Nice, congrats! Planning is a difficult thing because we have typically run into 2 problems:
1. We don't know what the future holds
2. It can be overwhelming to try to do big life goals & find a purpose in life & all that jazz
My approach is to break it down into multiple levels:
1. Bucket list, i.e. stuff to do before you die
2. 5-year plan, because it's hard to plan out much beyond that
3. Current & next hot projects - something to plug your excitement into now, and something to look forward to next
Then I pretty much just do my planning based off that. That way I have something to work on now, something lined up next after that, stuff loosely lined up for the next 5 years, and then stuff to do before I kick the bucket. It's sort of like having a lighthouse out in the distance...it gives you something to aim towards, instead of just drifting.
I like this approach because it gives me some targets to knock over in different blocks of time (right now, 5 years, and lifetime), instead of just trying to come up with stuff randomly off the top of my head...it provides me different "buckets" to put different ideas in. As a kid, most of your structure is decided for you - when to go to bed (as dictated by your parents), who to hang out with (as dictated by proximity), going to school (as dictated by the government), and so on. There's a general American dream out there, but you may or may not be interested, and even if you fulfill it...then what?
A good place to start is to ask yourself if $100 million dollars just dropped into your bank account...once you got everything paid off & got everything you ever wanted & partied it up for a few weeks or months or years...then what? It's
incredibly boring not to be plugged into anything fun or exciting or have anything like that to look forward to in the future, and thus you fall into the "meh mode" trap. Meh. Or you go the celebrity route, where you're so rich & have so much free time that you drink yourself to death or die of a drug overdose because you're so bored that all you can think to do is party all the time to escape the boredom.
Which leads to the question of: what would you do if you were rich? If you had unlimited free time & resources, what would you do for free? If you weren't just stuck with your current, limited options, what options would you create for yourself? Life is literally what you make of it, so if you could make anything, why not have big, wild dreams & then work on changing your options so that you can pursue them?
Of course, another trap is just getting sucked into the day-to-day living stuff. I've discovered that you can be really busy doing nothing. It's like spinning on a hamster wheel...you're active, but you're not getting anywhere, haha. This is why I think it's worth hanging some carrots out in front of you for stuff to do on your bucket list, on a 5-year plan, coming up next, and right now...fun, exciting stuff that actually motivates you. Unfortunately, it's not the same stuff that worked on you as a kid...
View attachment 15388