A friend recently mentioned how frustrated he was with his new job within 2 months of joining. This is a very smart and ambitious person and the company is one that several people even from top IIT/IIMs only dream about joining. He was contemplating leaving the company and was considering the options. When he talked to his seniors in this company, the advice was to wait for a little longer as it had only been 2 months. He sounded low and confused. I asked him if he had thought of what he wanted to do in life and he had no idea!
People, in general, make make poor career moves when they don’t have any goals in mind. Questions like should you join a startup vs a corporate, should you hog on to the next opportunity where you are getting a 20% hike or leave the current job because it’s getting intense become much easier to answer where you know the end state. A goal could be x% hike in salary or getting a promotion to a senior role, getting to manage a PnL of some amount or multiple such things. But once a goal is in place, inputs can be thought through.
Successful entrepreneurs do a good job of this. They have a clear vision or end state in their mind and all decisions are made by understanding if it's taking them closer to end state or not. Even if the situation gets hard, vision keeps them going and at the same time they are able to take hard decisions of saying no to offers that look good in the short run but don’t align with the vision.