My Memory Book

Chapter 9
Looking Forward

By: Reid Erdwien

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     Who knows what the future holds? We may be on hover-boards in ten years (four years, if Back to the Future is to be believed). No future plans or goals can be expected to come completely true. There are simply too many variables to take into account. However, a plan or goal to help guide you can be useful, even if you stray far from the path.
     In ten years, I’ll be twenty-four, and probably still in college. I haven’t decided on a college yet obviously, but contenders are K-State and Digi-Pen. It really depends on what I want to do, and I don’t want to try to plan it out too much, because I want to end up doing something that I really enjoy. If I try to say now “I’m going to defiantly be a rogue theoretical physicist”, then I might end up missing out on something that would be even better, for example, the CEO of a shower curtain company, who knows.
     Between the ages of twenty-eight and fifty, I’ll be working at my job. As I said before, I don’t want to limit myself to what I’ll do as a job. However, I do know some places that would be great companies to work at. Google and Valve have great employee benefits and pay, and it’s the kind of stuff that interests me (and I think I’m good at it). Both would require me to be a good programmer, but in different ways. You probably know of Google, if you don’t, welcome to the outside world, it’s so much better than that rock you’ve been living under. Google deals primarily in services on the Internet, so I would need to be a good programmer mainly with Internet languages, such as HTML, CSS and especially JavaScript. Google really is an amazing company when it comes down to employee life. So, great pay, benefits, company, and thing I love to do. What’s not to like? Valve is a video game company based in Bellevue, Washington. It too has really great employee retention and life. The biggest difference would be that for Valve I would be making video games, instead of applications. I don’t know which I would like better, as I have little experience with both, all I know is that I love programming and these would be great places to work.
     My goal is to become a programmer, unless I find something that I like more than that. I’ll achieve them by working hard towards them. I’m already starting to program, and I plan to do a lot of it over the summer. I believe in working towards achieving your goal all the time. In order to be the best, I should start now right? My values are pretty simple and can be summed up in a sentence. Don’t be stupid and don’t be evil.
     If I were to die in one week, I would do all those things I’ve wanted to do, but never had the guts to do it. I want to die skydiving without a parachute, and probably with some explosives tied to my back. Better to go out with a bang that a whimper right? Just have fun in the last week of my life as opposed to spending it in a hospital bed. My ideas, values and opinions guide me through the course of the rest of my life. Ideas, values and opinions form naturally over time, so the course will change with them over time.