Life Design Odyssey Plan Guide

A step-by-step guide that helps you design your own Odyssey Plan by exploring multiple life paths through reflection, creativity, and principles from the Life Design framework.

Odyssey Plan from Life Design Framework

Create Three Alternative Versions of the Next Five Years of Your Life. Each One Must Include:

Include personal and non-career events as well

Examples: Do you want to train to win CrossFit Games, be married, or learn how to bend spoons with your mind?

Use a six-word headline to describe the essence of this alternative timeline

Example: All In – The Silicon Valley Story

Two to Three questions
Ask questions to test assumptions and reveal new insights
What kinds of things will you want to test and explore in each alternative version of your life?

Use the dashboard to gauge:
- Resources: Do you have the resources (time, money, skill, contacts) to pull of the plan?
- Likability: Are you hot, warm, or cold about your plan?
- Confidence: Are you full of confidence or pretty uncertain about pulling the plan off?
- Coherences: Does the plan make sense within itself? Is it consistent with you, your work-view, and your life-view?

Possible Considerations and Other Ideas

Any of the considerations listed below can be a springboard for forming your alternative lives for the next five years. If you find yourself stuck, try making a mind map out of any of the design considerations listed above. Don’t overthink this exercise and don’t skip it.

Geography: where will you live?
What experience/learning will you gain?
What are the impacts/results of choosing this alternative?
What will life look like?
What particular role, industry, or company do you see yourself in?

Keeping things in mind other than career and money
Pay attention to other critical elements

Martha’s Many Lives Example

What follows is an example of three five-year Odyssey Plans from a participant in one of our Mid-Career Workshops. Martha is a technology executive who was looking to try something more meaningful for the latter half of her life. She came up with three very different plans for her future, each a little more risky and innovative, but all involving some kind of community building.

Her three plans were: doing her first Silicon Valley–style start-up, becoming the CEO of a nonprofit working with at-risk kids, and opening a fun and friendly neighborhood bar in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, where she lived. Note that each example has a six-word headline describing the plan, a four-gauge dashboard (we really like dashboards), and the three questions that this particular alternative plan is asking.