Follow People, Not Plans
Choose jobs by who you'll learn from, not by a five-year plan or a financial bet.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
Yehoshua rejects the pressure to have a career plan. Instead she optimizes each move around one variable: how much you'll learn from the people you work with. Chase the best practitioners and the companies where great talent is clustering, because skills and relationships compound even when a specific company fails—and financial outcomes are nearly impossible to predict anyway.
Origin
Tamar Yehoshua's personal career philosophy, contrasted in the episode with the common instinct to build a five-year plan.
Core principles
- 01You don't need a career plan; the significant forks feel scarier early on but you can navigate by pull and interest.
- 02You learn the most from people, so follow the best practitioner in the skill you want—best product thinker, best engineer, best salesperson.
- 03Go where great people are clustering (a 'Nexus'); together they do great things and the relationships outlast any single company.
- 04Weight learning over money: financial returns are the hardest thing to predict, learning is nearly guaranteed even if the company fails.
- 05Skills can't be taken away—a company can fail but a skill stays with you forever.
- 06You don't need the top-brand company; there are many paths and many places to learn.
How to run it
- 1
Drop the five-year plan
Accept that you may have no idea what you want in five years, and that this is fine. Follow things that pull you and seem interesting rather than forcing a rigid roadmap.
Pro tip If a plan genuinely energizes you, keep it—this is about removing the guilt of not having one, not banning planning.
- 2
List the best people you know
Make a list of the practitioners you most respect—the best at the specific craft you want to learn—and find out where they work. That list is your target set of companies.
Pro tip Base the list on who you're most impressed by professionally, not just who you like personally.
- 3
Follow the talent Nexus
Prefer companies acquiring a concentration of great people. Even if the company underperforms, the network you build (think 'PayPal Mafia' or the ex-Googler diaspora) pays off for decades.
Watch out Beware companies with the opposite gravitational pull—losing all their good people—because recruiting there is brutally hard.
- 4
Optimize for learning over money
When weighing offers, rank expected learning above expected financial return, because you can predict who's good and where you'll grow, but not market/crypto/AI outcomes.
Watch out Taking a role purely as a 'mercenary' for the pay is dangerous—Yehoshua watched it fail for people who did it.
- 5
(For leaders) Pick jobs that make your hires' careers
If you're a manager, only take roles where hiring someone will genuinely advance their career—so you can earnestly tell recruits 'you can make your career by coming here.'
Pro tip This raises the bar on every job you consider as a leader and screens out doomed turnaround roles.
In the wild
Udi Manber, who started A9, spent two hours on the phone one night recruiting Yehoshua by telling her how amazing Jeff Bezos was—before any books on Bezos existed. She joined Amazon early because of the people, and got quarterly meetings with Bezos before AWS even launched.
→ Following the person (Manber, and proximity to Bezos) gave her a rare early-Amazon learning vantage point.
A person in their 20s told Yehoshua they were stressed assembling a five-year plan. She said she never had one and still doesn't know what she wants in five years. The person visibly relaxed, relieved they weren't supposed to have it figured out.
→ Removing the plan-pressure freed the person to navigate by learning and interest instead of anxiety.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early-to-mid career operators anxious about not having a career plan, or choosing between competing job offers
Not ideal for
Someone with a strong domain calling (e.g. climate) who legitimately wants to optimize for mission over people
From the transcript
“I Never Had A Five-Year Plan”
“you follow people you learn the most from people”
“you follow people who are the best at what they do”
“you look at where the great people are going”
“Financial returns are the hardest to predict”
“skills can't be taken away a company can fail but if you learn a skill you will always have that skill”
“take a job where if you hire people it's going to make their careers”
From the episode
Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack
Tamar Yehoshua (Product at Glean, ex-Google and Slack)