The 1 Method to Creating Your Own Path to Fulfillment
Did you ever wonder where life might take you within the next 5 years?
Have you made plans for the future like, changing your job, buying a car, or running a marathon next year?
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| Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash |
In my life, I’ve set many goals and yes, some of them became reality: doing my PhD & buying my own house before I turn 30 as well as starting a family. But I also set goals I didn’t achieve: running a marathon before I turn 30, going to Wacken 2020 (Corona stepped into the way), and doing my PMP in 2022.
In the past years, I’ve read many books on life/career advice and I’ve found a great method to create a personal path to fulfillment.
In this article, I want to show what I’ve learned and how you can implement it too!
Design your Life
In my last article, I wrote that there is no map for your life. And yes, there isn’t. Our world is just too turbulent that we can make precise plans for what we will exactly do when.
Opportunities are coming and going and there are political, environmental, and economic changes all around us, that we couldn’t ever anticipate. (Who would’ve thought the Corona pandemic unfolding the way it did? I didn’t. I planned to go to Wacken that year …)
If you’ve read the first two parts of my series on Life Design (1 & 2), you will know how to define your goal and how to get unstuck. But once you are unstuck, you most likely cannot sprint all the way through until you reach your goal.
There are sub-goals in your path.
A great method to put these sub-goals down and visualize them is an Odyssey Plan.
The Odyssey Plan
It’s a five-year roadmap or plan where you sketch out what you aim to achieve in the upcoming years in different scenarios (e.g. a win in the lottery). Every Odyssey Plan is created with a small dashboard with four variables:
- Resources: money, skill, time, contacts, …
- Likability: Do you actually like the plan?
- Confidence: Are you confident about pulling this off?
- Coherence: Is it consistent with your view on work and life?
Create your Odyssey Plan(s)
How do you create an Odyssey Plan?
The key is to create not just one Odyssey Plan, but generate three plans simultaneously - no sequential order here (you can use this template). This is a trick that Designers use often. Creating multiple alternatives (prototypes) in parallel helps you maximize your creative potential.
You might come up with ideas / sub-goals in plan 2 that would also perfectly fit into plan 1.
But on which topic should you draw the Odyssey Plans?
Feel free to select any topic you like. However, ensure that the three plans differ significantly from each other. They shouldn’t just be variations of the same plan. If you have trouble choosing a topic, you can use techniques from Life Design I discussed in my previous article.
Alternatively, you can use:
- Your current plan.
- Plan B: if you would have to pivot your life 100 % (e.g., moving to a different country, a job loss etc.).
- Money is no constraint.
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| Five-year plan example by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Source: Designing Your Life |
And what now?
Take the plan that (i) is feasible and (ii) you like best.
And yes, we’d all like to be in a situation where money doesn’t matter - so this plan will probably fall away. But it’s still nice to think that you already have a plan in the drawer if you suddenly win the lottery!
Another thing I want to highlight: Once you’ve picked your Odyssey Plan, put it somewhere you see it often. Mine hangs right above my closet, and I see it every day in the morning when I am getting dressed.
3, 2, 1, Start!
You now have everything you need to start creating a life you love.
But don’t rush to quit your job and make a big change right away.
Do Prototyping.
Start small and try things out, like a designer testing ideas to see what works best.
Making prototypes isn’t just thinking about stuff! You gotta actually do it. Start by talking to people. Find folks who are already doing the job you want someday (like in your Odyssey Plan’s 5-year goal).
An easy way of prototyping is talking to someone who is already doing what you want to do in the future.
If you can’t find anyone in your workplace to talk to, check online or ask people you already know. Starting a chat with someone new might feel tricky. One smart move is to get a friend to introduce you. This makes it more likely you’ll get a chance to talk.
If you aspire to start your own business, you can also start small with a side hustle and start scaling it once you earned some confidence.
Whatever works for you, the important thing is: to get started. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity (it will most likely never come).
Look at your Odyssey Plan and start with the first thing on it.
Thank you for reading!
This was the first part of my in-depth series exploring “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Check out the entire series here: