You and I go through 6 life stages when it comes to discovering our life’s purpose and place in this world.
- Childhood: under 13
- Adolescence: 13 – 25
- Odyssey Years: 20 – 35 (chances are, you’re here)
- Adulthood: 28 – 50
- Encore Career: 40 – 70
- Retirement: after 60
The period of each life stage differs from one individual to the next, but your Odyssey Years are more likely to be from the age when you started your first job, until about your mid-30s.
Odyssey Years is the stage in your life where you frequently wander and wonder to figure out what you want to do with your life.
Have you wondered…
– if you should quit your job and change careers?
– if you have what it takes to start your own business?
– if you continue living this way, would you regret it in the future?
– if this is all that life has to offer, and are you limiting yourself from living a more adventurous, exciting and fulfilling life?
I’ve wondered the above, and continue to wander on the same boat. 
Which is why the Odyssey Plan (by Stanford Life Design Lab) intrigued me when I first came across it.
I am currently in the process of drawing out my own Odyssey Plan.
Odyssey Plan
In a nutshell, the Odyssey Plan is a life-design exercise where you attempt to write out, in detail, your answers to these 3 questions:
- What would your life look like 5 years from now if you continued down your current path.
- What would your life look like 5 years from now if you took a completely different path.
- What would your life look like 5 years from now if you did not have to worry about money, social obligations, and what other people would think.
For each question, take 10 minutes and dump your thoughts on to a blank piece of paper. Your answers should include thoughts about your personal life as well as your career.
After finishing one, give that life plan a short title (under 6 words).
And then, on a scale of 1 to 10, rate your life plan in terms of:
- Resource: How much money, time, effort would you need to execute this life plan?
- I like it: How happy would you be if you successfully executed this life plan?
- Confidence: How confident are you, by gut feel, to execute this life plan?
- Coherence: How much of this life plan makes sense? Does it tie together well?
Once you’ve written out the three 5-year plans, review them collectively.
– What are parts that you like and excites you?
– What are parts that are challenging but you would regret not doing?
As a final step, take 15 to 30 minutes to write out a new 10-year plan. That 10-year plan will be the life plan that you go for.
That is your Odyssey Plan.
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BUT is all this planning really worth your time and effort?
Does Life-Design really work?
The argument against a lot of self-help books and architecting-your-ideal-life techniques is that “what is good on paper, does not really work IRL“.
I wholeheartedly, 100% agree.
No plan for your life survives the first contact with reality.
But… I have planned my life in the past. I still plan my life today. And I’ll continue drawing new life plans in the future.
So, Why Life-Design?
Because the best way to navigate your life course is to chart a map for it.
Not because it will necessarily go the way you planned it, but because it is a practical mental tool to refer to as you go through life.
You have a reference that you can fall back to in terms of what you want to achieve in the next 5 to 10 years.
For example;
When building something, your typical first move is to mockup an initial design of what you would like the final product to be.
As you continue to build the product, you refer to the initial designs you made as reference.
You will inevitably face circumstances and challenges that will prove the kinks and lacks of your initial draft.
But you don’t stop building. You improvise and optimise. With the initial designs AND your experiences as references, you build until you achieve your final product.
While the final polished product may not be what you initially drew out, the exercise of making the initial plans was valuable as your reference.
The plan is nothing, but the planning is everything.
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In a few days, I will share a Odyssey Plan template on Notion that breaks down the steps to make your own Odyssey Plan.
Till next week,
Ruiz
PS: If you’re interested in learning more about the Odyssey Plan, check out Stanford Life Design Lab’s Youtube playlist that details the whole concept and process.
PPS: If this email went to your spam box, I would greatly appeciate it if you can unmark it as spam. This would help my email deliverability into the future.