We typically tend to approach our lives through routines that we follow day in and day out.
While we are not always conscious of these routines, they rarely give us a chance to
take a step back and assess whether we are living our lives with intention and building
towards a life that would make us feel more fulfilled.
Enter The Odyssey Plan.
Now this is not really a dialed in plan with steps, but more of a brainstorm of how your
life might look in 5-10 years and coming up with all the elements that might make that
life seem fulfilling going forward.
Having some kind of ideation and visualizing how your life will be at different points
in your life.
Ideally, this would be something that you could use at points of transition in your
life.
So that would be graduating college, getting married, starting a family, moving to a new
city, etc.
There was a saying by President Eisenhower, which goes - “Planning is everything, but
the plan is nothing.”
This essentially means that planning is important to help prepare you for different events or
situations that unfold, but it’s not going to be a blueprint that you can necessarily
follow when something unexpected happens.
However, having a plan makes you feel like you are equipped and perhaps in a better place
to take on whatever might unfold.
The Odyssey Plan was introduced in the book Designing Your Life by Stanford University
Director Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
A typical Odyssey Plan involves creating 3 different 5-year timelines.
This will include personal as well as professional milestones.
Now the key here is to have each of these timelines be significantly different.
You don’t just want versions of the same life like doing the same job but at a different
company.
It needs to be a little more radical than that.
To help with this, it helps to follow this framework.
For the first timeline, Think about What you think you’re going to do.
You likely already have some idea of this and a vague plan.
For the second timeline, Think about what you would do if the first plan did not exist.
So maybe you had a completely different career or worked in a completely different industry.
And the third timeline is What would you do if money or your image was not a factor.
This is great because this can help open your mind up to many more possibilities when you
aren’t worried about what someone else thinks or how your resources would impact it.
The benefit of creating 3 significantly different timelines is that the variety and range that
it presents will allow you to cross examine your plans and see what elements would work
in different scenarios.
Maybe some portion on your 2nd Timeline might spark an idea about practicality in terms
of a backup, or elements of the 3rd timeline could help you think outside the box and show
you what you truly want when all bets are off.
And hey maybe if you do a good enough job with this and pick the right timeline to follow,
you won’t have some multiverse portal open up with different versions of you showing
up to whip into shape.
Now once you’ve developed these 3 plans and the ideation stage, you don’t just think
about it and wait for a lightbulb moment, the next step is to come up with what’s
called a Prototype.
It’s more of a sampling or tasting of elements of the plan to see if it’s really the path
that you want to head down.
Without this, all you have are ideas on a paper, but no real way to know how you feel
about it, and Prototyping encourages you to get curious, talk to people and try stuff.
You could have chats with people whose lives look a little more like what you’d like
yours to and gauge whether you wish through on your plan to become someone like them.
I mentioned earlier that Transitional moments in your life can be mentally exhausting but
Odyssey Planning forces you to figure out what you need to do to move forward.
More ideas create more choices, so brainstorming like a designer can help you get “unstuck”
in your thinking.
The theory behind future scenarios says that there’s no such thing as a single future,
but many possibilities that might unfold so it would only benefit you to pick one that
you think is best suited for you.
I will leave you with this quote from Bill Burnett who said “When you have a plan,
and you put your intention out in the world.
You give the world an opportunity to step up and give you what you want.”
I’ve attached a template document for your 5 years plans that you can use in the description
below.
Let me know more about the timelines that you create for yourself down in the comments
and while you’re at it hit that like button, subscribe with your notifications turned on
for more from me and I’ll see you next time.
Bye bye.