Plan Your Life? Some Say "Don't Do It!"

At LifeTwo we encourage people to figure out what makes them happy, and then change their life so they can do those things. We're in favor of goals (just see our Life Plan section).

But what if we're wrong?

The Sydney Morning Herald's Leon Gettler points us to writer Richard Oliver, who argues in this manifesto that "the majority of people, many of them very successful, make it up as they go along." He says "Take a look around you. How many people do you know who actually buy in to living their lives like a project plan?"

Is it because we're no good at planning? Gettler links to this intriguing post by Jeremy Dean at PsyBlog:

Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. ... In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it.

If (career planning is) hard at 18, it's even harder in midlife when people are theoretically better equipped to make their choice. In reality by your 30s wide-eyed optimism has normally been replaced by a more cynical outlook on jobs and the workplace.

... There's many reasons why it seems we should be good at prediction what we want. If I know that I'm enjoying what I'm doing now, then I should enjoy it in the future -- shouldn't I? On top of this I've got years of experience building up a set of things I like - cinema, books, sitcoms - and things I don't like - trips to the dentist, severe embarrassment and flu, especially not all at the same time. If I've got this huge bank of likes and dislikes it should be easy to predict my wants in the future. And yet, it seems we are often surprised by what the future throws at us.

The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed 'miswanting' by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future.

PsyBlog's Dean goes on to detail a study showing that people who thought they wanted variety ended up unhappy when they got it, and recounts other research from positive psychology showing that within six months of winning the lottery, people return to their baseline level of happiness. In short, he says, "We are incredibly bad at knowing our future selves."

Oliver is influenced by James Ogilvy's Living Without A Goal, a book is said to show that "richness and color and flavor flood back into our lives once we set aside the goals that hold us captive.*"

There's even academic research into the application of chaos theory to career trajectories. That's very much the antithesis of the coached and mentored ideal found in the business press and the career section of the bookstore.

So if goals and plans aren't for you, follow up on these alternative approaches.

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* One Amazon reviewer notes that it's problematic to have a goal not to have goals!