close to the career he already had, even though he was finding that career unfulfilling.
When he looked back in July 2026, five years after that conversation, he was struck by how completely those forecasts had missed. He says if he had been asked then to predict 100 scenarios for July 2026, he could have offered 100 plausible versions and none would have come close.
His conclusion was that the problem was not that he was a bad planner, but that planning extrapolates from the past. “When you try to plan your future, you’re not really imagining a new future,” he says. “You’re just extrapolating from your past.”
What he means is that the futures we picture are natural extensions of what we have already lived. We rearrange the same raw material into slightly altered outcomes, which is why planning had always felt easy while he stayed on a preset track. Once he began to question the track itself, that method stopped working.
His answer comes from theoretical biology. He points to life on Earth, which stayed relatively simple for more than three billion years and then exploded in complexity during a 50 million year window about 540 million years ago, a period known as the Cambrian explosion. In the 1990s, theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman argued that the explosion could not have happened earlier because the raw material did not yet exist.
Kauffman called the principle the adjacent possible. In his telling, coming steps are shaped by present conditions. Each breakthrough opens a fresh set of pairings just past the current edge, so futures that were outside rational prediction can quickly become reachable.
He argues that, in his words, “your most interesting, asymmetric, singular futures are entirely invisible to you today” because the raw material does not yet exist in your life. The work he prescribes instead is to widen and strengthen the set of possibilities within reach today, since each new skill, relationship, or environment multiplies what can come next.
Questions people ask
What was the Cambrian explosion?
About 540 million years ago, animal life diversified rapidly over about 50 million years after more than three billion years of mostly simple life. Scientists call that burst the Cambrian explosion, and many major animal body plans first appear in the fossil record then.
What does the adjacent possible mean?
It is the set of next steps that become reachable because of what exists now. A new skill, tool, relationship, or discovery does not just add one option, it unlocks combinations that were not conceivable before.