Concept
Odyssey Plans
Odyssey Plans are three deliberately different sketches of the next five years of your life, a method from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans's Designing Your Life that replaces the search for one right plan with several good ones you can compare and test.
The usual career question, "what should I do with my life?", assumes there is one correct answer waiting to be found. Burnett and Evans argue the opposite: each of us could live several good lives, and the useful work is to make a few of them visible. An Odyssey Plan sketches three five-year versions. Life One is the path you are on, or the idea you already have. Life Two is what you would do if Life One suddenly disappeared, for example if your industry vanished. Life Three is what you would do if money and what other people think did not matter. Each sketch gets a timeline, a short title and the questions it would answer, and you rate it on four gauges: the resources it needs, how much you like it, how confident you feel about it, and how coherent it is with who you are and what you believe. The point is not to pick a winner at once. Seeing three real alternatives loosens the grip of the default path, shows which parts of different plans can be combined, and reveals what you need to find out next, which is where prototype conversations come in. The authors suggest presenting the sketches to a few people and noticing which one makes you lean in.
A real-life example
Nazlı, a payroll specialist in İzmir, wrote three plans one weekend. Life One: a senior payroll role at a larger company. Life Two, if payroll were automated away: HR data analyst. Life Three, if money did not matter: teaching Turkish to foreign residents. Her confidence gauge for Life Two was low, but her energy kept returning to it. She signed up for a short data course and arranged coffee with an analyst she knew from university.
How to use it
- 1Set aside two hours and sketch three five-year timelines: your current path, the path if that one vanished, and the path if money and image did not matter.
- 2Give each plan a short title, two or three questions it would test, and a rating for resources, liking, confidence and coherence.
- 3Pick the plan that pulls you most and write down one question about it that you could answer this month.