Stanford Life Design Lab

The Odyssey Plan: Visualise 3 Versions of Your Future

A Different Concept to Reframe your 5-Year Plan by Stanford Geniuses

I stumbled upon a very interesting concept or shall I say an exercise to design my life for the next 5 years.

If you haven’t read that book already, “designing your life” by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans is one of the best books you can invest your time in. Its idea is based on re-framing the concept and making it more creative to focus on exploring your ideas and true potential. Before going into the Odyssey plan itself, let me mention briefly the authors as I feel knowing the brains behind it certainly adds to the concept.

Bill Burnett

After years of drawing cars and airplanes under his Grandmother’s sewing machine, Bill Burnett went off to the University and discovered, much to his surprise, that there were people in the world who did this kind of thing every day (without the sewing machine) and they were called designers. Thirty years, five companies, and a couple of thousand students later Bill is still drawing and building things, teaching others how to do the same, and quietly enjoying the fact that no one has discovered that he is having too much fun. Bill Burnett is the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford. He directs the undergraduate and graduate programs in design at Stanford, both interdepartmental programs between the Mechanical Engineering department and the Art department. He got his BS and MS in Product Design at Stanford and has worked professionally on a wide variety of projects ranging from award-winning Apple PowerBooks to the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures. He holds a number of mechanical and design patents, and design awards for a variety of products including the first “slate” computer. In addition to his duties at Stanford, he is on the Board of VOZ (pronounced “VAWS — it means voice in Spanish) a socially responsible high fashion startup, and advises several Internet start-up companies.

Dave Evans

From saving the seals to solving the energy crisis, from imagining the first computer mice to redefining software — Dave’s been on a mission, including helping others to find theirs. Starting at Stanford with dreams of following Jacques Cousteau as a marine biologist, Dave realized (a bit late) that he was lousy at it and shifted to mechanical engineering with an eye on the energy problem. After four years in alternative energy, it was clear that this idea’s time hadn’t come yet. So while en route to biomedical engineering, Dave accepted an invitation to work for Apple, where he led product marketing for the mouse team and introduced laser printing to the masses. When Dave’s boss at Apple left to start Electronic Arts, Dave joined as the company’s first VP of Talent, dedicated to making “software worthy of the minds that use it.”

Having participated in forming the corporate cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided his best work was in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and love doing it. So he went out on his own; working with start-up teams, corporate executives, non-profit leaders, and countless young adults. They were all asking the same question. “What should I do with my life?” Helping people get traction on that question finally took Dave to Cal and Stanford and continues to be his life’s work.

Dave holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a graduate diploma in Contemplative Spirituality from San Francisco Theological Seminary.

So What is the Odyssey plan?

The Odyssey plan’s idea looks really simple, Design 3 different possibilities of how your following 5 years will be, and that is achieved by doing the following:

Step one: write out what your life will look like 5 years from now if you go down your current path:

This is the simplest step. First, you split a paper into 1-year blocks (template link at the bottom) and start writing down how do you imagine your life will be if you continue with the path you have drawn.

Step two: write out what your life will look like 5 years from now if you take a completely different path:

Basically, you put down a scenario where your primary goal is unachievable. But the idea here is that you change your life completely. So let’s say you were planning on graduating and working for a specific firm and become a consultant. Imagine that working for that firm is not possible, or even the career prospects on the field you want to are uncertain. How would life be and what would you do.

Step three: write out what your life will look like 5 years from now if money and societal obligations are not a factor:

The third and last step is to imagine a different plan where money and social status are not deciding or contributing factors. What if your decisions are not limited by the amount of money you have, what if your view of your social status or what others expect from you is not important for you to make your decisions. What would your life be?

The Aim of the Exercise is Two Main Outcomes

We often believe that we only have one life ahead of us. One track that we can’t drift away from or we imagine that our choices are limited because we are too far from the start line we imagined to ourselves. Understanding that we have the potential to go into different futures can help clarify which way to choose.

It is not simply that we should choose the craziest plan as it may seem to represent what we want. It is more to rethink your main plan and see if there are some important things in the other plans that you may wish to incorporate in the main plan you’ve chosen.

If you are interested enough, I would recommend watching this TEDxStandord talk by Bill Burnett:

You can also have a look at this YouTube playlist which outline more about the Odyssey plan:

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