How to Get the Life You Want Without a Five-Year Plan
It was a Tuesday. The kind I used to daydream about from behind a desk that was quietly killing me. Here's how I changed my life. Not the way my mentors told me to.
I used to wake up at 2:30 in the morning gasping for air. Now I know it was a panic attack. Back then I just knew I was trapped in someone else’s body.
Last Tuesday morning, I went forest bathing on Lake Hallam in Aspen, led by a woman who studied the practice in Japan. We stopped to smell wild mint along the water and read poetry out loud. A deer foraged a few feet away, unbothered by my human aura.
As the day went on, I sat in sessions led by experts on mental health, psychedelics, and the fight over AI chatbots in healthcare. I had matcha and drinks with founders, CEOs, and investors. A couple of those conversations changed how I think about my business. Over lunch, I played with puppies from the Aspen Animal Rescue Shelter. After, a sound bath in a geodesic dome.
All of this happened on a Tuesday. All of it was work.
Forest Bathing at Lake Hallam at the Aspen Ideas Health Festival
Years before, my Tuesdays looked different. On paper they were great. Three gourmet meals a day at the office. A job people envied. That was the problem. I was living a great life. It just wasn’t my great life. It was someone else’s, and I was very good at it. Underneath, it wasn’t me. The panic was my body knowing before I did. I know how that sounds. A privileged pain, to be sure, but pain nevertheless.
When I asked my mentors how to get a freer, more honest version of my life, they handed me advice steeped in spreadsheets. Make a list of thirty people you need to meet. Schedule the coffee chats. Work the list. You can change function, or you can change sector, but not both. Find a lateral move that’s only a half-step away. Hang on for the next promotion cycle. Build your five-year plan. Self-limiting belief, dressed up as prudence.
And every option was a half-step. A lateral, a function swap, the next rung up. You don’t reach a different life by getting more efficient inside the one you’re trying to leave.
The throughline was always the same. Treat your career like a logistics problem. Inputs, outputs, a clean route between two known points. But I didn’t know the destination yet. And you can’t route to an address you can’t name.
So I dreamt. On paper and in my head. I asked myself how I wanted to spend my Tuesdays. I journaled it. I fantasized about it. I didn’t know the specifics, but I could feel it in my body. I could feel what it would be like to wake up on a Tuesday with the space to write in the morning. To take a walk with the sun in my eyes. To sit in the audience at my kid’s school performance at 2:30 on a Tuesday without the guilt of feeling behind.
That Tuesday, I realized I’m a lot closer to that life than I was a few years ago. I’m not all the way there. I still have grand visions I’m working on. But I’m close enough that I want to show you how I got here. Because the advice that worked was not the advice I was given.
Two things got me here. A rough vision, and the belief that I was allowed to chase it.
The vision came from paying attention. I’ve always known what I like, and I’ve never been embarrassed about it. Even deep in the grind on the wrong path, I noticed when something felt good. A midday yoga class I could take because a meeting got cancelled. A coffee that ran long and turned into a real conversation. I kept notes on what energized me, and I pictured a life with more of it.
The belief is that you’re allowed to build the life you want. Protecting the life you do want is your job. This one took the longest to comprehend. It’s a muscle, and mine built on the word no. I say no to most “pick your brain” requests now. Not because I’m unkind, and not because I don’t care. Because at some point I had to put myself first, and every yes I gave away was a Tuesday I didn’t get back. The first few felt terrible. They get easier. The discomfort is the point.
I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t say the other part out loud. I’m ruthless about hitting my goals. You don’t earn the room to play if you’re not delivering, and you can’t keep delivering without the play. The spreadsheet earns the shaman her freedom. The shaman is the reason I can run the spreadsheet at all.
Here’s where the spreadsheet people get to feel vindicated for a second, because there’s real neuroscience under all of this.
When you picture something vividly, your brain runs a partial simulation of actually doing it. The same regions that fire during the real experience fire during the imagined one. This is well established in the research on mental rehearsal, which is why athletes who visualize a routine perform measurably better, and why the effect shows up in the brain scans, not just the locker-room mythology. Imagining the thing primes you for the thing.
Then there’s the part that explains why my mornings started rearranging themselves. Your brain takes in millions of signals a second and throws almost all of them away, because you’d drown otherwise. What makes the cut is shaped by what you’ve decided matters. Get specific about what you want, and you start noticing the version of it that’s already around you. There’s a boring name for this. Selective attention. It’s the same reason you buy a particular car and then see it on every corner. The cars didn’t multiply. Your noticing did.
There’s a study on this. People who pictured the process of getting somewhere, the actual steps and days, outperformed the people who pictured the prize. Imagining the texture of the thing beats imagining the trophy. Which is what I’d been doing without knowing it. I never pictured a title. I pictured a Tuesday.
So when I say I pictured the mornings I wanted and they started showing up, I’m not claiming I bent reality. I got better at spotting what was already there, and what I spotted changed what I said yes to. The yes is the part that actually moved my life.
The version of this you’ll hear from manifestation coaches is too clean. The brain doesn’t conjure opportunities out of the ether. It doesn’t reward a vision board you glance at twice.
The shamanic part and the scientific part are describing the same event from two perspectives. One calls it intention. The other calls it selective attention. I’ve stopped needing them to agree on the language. They agree on the instruction, which is this: Get specific about what you want. Feel it in your body. Put yourself where it could happen. And move when it does.
Long before instruments, Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of miles of open ocean. No compass. No charts. No coordinates. They read the swell against the hull, the flight paths of birds, the positions of stars they’d memorized since childhood. They didn’t know the exact dot they were sailing toward. They knew the direction, and they were tuned to signals the rest of us would sail right past.
You don’t need the coordinates. Most of the time you can’t have them yet. What you need is a direction you can feel, and enough attention to read the water you’re already in. The deer at the lake that morning wasn’t following a map. Neither was I, ten years ago, when I started noticing which Tuesdays felt like the life I wanted.
If your Tuesdays don’t look like the ones you want yet, you are not off course. You’re mid-crossing. Get clear on the direction. Tune yourself to the signals. And when the wind shifts in your favor, and it will, move.
I read poetry in a forest last Tuesday morning. It was work. Ten years ago, it was a daydream I couldn’t have routed to if I tried. I just kept choosing the next thing that felt like mine.
The Practice
Pick one Tuesday on your calendar. Not a vacation day. An ordinary one. Write down how you’d spend it if guilt and logistics weren’t a factor. Don’t solve for how yet. Get specific enough that you’d recognize the day if it showed up. That’s your direction. Now watch what you start noticing.
The Shelf
Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It came out of a Stanford course, and the whole premise is that you prototype your way toward a life instead of planning your way there. The spreadsheet people, quietly admitting you have to try things to find out.
The Invitation
Reply and tell me one thing you noticed this week that felt like the life you want. One Tuesday detail you’re steering toward. I read them all.
Have you made it this far?
tap the ❤️ so I know it landed
leave a 💬 with the Tuesday you’re working toward
forward this to someone who’s quietly living someone else’s great life
Run on both,
Nathalie