I know a bright young kid who graduated from college a year ago and now works at a large investment bank. He started to find that he hated being on Wall Street and wanted to work at a tech startup. He recently offered his resignation to his bosses, who responded by putting on a "big show" to convince him to stay. Bosses told him that if he stayed at the bank, they would give him a raise and a more important job, and that by joining tech, he would start from scratch. Now he thinks he will stay, although he says he is "very confident" that he doesn't have the kind of ambitions for the financial industry.

Over the years, I've come across many employees who have this underlying tendency. When I ask them a very obvious question."What do you want to do in 10 years?"The answer is without exception"Work at a tech startup or start a company"— yet most of them just continue the status quo and don’t join startups. After a few years, they finally quit their jobs, but only for a few years in an industry they didn't like and didn't really live up to their ambitions.

How can smart, ambitious people keep working in a field where they have no long-term ambition? I think the mistakes they made can find a good analogy in computer science.

A classic problem in computer science is hill climbing. Imagine you're dropped at a random spot in a hilly terrain where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assuming fog or something). Our goal is to reach the highest mountain.

Consider the simplest algorithm. At any given moment, move towards a higher place than the present. The potential risk with this approach is that if you happen to be near a lower hill, you end up at the top of the lower hill instead of the top of the tallest hill.

An improved version of this algorithm is to add some randomness to your walk. You start off with a random walk, reducing the randomness over time. This gives you a better chance of lingering around larger hills before embarking on focused, non-random climbs.

Another, usually better, algorithm has you repeatedly dropping yourself on random parts of the terrain, doing simple hill climbs, and then after many such attempts, go back and decide which hill is the tallest.

Going back to the job seeker, they have the advantage of being less confused about their "terrain". He knows (or at least believes) that he wants to end up on a different summit than the one he's currently climbing. See that higher hill.

But the allure of the current hills is strong. Human beings have an instinctive tendency that the next step must be better. It is then easy to fall into a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists: people tend to systematically overestimate near-term returns rather than long-term returns. This effect seems to be stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it difficult for them to give up the nearby ascending ladder.

People who are early in their careers should understand a truth from this "climbing theory": the road that allows you to walk is winding (especially early), and you should randomly throw yourself into new terrain. When you find the highest mountain When you are on a hill, don't waste any more time on the current hill, no matter how tempting you are.