I found one of my favorite frameworks for thinking about careers in Sam Altman’s piece “How to Be Successful.”
In it, he basically talks about how you want your next project to render everything you’ve done in your career to that point a small footnote in the book of your life.
It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful
It reminds me of Thomas Edison’s mentality towards mining after already having invented electricity.
Aim higher!