Do you have a life plan?
Planning is everything but a plan is nothing.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When we are young we imagine our lives as a linear timeline filled with successful milestones and tight deadlines. By the time your are full speed on your life journey, in the open sea of adulthood, you realize this is not exactly how life works.
Life is not a straight line, it is a tangled line that you will only be able to see its final design when you zoom out (aka RIP) – but hey, who’s in a hurry for that. What’s weird is no matter how scary and dizzying that messy doodle looks, sometimes is scarier to stick to a linear timeline you no longer believe in, just because it took a lot of effort to draw it.
Sometimes you choose to change course, maybe you realized what you thought you wanted, you do not want after all, maybe you wish to pursuit something different, maybe something simply ran its course. Sometimes life just happens and the changes can be radically transformative.
This puzzle of voluntary and involuntary transitions we call life, may seem scary, but is is also exciting and more importantly infinite. As long as you breathe there will always be another piece to fit in. Which can be scary, but also liberating. David Bowie in his song Changes says “Every time I thought I’d got it made It seemed the taste was not so sweet.” Maybe life is not about reaching goals, but setting them.
In life there is no right and wrong choice. Even if you make the wrong choice life has its magic way to gently or forcefully recalibrate your course and nudge you towards the right direction. They key to life is to make a choice, to make a move, to live
This is where life planning comes in handy. The aim of a life plan is not to timely and steadily guide you towards your end goal, but to get you moving and help you fine tune your compass along the way.
I recently followed an interesting course by Stanford University on the topic, Odyssey Planning (you can follow the course for free here). It basically applies design thinking in designing your life. First of you are challenged to come up with three 5 year-span period life scenarios that don't all need to be ”realistic”, but all should be visual and in as much detail as possible (they could include work, hobbies, personal events).
Once you have your plans you should contemplate on them: what will you gain from each journey, what resources/skills would you need, would you actually be happy if this is how your life actually turned out to be, are there any common patterns between the different scenarios, how confident are you about making it come true, and –most importantly– does it resonate with you, does its course follow your compass, aka your values?
You should also note down any questions that come up for each scenario, like “Would I enjoy living in X city", “Is an X monthly income realistic in this line of work”, etc.
Once you have your plans it is time to pick one and expand it into a 10-year plan where you can also include some –not all– elements from the other scenarios. Then it’s time to think how you could test your prototype, maybe if you can shadow a leader in the industry you want to crack in, maybe volunteer in the country you were thinking about moving in etc. Challenge your assumptions and see for yourself if this is really the direction your want to take.
Just remember a plan is just a plan and you should always revisit it to ensure it takes you in a direction that is true to you. Hope this helped and I’d I love to know practices that have helped you, friend.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon — don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon — you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
from the poem Ithaka by Cavafy
