By Brett Ingram | Last updated October 7, 2026 | 6 minute read
An Odyssey Plan is a short written sketch of three different five-year versions of your life. It comes from the Stanford "Designing Your Life" course and the book of the same name by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. You don't pick the winner. You imagine all three, give each a title and a rough timeline, and see which one makes you lean forward. The point isn't prediction. It's to remind yourself that you have more than one good life in you.
Write down three lives you could plausibly be living five years from now. Life One is the obvious path, the one you're already on or expect to take. Life Two is what you'd do if Life One suddenly vanished. Life Three is what you'd do if money and other people's opinions didn't matter. Give each a headline, sketch the next five years, and note what excites you and what worries you. Then pick one small experiment to test.
According to The Stanford Daily, the course "Designing Your Life" was created in spring 2012 by design lecturer Dave Evans and William Burnett, who teaches in Stanford's design program. It applies design thinking, the same ideate-prototype-test loop used to build products, to the question of what to do with a life. The course culminates in an Odyssey Plan: three genuinely different paths for the five years after graduation.
The word "genuinely" matters. One instructor quoted in that piece put it plainly: they don't mean working at one consulting firm in one plan and a rival consulting firm in another. Same life, different logo. Not what we're after.
The framework later went mainstream through the 2016 book Designing Your Life and is now used by career centers well beyond Stanford. Colorado State University's career resources, for example, describe it as a way to explore multiple viable paths instead of chasing one "perfect" choice.
Because one plan isn't really a plan. It's a bet you haven't compared to anything.
When you only imagine a single future, every doubt feels like a verdict. When you imagine three, you start noticing patterns. Maybe all three involve teaching. Maybe all three involve living near water. Maybe the wild one is less wild than you thought. The comparison tells you things that staring at one option never will.
There's a second reason, and it's the one I like best. Most of us treat life direction as a puzzle with a hidden right answer, and our job is to find it before we run out of time. That's a stressful way to live. Designers treat it differently: it's a problem you work on by trying things. Organizational scholar Herminia Ibarra makes a similar case in Working Identity. As Harvard Business Review Press describes it, her argument is that reinvention comes less from self-analysis than from trying on possible selves through new activities, new networks, and making sense of what you learn. You act your way into clarity.
If you've ever seen Sliding Doors, the movie where one train, caught or missed, splits a woman's life into two timelines, you've felt the pull of this idea. The movie is a fantasy. But the instinct behind it is sound: how you imagine your life branching changes how you feel about the one you're living.
| Life | The prompt | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Life One | The path you're on, or the one you'd naturally take | What you've been assuming about your future |
| Life Two | What you'd do if Life One disappeared tomorrow | What you'd reach for when the default is gone |
| Life Three | What you'd do if money and status didn't matter | What you actually want, minus the filters |
Set a timer. Grab paper, not a screen. Here's one way to run it. This is my adaptation of the exercise, so adjust as you like.
Here's a sample scoring sheet, just to show the shape of it. The numbers are invented for illustration.
| Life | Enjoyment (1-5) | Confidence (1-5) | Fits my values (1-5) |
|---|---|---|---|
| One: Promoted at current company | 3 | 5 | 2 |
| Two: Teaching and consulting | 4 | 3 | 4 |
| Three: Small workshop by the coast | 5 | 2 | 5 |
Notice what the scores don't say. They don't say "quit and buy a boat." They say Life Three is exciting and unproven, and Life Two might be a bridge. That's useful. That's the exercise working.
Resist the urge to choose. The plan is a prototype, not a contract. Pick the smallest experiment attached to the life that interests you most and run it for a few weeks. Then look at what you learned and revise.
If you're not sure where to start, a life audit gives you an honest picture of where you are now, which makes Life One easier to write. If you suspect you've been drifting, our post on living by default versus living by design covers why that happens. And once a direction starts to emerge, you can translate it into daily reality with an ideal week.
An Odyssey Plan is an exercise from Stanford's "Designing Your Life" course in which you sketch three different five-year versions of your life. It's designed to help you explore options rather than commit to a single path too early.
Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, who created the Stanford course in 2012 and later wrote the book Designing Your Life.
You can draft a rough version in about an hour. The real value comes from revisiting it and running small experiments over the following weeks and months.
No. The original exercise leans toward career and post-graduation planning, but the format works for any big question: where to live, how to structure your time, what to do after a major life change.
You aren't searching for the one right life. You're a person with several decent options and a limited number of years to try a few of them. That's good news. It's the idea behind our Life Architecture pillar: treat your life as something you design on purpose, in drafts, rather than something that happens to you. Grab a pen. Write three headlines. See which one you'd want to read.