How do I plan my life?
Deciding on what to do with your life? Try creating an odyssey plan.
During the Great Resignation, I switched careers. I went from being an industry leader in media to transitioning over to the tech world. There were many reasons why I left my 10-year career in journalism, but one of the main reasons was I needed a change.
From stressors fueled by the pandemic to changes in economic conditions, I think there are many people right now who are also facing moments of great transitions. And they are trying to figure out the next steps in their life. Although I landed a job at a big tech company, I still feel like my life is in a moment of flux. And I still feel the urge to figure out where my life is heading, and what I’m going to do next.
So, like any diligent student, I started researching ways to better plan out my life.
That’s when I came across Stanford’s Design Your Life course. This course, created by professor and author Bill Burnett, discusses a technique to create 5-year and 10-year plans to help students better design a purposeful and fulfilling life. This life designing technique is called: the odyssey plan.
What is an odyssey plan?
The name “odyssey plan” was inspired by New York Times social commentator David Brooks. In one of his articles, he used the term to describe a period of great exploration in a person’s life — much like Homer’s epic poem. These odyssey years happen generally between ages 25 through 35 as people transition from adolescence to adulthood. This is a period of time when people are discovering who they are, and it can be a critical moment to develop a plan that helps people reach their goals.
Planning multiple years of your life ahead of time can feel like a daunting task. But Burnett says in his course that “if you plan for nothing, you’re going to get nothing.”
Another reason to create a plan that helps us chart out our lives is simply that we’re living longer. One hundred years ago, the average life expectancy was 35, now in most developed nations, the average life expectancy is 75. Thanks to science and activism, we’ve essentially gained a second life.
Now that we’re living so much longer, it’s not uncommon for us to have multiple careers in different industries. Additionally, social scientists are viewing the stages of our lives differently. For instance, in the 1970s, sociologists believed there were 4 stages in a person’s life:
Childhood
Adolescence
Adulthood
Retirement
But now, thanks to our longevity and more complex social worlds, scientists believe we have six stages in life:
Childhood
Adolescence
Odyssey years (a period of self-discovery)
Adulthood
Encore years (a time when a person is working for purpose rather than money)
Retirement
Seeing these new stages of life listed out like this resonated with me because I was at a point in my journalism career where I felt like I’d achieved as many milestones in the industry as I could. When I asked myself, “what’s next?” The answer seemed pretty obvious: Become a corporate executive. But when I tried to become a vice president at the media company I was working for, the next stage of my career journey, my managers told me it wasn’t my time — despite my qualifications.
Instead, I was told to wait my turn.
When to transition to a new career?
I don’t like sitting still, I never did. Therefore, I couldn’t see myself being a middle manager for another 10 years before there was room at the top of the corporate ladder to promote me. I wasn’t going to let a company’s corporate leadership structure stagnant my life, which is what I feel like I had endured for the first six years of my media career.
Facing this pushback and witnessing my lack of support, I realized it was time for me to leave the media industry. Instead of waiting my turn, I wanted to try something different while I still had the time. I wanted to learn a new skill. I wanted to take a risk. I wanted to embrace change, even though I was really scared of going from an area of immense expertise to an industry where I needed to start over again.
I also wanted to do more outside of my career. For 10 years, I dedicated my life to being a journalist working in the media industry. But before starting my career, I used to paint, write creatively, film short movies, play tennis, rock climb, and dance. But all those passions lost their priority while I worked in the media industry. It wasn’t because these activities weren’t important to me, but because they weren’t relevant to my journalism career. And because our time is finite, the passions I had that weren’t related to my career faded away.
Reflecting back on this, I felt remorseful, angry, and bitter about how I spent the past 10 years working as a journalist. I wanted to plan out my life better, and spend time doing things that I valued.
Life is funny in some ways. For instance, life feels long and short at the same time. When you’re working towards something, like building a career, starting a business, or accumulating a net worth, life can feel so long because your goals take time. But once you look back at your life, you see that time has gone by so quickly. And when you reflect on your life, it’s normal to question whether working so much was really worth it. And according to researchers, one of the biggest regrets of people who are dying was spending too much time working. And for me, working those extra hours every day for 10 years to cover breaking news events, it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Not at the expense of my life and time.
How to design your life
So that’s why I created an odyssey plan for myself. Technically, you’re supposed to create several different plans with different life choices and get feedback from peers, friends, or family on which plan is the right one for you. As of now, I’ve created two plans. Here’s one plan that I’ve put together as an example for you.
In this 5-year plan called “financial independence as a creative entrepreneur” (Burnett suggests titling your plans using six words), I picked three things that I wanted to focus on:
Starting my own business
Having a family
Writing, publishing, and selling my book
Burnett, the creator of the odyssey plan, says that it’s important to pick three things to focus on in your plans and create a roadmap for yourself on how to achieve your goals. Selecting too many goals could lead to wishful dreams and unfilled plans. The reason I picked these three goals is that I wanted to have goals for different aspects of my life: My professional life, my personal life, and my passionate life.
While creating my first odyssey plan, I was surprised by how difficult it was to narrow down what is actually important to me. The first few drafts of my plan were devoted to working and rising in my corporate career. But when I read through those plans, I didn’t feel excited. Instead, they all felt safe and boring.
When I stripped away my desires for corporate accolades and my fears of failing, I saw that what I really want to do is to create something meaningful for myself and others, like writing my book to share with the world. I want to have a safe and stable home with someone I love. And I want to be financially independent outside of working a corporate job by starting my own business.
I’m still in the middle of creating my other plans, but I think this exercise has been a good way for me to reassess my values. And now that I’m in my early thirties, I think this is a perfect time to head in a direction that finally puts me first.
If you’re in a moment of transition and looking to figure out what to do next, I suggest designing a 5-year plan for yourself. Science gave us a second life, and it’s now in our hands to decide with to do with it.
