The Big Plan

Plans are nothing, planning is everything

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

An Intentional Life, A Better Life

I've decided that I want to be more deliberate with my life. I've always noticed that I've been the best version of myself when I've had a clear plan that felt both ambitious yet achievable. It's worked well for me in the past leading to the events, accomplishments, and growth throughout my life that I'm most proud of.

More recently, though, I've been feeling a bit less...intentional, and even a little lost at times. Life over the past few years has been very different from my earlier life. There's been good. There's been not good. There's been a whole lot of change, and a lot of adjusting and growth as well. I'm different in a lot of ways, but the same in many others. On the whole, it's been a net positive, but even still there has been an increasingly nagging feeling of a distinct lack of direction; something that I now want to address.

The Big Plan

I'd like to regain that sense of conviction I had before, and I'd like it to be true to the person I am now and compatible with the person I hope to be in the future. So I've decided I'm going to make a plan that is maybe my most important plan ever: the plan for the rest of my life.

I know what you're going to say: "you can't plan your whole life", "you're never going to know what you want down the line", "your circumstances and priorities are going to change", "you're closing yourself off to new opportunities in life", "hey, I hate you and also you're crazy". Sure, I know this probably sounds crazy, and some of those concerns are true, but I think that's missing the point. Obviously, life doesn't always go to plan, but as Ike implies above, it's never about the plan. It's about the clarity and the purpose that you get from the process, which funnily enough happen to be the two things I've been missing.

Know Thyself

But how do you make a plan for your life? And even if you make one how do you stick to it? For me, I think it requires knowing your values, and the things that you believe will give your life meaning when you look back on it. Understanding your values allows you to set goals to help uphold them, and once you have your goals you can create strategies to reach them. When you add all the plans, goals, and values back up, you get what I'm going to call The Big Plan: a map that you can use to chart out and track your life's journey. It gives you the structure and direction from knowing your overarching values, and also the practicality and measurability of your underlying goals and strategies. In terms of "sticking" to it, I actually think it's more about staying aware of your progress and periodically reflecting to see whether you need to make adjustments anywhere.

I'm looking at it this way because I think the concerns are right. My priorities are going to change, and my circumstances are going to change. So my goals are going to change and possibly my values too. It has already happened before. But when my circumstances change, I can set new plans to reach my goals. When my priorities change, I can set new goals that still meet my values. And when my values change, then I will need to plan out new goals and strategies, but with the understanding that this is a successful step towards leading a more fulfilling life rather than failure to uphold my (now outdated) values. At the end of the day, I just don't want to feel lost anymore, so I think it's about both the specific goals you set, but also the way you approach defining and pursuing them.

Next Steps

So in terms of what I do next, here's my plan (see what I did there):

1. I'm going to define my requirements for a fulfilling life, by looking at the values that have stayed with me the most strongly over the past 30.7381544901 years¹.
2. I'm going to set some initial goals to help me meet my values (goals that are both ambitious and achievable)
3. I'm going to start checking in periodically to see how I'm doing towards my goals and (less frequently) my values.

I'll be tackling these in my next posts. If you'd like to be notified whenever I publish new posts, you can subscribe to my mailing list below.

— Vinay