How I'm Figuring Out What To Do In Life

Opportunities from an Existential Crisis

By the time I entered my final year in college, I knew I didn’t want to live the traditional path of working until you’re 50 and finally “enjoying” freedom during retirement.

No, that’s not the path for me. What I want is to carve out my own path.

I want to explore and see what else life has to offer me. This is why I took on a marketing role for my day job (despite having zero marketing skills) and started writing on this Substack several months ago (despite never really seeing myself as a writer before).

It’s been an interesting journey so far. I feel like I’ve learned more valuable lessons in the past year than in the classes I took in school.

A downside to this path, however, is the uncertainty of what lies ahead of me. The road isn’t laid out for me like in the traditional path. I have to figure things out on my own.

And one of the biggest questions I’ve been asking while being in this whole uncertain journey is, “What do I actually want to do in my life?”

The Odyssey Plan

My existential crisis led me back to an exercise that I did last year when I also felt stuck. It’s called The Odyssey Plan, a life-design exercise from Stanford Business School. The task was to simply think about the following prompts and write down the answers for each one:

1. Write out, in detail, what your life would look like 5 years from now if you continued down your current path.

2. Write out, in detail, what your life would look like 5 years from now if you took a completely different path.

3. Write out, in detail, what your life would look like 5 years from now if money, social obligations, and what people would think, were irrelevant.

I’ll be sharing my answers below. They’re highly personal, but you can use them as a guide if you’re willing to try the exercise yourself. Feel free to skip to the bottom if you only want to check my reflections and takeaways.

👣 Current Path - 5 Years from Now

• I’m 29. I’m still working at a marketing role, but now with a more senior position. I am mindful about work, but I sometimes work overtime just to meet deadlines and get projects moving. Unlike before, however, I’m able to manage my stress better. I deeply wish I had more time and freedom to do what excites me the most (which is probably writing, reading, or doing creative projects / life experiments), but for now, I’m finding ways to manage my work so that I still have time to do things I love.

• I like exploring stuff on the side. I find comfort in the stableness of my monthly income, and that allows me to experiment without much risk. Life is too short to spend all my time on my day job, so I’ve been engaging in entrepreneurship after starting my million dollar weekend 5 years ago. I’m coaching Gen Z and Millennials to help them build a life that they love. I regularly talk to clients during weekends and weekday nights.

• I’m still staying with my parents, but I also want to stay with my girlfriend of 6 years, so we’re now staying together in one household. We moved to a rural area in Cebu City where we’re surrounded with hills and trees, but still have easy access to the city. We have a pet dog. My siblings have also moved to the city after my parents did the same, so we would get together a couple times a year to spend time together as a family.

• I already bought myself a library’s worth of books. I read for at least an hour everyday, and I make sure to take down notes and actually apply the lessons from what I read. 

• I bought myself the latest play station and I often play with my girlfriend at night when we feel like it. I like to think I’ll be a kid at heart even when I turn 60.

🍃 Alternative Path - 5 Years from Now

• I’m 29 and I’m now living life with more freedom. I decided to quit my job 5 years ago to fully be self-employed. The money I make every month isn’t much, but it’s enough to sustain the lifestyle I want to live. 

• I’ve tried out 5+ business ideas at this point. The first ones didn’t go as planned, but I didn’t give up. I lost some money along the way, but I’ve been wise enough to mitigate risk such that I’m still capable of starting again when things don't work out.

• I’m either doing coaching or consulting. After trying both of them out years ago, I have decided to double down on the one that feels more exciting for me. If it’s coaching, I’m helping Gen Z and Millennials design a life that they love. If it’s consulting, I’m using my marketing skills and experience with data to scale businesses and solve key problems.

• My parents live with me and my girlfriend in Cebu City. I get together with my siblings at least once a month. And I try to hang out with friends every week. Occasionally, I fly overseas to meet with writers and creators I admire.

• I spend a lot of money on books and social activities. I play sports like basketball and badminton at least once a week. Unlike when I was employed, I now have more energy for the things I’ve been putting off because I was “busy.”

• I started my own YouTube channel and podcast around 4 years ago. I use my platforms to share interesting conversations, how my life experiments have been going, and practically anything I find interesting. I have at least 1,000 subscribers and I’m earning some money from sponsorships, deals, and the new course that we just launched. I have a team of 5 to 10 people who help me out with video editing, social media management, and all the other stuff I don’t enjoy doing. 

• I treat YouTube and podcasting as lifestyle businesses. That means I publish at least once a month to maintain my presence online, but I don’t pressure myself to publish videos or episodes when I don’t feel like it.

• I’m still writing and publishing consistently every week. After years of honing my craft, I decide it’s time to finally write a book and I commit to doing this for maybe 3-5 years. I have a writing coach and try to go on weekly writing sessions with other writers.

🪴 Alternative Path - No Money, No Social Status

• I’m 29 and living life with full freedom and intention. I stopped worrying about money 5 years ago because for some magical reason, I have always been able to afford whatever I wanted. I also don’t care about social status or what people have to say anymore.

• I decided to quit my job 5 years ago to build something of my own. It’s not a business, since money no longer matters, but rather something that I find more meaningful. It’s a community of people who see life with many opportunities and trust in their own potential to do great things. They believe in lifelong learning, as I do, and find joy in trying things out and seeing what happens.

