Most of us get stuck at some point in life. Sometimes, figuring out where to go next requires imagining a different existence, no matter how wild it may be. Visualizing different paths could be the push you need before actually taking them.
Two professors and best-selling authors at Stanford University, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, constructed the Odyssey Plan to help people do just that. The idea is simple: Three questions can help a person envision where they could be in five years.
The Odyssey Plan
On their website, Burnett and Evans explain their “Designing Your Life” ideas, which they developed through the Stanford Life Design Lab and that helped them create the Odyssey Plan. The plan is a “tool [that] allows you to explore multiple possible futures, giving you clarity and confidence in your life decisions.”
Burnett and Evans recently appeared on The Mel Robbins Podcast, where they broke down the exercise. Evans explained that the bigger your idea tank is, the better:
“So we know you have to have more ideas to get your best ideas. So if you’re gonna get stuck on one idea, you’re gonna get stuck in a corner. So if we’re gonna plan the future of possibilities, we’ve got to hear from more than one of you.”
By “more than one of you,” Evans meant more than one potential version of yourself.
Asking 3 questions
Robbins summed up the three key questions:
- “What happens in my life if I change absolutely nothing?”
- “If all of this [the present] disappears, but I’ve got to pay my bills, what am I doing?”
- “Money’s no object and nobody’s gonna laugh… what are you going to do?”
Wild-card ideas
Evans leaned into the third question, which he called the “wild card.” He explained that people should think big “not because it’s a good idea. It’s that we need to train you to quiet the ‘internal critic.’”
He gave an example scenario. “So the 54-year-old woman says, ‘I’m thinking about going back to medical school. I always wanted to do that and I don’t think it’s too late. But my friends say I’m crazy, what do you think?’ So her internal critic is being encouraged by all of her friends’ internal critics going, ‘Well, that’s crazy, you can’t do that.’”
“So that’s part of the evolution that keeps you from being eaten by the saber-tooth tiger. There’s a negative bias being built into your brain evolutionarily, lest you be eaten. So you have to learn to overcome that critic. So the Odyssey Plan helps you imagine there’s more than one way you can live.”
Silencing the internal critic
Later in the podcast, Evans rephrased the question of how to redesign your life, asking instead, “How will I learn to live out of ‘get to’ and not ‘got to’?” Just one tweak could help you peel back the internal critic in your mind, allowing you to see a future path not as a lifeline but as a hopeful possibility.
Be present
Burnett challenged people to assess how they spend their time. “I’ll bet if I looked at your phone, it would tell me how much time you spent on Instagram, how much time you spent on TikTok, how much time you spent scrolling mindlessly.”
Burnett said he wasn’t being judgmental, noting that many people have a habit of doomscrolling online, but that using that time better could open up opportunities. He suggested, “Be present with yourself and see what comes up.”
On a Facebook post that shared the same clip from the podcast, one commenter described how they’ve seen this idea turn into reality. “Crazy how just today I was having a conversation about life is too short to settle. I want happiness so I need change. A peer just told me she’s leaving her current job, she said she just wasn’t happy anymore. Coincidence. I think not. She’s my new hero.”
Other users shared their wild-card dreams. On YouTube, a commenter wrote, “My wild card would be to open a coffee shop bookstore, just a little one, and hold music nights there for upcoming artists and bands.”
Inspirationally, another described how they turned their life around. “I am living in my wild card right now. Trained as a medical doctor, stepped out to be SAHM for close to ten years. And instead of going back I asked myself what are the other dreams I have shelved that I can pursue now as I take care of my children – I am now a published author, speaker and coach. Love it.”
