Odyssey Plans: What are the Odyssey Years?

My name is Bill Burnett.

I'm one of the co-authors of Designing Your Life, How to Live a Well-Lived Joyful Life.

That's based on the class we teach here at Stanford called, Designing Your Life.

So one of the big assignments in the class is the Odyssey Plan where people come up with three completely different plans for their life.

And the idea of the Odyssey years comes from an article that David Brooks wrote in the New York Times.

David Brooks is a fantastic, sort of a political and social commentator.

And he had one article where he described the period of time between about 20 and 35 as your Odyssey years, the years where you discover and explore who you're going to be as a full-blown grown up.

Some people have called that period, sort of the extended adolescence or baby adulthood.

And we thought the framing of Odyssey years, where you're on a journey like, you know, Homer's Odyssey was a more powerful way to talk about it.

So we used the phrase Odyssey years to describe roughly the 10 years between about 22 and 32 or 20 to 35, that 10 to 15-year period.

They matter because in our current society, that's when people really-- maybe they're just finishing college or they're out of school for the first time and they're really starting to explore, what is it like to be an adult. And they're also starting their lives.

Right.

They're getting their first apartments or homes.

They're creating their first, maybe primary relationships.

Maybe they're getting married in that period of time.

So a lot of change is going on and it's a really formative time in any young person's life.

And we like the idea of an Odyssey as sort of a journey, you know a mystical journey through all these adventures.

And nowadays, we have more stages in our lives and so we have more time to do this kind of exploration.

It's a really critical time in a young person's life.