Designing Your Life

Navigating Your Future Possibilities Most people get stuck because they obsess over finding the single right path for their lives. This linear thinking creates a mental bottleneck that limits creativity and fuels anxiety. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans developed the **Odyssey Plan** at Stanford University to break this cycle. This guide helps you map out three distinct versions of your next five years, providing the clarity needed to move forward with confidence. Tools and Preparation To complete this exercise, you only need a quiet space, thirty minutes of uninterrupted time, and a notebook or digital document. You must approach this with a mindset of radical curiosity. Turn off your internal critic—that evolutionarily programmed voice that fears risk to keep you safe from perceived danger. The Three-Path Framework Follow these steps to visualize your potential futures: 1. **The Optimized Path**: Document what your life looks like five years from now if you continue on your current trajectory and everything goes exceptionally well. Who are you? Where are you? 2. **The Pivot Path**: Imagine your current career or lifestyle completely disappears tomorrow. You must find a different way to pay the bills and find fulfillment. Describe this alternative plan B in detail. 3. **The Wild Card Path**: If money were no object and no one would judge you, what would you do? This is the space for the "crazy" ideas, like opening a button shop or returning to medical school in your fifties. Overcoming the Internal Critic The most difficult part of Odyssey Planning is silencing the negative bias built into the human brain. We are wired to avoid the "saber-tooth tiger," which today manifests as a fear of social ridicule or financial instability. By explicitly including a "wild card" option, you train your brain to explore possibilities without the immediate weight of judgment. Expected Outcomes After completing these three maps, you will notice shared themes or forgotten interests across all versions. This exercise does not force a choice; instead, it expands your vision so you can stop obsessing over one "right" answer and start living a more meaningful, multi-dimensional life.