When asked “What’s your career advice for young people?” Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Technologies, a $5 billion IT services company centered in India, said the following:

When you come out of college, you’re raw. You have energy. You want to experiment. You want to learn. You have hopes. You have aspirations. You want to be Oprah Winfrey. You want to be Steve Jobs. You want to be Bill Gates. You want to be all that.

Slowly, over time, you lose it. And by looking in the mirror every day as you get older, you fool yourself that you’re OK. There has to be another way of looking in the mirror and revisiting what you really want to do. So I would say, maybe at the end of college, write it down honestly, in 100 words or whatever it is, and put it in a box. I call it the magic box. Revisit it once a year or once every two years and say, how honest are you to that? Don’t let anybody run your life. That, in my mind, is very, very important.

You should be in control of your life.

Think about what Nayar’s comments mean for you. In approximately 100 to 200 words, describe your deepest career aspirations. Include several statements about your guiding philosophy and the core personal values that drive your ambitions. Explain who you want to be in the future. Write the statement assuming that you will return to it in five, ten, or more years to see what progress you have made with your self-determined career aims.