The Odyssey Plan: Design 3 Futures Before You Lock in Your Retirement

A WhyzMen summary

The Odyssey Plan comes from Stanford's Life Design Lab and was popularized in Designing Your Life. Instead of hunting for the one right future, you sketch three different versions of the next five to ten years and look at them side by side.

The three paths: your current path (if nothing major changes); a pivot path (if your current path disappeared tomorrow); and a dream path (if money, status, and other people's expectations were not constraints). Coxwell's point is that most people do not have a planning problem; they have an option-awareness problem. The question shifts from “Will my plan work?” to “Which life do I want my plan to support?”