• The community is filled with energy. We’ve already completed projects that that helped provide better education (one that’s quite different from what schools and universities usually teach) to cities all around the world. We have also built local libraries in all sorts of places because we believe books are a great resource for education. We make it a point to have more timeless books and not just the most popular and trendy ones lol. Often, we also have volunteers organize classes teaching a wide range of topics like life design, personal finance, and health. I make sure to be involved in all of these activities.

• I started writing a book 3 years ago, but it’s still not finished. I want to spend a lot of time refining my ideas and making sure my writing is of the highest quality. I started writing the book pretty early because I believe that the best way to do anything isn’t to wait until I’m ready, but to simply start and learn along the way. I’m not sure when the book will be finished. It may take 5 more years or maybe even a decade, but I’m sure that I’ll know when it’s ready.

• I’ve been living as a nomad for a few years already. I’m traveling to all sorts of places with my girlfriend. We’re not pressured to move to a new place every month. We’re taking the time to immerse in the culture and environment we are staying in. We make it a point to stay in a quiet place that is surrounded with nature because that is what energizes us.  While we enjoy traveling, we don’t really live consistently as nomads. We come back home to stay with family for a couple months at a time. We believe there needs to be a balance between exploring new things and cherishing the relationships we currently have. We’re still figuring out how to do this, but we’re always mindful about the journey we are taking and what we might be leaving behind if we do this or that (or what we might miss out on if we don’t). 

• I’ve learned to value fun and entertainment a lot more, so I still play games. I have the latest version of the Nintendo Switch and Play Station. I have fully quit social media, and only have messaging apps left on my phone. My phone screen is always in black and white.

• I am living an active lifestyle. I play basketball at least once a week. I’m also trying out all kinds of sports. I have a fit body because I work out at least four times a week, and I make sure to move my body and stretch daily. I also have a fitness coach who guides me with exercises and my diet.

• I’ve also been learning how to create art. I started drawing around 2 or 3 years ago. I want to be able to create stories with my drawings because I remember I used to do that quite often as a kid. I also think it’s nourishing to have different ways of expressing how I feel. I’ve been engaging in nonfiction for a very long time, but now I’m trying to create fictional stories which I enjoy sharing with my girlfriend. I create story books, which I’m hoping to read to my kids one day.

Reflections

This turned out to be a longer exercise than I thought, but I think the clarity I gained in the end was worth every minute I spent on it. I even came up with some pretty interesting ideas which I may want to try out someday.

I guess the reason why this worked for me was that I was leaning into what I think would be exciting if I took the different life paths. I didn’t worry too much about what my goals or passions were. 

In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris wrote:

When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement. This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

You might notice how overly optimistic my answers are. And I think that’s the best way to do the exercise. Sure, it might not be likely that I’m able to simultaneously work on a book, build a community, and live as a digital nomad five years from now. But they’re really good signals about what I truly want to do.

Anyway, here are my biggest takeaways from this exercise:

1. Travel seems to be something I really want to do, probably because I’m curious about different cultures and experiences. I’m wondering if I should save up for a trip before the year ends.

2. I find myself wanting to live a more active lifestyle where I regularly engage in sports. These days, I’ve been stuck in the house almost every day of the week. Maybe it’s time I revisit our local basketball court?

3. I am fully aware of the value of my relationships. I know I want to spend more time with friends and family, but I always tell myself I’m too busy. But seeing what I wrote here, I think I should make more time for my relationships.

4. All 3 life paths have an emphasis on reading and writing, which tells me how important they are to me now. When I started doing them, I will admit I was doing it for the results that they promised. But now, I think things are different. I feel good when I write and clarify my ideas. I feel excited when I read and discover stuff I never knew before.

5. Education has been a consistent theme. I think I still do believe that the world should have a more holistic kind of education, and I want to play a role in creating that. I was pleasantly surprised when I came up with these ideas: a) An organized book club with weekly experiments, b) self-organized classes taught by volunteers, and c) community-built local libraries. I feel excited just thinking about them. I’m eager to see if these could be projects I can work on sometime this year.

6. When money and social status became irrelevant, I found myself wanting to build a community of ambitious learners. This was surprising to me. Lately I’ve been looking into coaching as a way for me to share what I’ve been learning on intentional living. But in the third prompt, it’s not just about me inspiring others. I actually want other people to do the same and building a community seems to be a good step towards that. Easier said than done, of course, but I’m keeping this in mind.

And that’s it. The Odyssey Plan exercise always helps me find some sort of direction in life. I’m not yet entirely sure where I want to be headed, but at least I already have clues on what I want to be doing next.

The most important part is the one that comes next, which is finding ways to act on what I learned. And you can bet that from here, I’m going to start doing what I want to do.

How It’s Going:

📖 — Finished reading Kafka on the Shore after 7 long months. I’m already missing 15-year-old Kafka and cheerful old soul Mr. Nakata. I’m enjoying fiction for bedtime, so I started reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

📱 — I turned my phone screen to b&w and I don’t think I’ll be changing it anytime soon. I sometimes apply a grayscale filter in my laptop as well. It’s been big help to my eyes (and daily screen time).

📺 — I realized I haven’t finished Attack on Titan yet, but Eyang is almost done with Season 3. We’ll probably watch the Final Seasons (yes, apparently it’s more than one) together.