Every other day, someone asks me “What is your five year plan?” I know the next few years hold a lot of change for me, and that the people who ask that question are genuinely just wondering what direction I want to take my life. But, I never give a satisfactory answer to this question because, quite frankly, I hate five year plans. Yes, I know I need a sense of direction in my life. Yes, I know I can’t procrastinate the future just because I refuse to admit I am growing up. But here me out: Five year plans place subconscious limits on your potential and cause you to falsey measure your quality of life.
Five year plan creates a tunnel vision effect on your future. Let’s say your five year plan includes getting hired out of college to work at your dream company, Google. So, you put in the hard work, aiming at this one particular goal. Maybe you get it, maybe you don’t. But either way, the tunnel vision you had while studying and networking caused you to miss out on opportunities that would have suited you better. Maybe you could have found a company you actually liked more, or maybe going to graduate school would have prepared you for a higher, more fitting position. But because you set this timely, specific goal you’ve missed out. Your five year plan has hurt you.
Five year plans also falsely measure your quality of life. Let’s use the previous Google position example. Sadly, you didn’t get the dream job. You measure this as a failure because you weren’t able to cross this dream off your list. But you land a role working for Microsoft that offers you a larger salary. A few weeks in, you’re fitting right in with the atmosphere of the coworkers. You know this is where you were meant to be. But, according to your five year plan, this is a loss. You didn’t get the Google spot, so you endured that heartbreak and inner disappointment, even though things ended up for the best. Had you not had a five year plan to disappoint, you would have dodged the emotions, and still been happy in the end. So, if five year plans can cause us to miss out on other opportunities and don’t accurately depict our happiness, then why do people still ask about them?
Five years ago, I was a high school sophomore who drove a green Volkswagen Beetle named Olive and ate an ungodly amount of PB&Js. If you asked Young Samantha what her five year plan was, she’d tell you that by the time she was 20 she’d have walked at high school graduation and stayed in touch with hometown friends even after moving to attend NYU where she fell in love with a Wall Street broker who bought her flowers weekly. Sorry Young Samantha, none of that has happened (yet).
The global pandemic (which was in absolutely nobody’s five year plan) and the common obstacles of moving to college threw a wrench into most of those plans. But am I sad that my life as a 20 year old has failed to live up? Well, maybe about the Wall Street boyfriend, but in the grand scheme, heck no. In the last five years, I’ve met life long friends, found a career I am passionate about, and become more of an independent woman than I ever could have pictured. So needless to say, my last five years have been successful even though they didn’t align with my sophomore self’s hopes and dreams.
Oscar Wilde put it best when he said that if you know what you want to be, you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. If you never set your eyes on one goal, you have the freedom to achieve anything. It’s quite paradoxical; to achieve more with less of a plan. But, stripping ourselves of cemented goals allows us to see beyond our narrow paths. There is a world of opportunity and growth that exists outside of five year plans, and I for one am called to explore it.
