Before You Make a 5 Year Plan, Read This
Warning: If you decide you want to make a 3 or 5 year plan, there’s something you should know.
A plan is NOT a code of conduct.
It’s not a law. It’s not a spell cast over you that you are therefore “bound to follow through on.”
When we made 4 year plans in college, we were asked to make a sticky note for each class needed to finish out our degrees, and then place it in the corresponding semester.
I would bet a lot of money that every person who made a four year plan in their first year of college shuffled those sticky notes like a deck of cards, and in a lot of cases, threw half of them out and made a fresh batch to fill in the blanks.
I personally went through a lot of sticky notes. A lot of plans.
The long term plans we make now are no different.
In other words, we can make a plan, but we can also expect that whatever plan we make will likely flex and change.
So if you make a longer term plan, make an agreement with yourself that
1. It’s okay to change course
2. You don’t have to know the answer to every “how”
3. You’ll figure it out as you go along
This will save you a ton of headaches. Those who bend over backwards to “stick to the plan” that is no longer aligned with what they want end up wasting a ton of time and money.
But the people who are willing to adapt their plans as they go are the innovative minds that…
-Get the most done
-Make the coolest things
-And don’t have to spend as many resources to start over when the plan stops working for them
TLDR: go ahead and make a 5 year plan if it gives you satisfaction to do so. But don’t treat that plan like it’s the word of God or use that plan as a weapon against yourself to keep you locked into something you don’t want.
Changing course when you gain new information is the REAL divine process.
Did this post resonate with you? If so, I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment or send me a message to share your thoughts. For more uplifting content, you can check out some other posts on my blog or follow me on instagram @morgan_barbret or get my emails.
Cheers,
Morgan Rita Barbret
