You can have more than one plausible life
When you ask for the right next step, it is tempting to search for a hidden life that was always meant for you. That expectation makes alternatives feel like distractions or evidence that you do not know yourself. Another possibility is that several directions could be meaningful, and that you need experience to discover which one you want to develop now.
Stanford’s Life Design Lab offers Odyssey Planning as a way to explore alternate futures. This guide is an original, shorter exercise inspired by the broader practice of considering multiple directions. It does not reproduce the Lab’s worksheets or require you to create a polished plan. The useful result is a set of possibilities detailed enough to investigate, rather than a declaration of your destiny.
Make the alternatives genuinely different
Sketch three futures that change something important about daily life. One might develop the direction you are already following. Another might organize your life around a neglected interest or different kind of contribution. A third might question an assumption you have treated as fixed, such as where you live, how you work, or what success needs to look like.
Avoid creating one appealing future and two obviously inferior backups. Give each a fair chance. Equally, avoid making all three variations of the same status goal. If every sketch is a more impressive job with longer hours, you may be changing labels while leaving the underlying life untouched. Ask what would be different on a normal Wednesday, including relationships, responsibilities, and how you spend your attention.
Put the unglamorous details on the page
For each future, write a short description of work or contribution, home and community, care responsibilities, learning, and rest. Include a frustrating day as well as a satisfying one. An appealing career can contain administration. A slower life can contain loneliness. A familiar path can contain surprising growth. Detail protects you from comparing a realistic present with an edited fantasy.
Next, list what you would need to learn, what support would be required, and which assumptions remain untested. You may not know whether a type of work is accessible without more training, or whether your partner wants the same location. Put those questions beside the sketch. Uncertainty does not disqualify a future; it tells you where investigation should begin.
Compare lives through experiments
Consider someone who works in operations and feels drawn toward education. Their three sketches might be leading a better-designed operations team, moving into professional training, or keeping a stable role while organizing a community workshop. Each contains teaching, but in a different balance of income, responsibility, identity, and available time.
The next experiment need not be a career change. They could facilitate one internal session, interview a professional trainer about preparation and irregular work, and help deliver a community event. Each test should address a different assumption. Afterward, compare what felt engaging, what felt costly, and which responsibilities you wanted to return to. An experiment that reduces enthusiasm has done useful work. It may save you from a commitment based mostly on the appeal of a title.
Look for ingredients, not a winning poster
Place the three sketches side by side and notice recurring ingredients. Perhaps every version includes collaborative work, less commuting, or regular time with close friends. Those themes may be more actionable than any complete future. You might bring an important ingredient into your present life while continuing to explore a larger change.
Choose one inquiry from each sketch, then select the smallest useful inquiry to do first. Give it a date and a way to record what you learn. You do not need to keep all three paths equally alive indefinitely. Exploration should eventually help you commit attention. The purpose of plurality is to loosen a premature conclusion, not to create endless comparison. When you choose a direction, keep the other sketches as records of what you considered and what you might revisit under different circumstances. A life can have chapters without needing every possible chapter at once.
Keep exploring
Sources & further reading
Our examples and prompts are original. These sources provide context, describe the methods, or let you read the work for yourself.
- Stanford Life Design Lab — resources
Original life-design resources, including Odyssey Planning. Our exercises and examples are independently written; no affiliation or endorsement.
Let the reading become a first step.
You can explore the related exercise at your own pace, then bring what you notice into a conversation.
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