Have you heard of the Odyssey Plan? It can be life changing to anyone serious about taking charge of their own life.
It's a framework from the book Designing Your Life by Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and the core idea is really good because it expands thinking. It proposes that instead of trying to identify your one perfect future and grinding toward it, you map three parallel lives you could live over the next five years.
1. Your current path.
2. What you'd do if that 1st path suddenly disappeared, and
3. The wild card: the life you'd live if money and social expectations weren't in the room.
I really recommend it because it gives permission to hold multiple possibilities of "maktoubs" at once and resisting the premature convergence onto a single track is very liberating.
So it gets a big YES from me. It also gets an "and..." Three actually.
The framework asks what you'll do, not what you want to change.
I don't know if it's the twenty-plus years of working in social change, of sitting in rooms where the confusion between outputs and outcomes would derail the most well-intentioned plans. Outputs are things you produce: the project, the product, the milestone crossed off the list. Outcomes are what shifts: in people, in relationships, in the texture of daily life. They're related but they're not the same, and designing around outputs while losing track of outcomes is how you build something that looks successful but feels hollow.
The Odyssey Plan, in its current form, is an output machine. You map careers and milestones and projects. You answer: what will I build, where will I live, what will I achieve? But the question it doesn't ask -the one I think needs to come first- is: what do you want to be different?
In you, of course, but also in your relationships, in what you contribute and in how you move through the world.
Before drawing a single timeline, that question. If this life worked, what would change, and for whom?
The answer becomes the north star the path is measured against. Not "did I achieve X" but "did X actually change." That's a different orientation entirely, and it changes what you map.
It gives you a five-year timeline but life doesn't move in lines.
I understand why, linear time feels manageable. A five-year arc gives you the sensation of control, which isn't nothing when you're standing in front of three blank pages trying to imagine three whole lives.
But we know better. We know that life moves in seasons, in ruptures, in long gestational silences where nothing visible is happening and everything is changing underneath. A year can pass that changes nothing and a single conversation can collapse a decade of assumptions in an afternoon. The five-year timeline has no category for either of those things.
What I find more honest, and hopefully more useful, is mapping conditions instead of calendars. For each path, instead of asking when, you ask what needs to be true:
- What needs to shift in you for this path to open? Belief, habit, capacity, the fear you've been managing around rather than through.
- What needs to shift around you? Relationship, circumstance, resource, permission.
- What is this path waiting for that you can't control? Name it. Write it down. Most planning fails silently because this question goes unasked and then the thing you couldn't control becomes the thing that undoes the whole plan in year three, and you call it failure instead of recognizing it as information you had all along.
This isn't fatalism, it's precision. You're not surrendering the plan, you're making it honest about what's actually in your hands. You're strengthening the plan!
It never checks whether those paths are actually yours.
This is the big one, because I have written life plans on assumptions that weren't mine. The Odyssey Plan assumes you arrive at the exercise with three paths that genuinely belong to you. In my experience, at least one of them is carrying someone else's unlived dream, a parent's detour, a cultural expectation dressed as personal desire or a fear of irrelevance dressed as ambition.
You can't always see it from the inside. The desire feels real because it is real, just not necessarily yours in origin. A path built on someone else's niya or intention, in Arabic, the quality of the movement not just the direction, will exhaust you at the exact moment it succeeds. I've watched that happen to too many people I respect.
So before running the exercise, or at least alongside it: for each path, ask whose voice is loudest here? Not to disqualify the path, just to know know what you're actually choosing.
Three lenses to run across your paths
Once you've mapped your three lives, I'd run each one through three questions. Not to score them, or rank them, or come up with a winner. Just to understand what each path is actually asking of you.
❤️ The Niya lens: Is this path chosen or drifted into? Are you walking toward it, or just not walking away? There's a difference between the two that doesn't always show up on a timeline.
🔥 The Himma lens: Does this path call your inner drive forward, or does it let it stay dormant? Himma is that deep motivational fire, and the question isn't whether a path is hard or easy. It's whether it needs you, fully, or whether it lets you coast on a fraction of yourself indefinitely.
✨ The Baraka lens: Are you approaching this path with open hands or clenched fists? Scarcity thinking and abundance thinking produce different paths even when the content looks identical on paper. Which one is running this Odyssey design process?
On sharing, the last step of the process, keep it simple
The Odyssey Plan recommends sharing your plans with three to six supportive people. I'd simplify that considerably. Find one person willing to ask you why, not to interrogate, but because your answer to why will tell you more than the plan itself. The plan is a representation, the why is the thing underneath it.
What this is and isn't
This isn't a replacement for the Odyssey Plan. Use it, it's a fantastic exercise, and the three-path structure is worth keeping exactly as it is. What I'm offering here is the layer underneath: the questions that make the tool more honest about what you're actually trying to change, what's really in your hands, and whether you're designing your life or performing someone else's idea of one.
Hope this speaks to you and is helpful.
Ratiba
