The Odyssey Plan
Draft three divergent five-year lives to find the goal worth chasing
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
The Odyssey Plan, from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans' Designing Your Life, forces divergent thinking about the future before any planning begins. You write three separate versions of your life 3-5 years out: the first if you continue exactly as you are, the second if you were forced onto a completely different path, and the third if money were no object and you did not care what anyone thought. Comparing the three reveals desires that day-to-day momentum hides. Ali Abdaal then converts the chosen direction into a concrete '12-month celebration' across four realms he tracks: health, work, relationships and joy. Only once a real destination exists does productivity become meaningful, because productivity is an effectiveness measure on route to a goal, not a goal in itself.
Origin
From Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans of Stanford. Ali Abdaal describes running the exercise personally every year and converting its output into annual goals across four life realms.
Core principles
- 01You cannot optimise productivity without first knowing where you are going
- 02Divergent thinking surfaces paths you would never otherwise consider
- 03Money and other people's opinions distort what you actually want
- 04A goal you can picture celebrating is more motivating than an abstract target
- 05Written goals beat unwritten ones; the act of writing forces clarity
How to run it
- 1
Current-path future
Imagine and write out your life 3-5 years from now if you keep going down your current path unchanged.
Pro tip Be honest about where inertia actually leads, not where you hope it leads.
- 2
Completely different path
Now write your life 3-5 years out if you were forced to take a totally different path.
- 3
No money, no judgment path
Write it a third time assuming money is no object and you do not care what anyone thinks of you.
Pro tip This third pass is where the most surprising desires surface.
- 4
Convert to a 12-month celebration
Translate the direction that pulls you into what you would like to be celebrating a year from now across health, work, relationships and joy.
- 5
Write the goals down
Commit the resulting goals to paper. Written goals correlate strongly with follow-through.
Watch out An unwritten goal quietly reverts to a vague intention.
In the wild
Ali Abdaal runs the three-scenario Odyssey Plan every year, then turns it into a picture of what he wants to be celebrating twelve months later across health, work, relationships and joy. He credits the money-no-object pass with surfacing directions his default momentum would have buried, then writes the goals down because he trusts the research that written goals outperform unwritten ones.
→ A short list of written, realm-tagged annual goals that make weekly productivity decisions obvious.
Common mistakes
Optimising with no destination
Chasing productivity gains before deciding where you want to go makes the effort pointless.
Skipping the money-no-object pass
Without removing money and judgment, the exercise just re-describes your current constraints.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone at a fork or a year-boundary who feels busy but directionless.
Not ideal for
Someone already deep in execution on a goal they are certain about.
From the transcript
“you imagine your life three to five years in the future if you continue to down your current path and you write out what it…”
“productivity is like sort of an effectiveness measurement on route to a particular goal and if you don't have that goal then optimizing for productivity…”
From the episode
You’re Not Lazy: How To Make Discipline Easy - Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday