Excellent idea from Pammer at Outside Voice - to write a letter to yourself at 20…
This letter has travelled 17 years into the past to find your hands. You are single, you live with your parents, you have just left college, and you are working for the family business. You’re not going to believe what I have to tell you.
In 17 years time you are married. You met a girl in Oxford one Sunday afternoon in 2000. Neither of you thought it would go anywhere at first, but you saw each other again, and again, and nature took it’s course. Pretty good going for somebody who never dreamed he would even meet anybody.
You live near London. Months from now, your entire family will scatter across England - you will find your career a couple of miles from the girl you’re going to meet in Oxford.
You work as a software and web developer. What’s more, you also worked as an IT manager, and wrote all the software used by a manufacturing company to run their business. Code you have written is in use by big companies now all over the country. You’re regarded as a good software developer by your peers, and an outstanding web developer.
Sit down. The next one is huge. You have three children. Three little girls. They are fantastic - they make you smile, laugh, and occasionally shout. The eldest is learning to play the violin, the middle one has the loudest voice in the known universe, and the youngest is going to be trouble - she is blonde, pretty, and knows it.
You write a journal on the internet. Compuserve - that you’re thinking about joining at the moment - will cease to exist soon - the World Wide Web is about to be invented at CERN, and will become the primary means of communicating with friends, colleagues and associates.
You are going to have friends all over the world. You will regard some of them as being as close a friend as those in the “real world”, and will catch up with them daily via the internet.You don’t want to know how many computers you’re going to have around the house.
What are we saying here? Your life is going to change enormously - you are going to be happy, have a fantastic family, and lots of friends. You’re going to be busy - you’re going to work all over the country - sometimes overseas - and you’re going to love your work.
It’s all good. Look forward to it all.