Sketch three possible lives

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who teach Designing Your Life at Stanford, suggest sketching three quite different five-year plans instead of searching for one perfect answer. Plan one: the path you are on now. Plan two: what you would do if plan one suddenly disappeared.

Plan three: what you would do if money and other people's opinions did not matter. For each, write a few lines about what a normal week looks like, and rate it on how much you like it, how confident you are, how coherent it is with your values and what resources it needs. The point is not to pick one now, but to see that you have more than one possible future.