Hello Blogites,
I hope you're all enjoying my novel. If you haven't purchased it yet, you can go to Amazon, search for me (Jon Rance) and buy my book. For the price of a cup of coffee, a pint of beer, or box of fancy cereal, you could get your hands on a novel written by me!
Anyway, enough shameless plugging of my novel, this blog is about my obsession...making plans and to be more specific, five-year-plans.
I don't know when it started exactly, but my first memory of making a To-Do list was around my mid-teens. I'm not sure how it evolved, whether it was a daily To-Do list that just got out of hand, but it evolved to become my first five-year-plan. The first of many.
So, what exactly is a five-year-plan and why am I obsessed by them. Well, a five-year-plan is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a plan that needs to be completed in five years. The important thing about a five-year-plan, as opposed to say a ten-year-plan, a two week plan or indeed a single day plan, is that five years is the perfect amount of time to do something amazing, life-changing, but it's also short enough so you can keep the plan in mind and make sure it gets done.A ten year plan for example is too long, while a year just isn't long enough. Five years is the Goldilocks of plans.
So, what was my first five-year-plan? Bearing in mind that I was around fifteen when I first conceived this, I think it's pretty solid.
1. Get good GCSE results and go to sixth-form college.
2. Get good A-Level results and go to University.
3. Get a degree.
4. Live in London.
5. Travel the world for a year.
OK, admittedly this is all basic stuff, but still, I was a sulky teenager with a plan and you know what, I achieved everything on that list.
I remember one specific moment when I realised it. I was on a tiny boat heading out towards a small island in Fiji. It was glorious, one of those moments you remember forever. It was hot, I was in shorts, a t-shirt, on my own on a small boat in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by paradise and heading towards two weeks on a desert island. The mainland was disappearing off into the distance, soon to become a speck and there on that boat, it suddenly came to me. I had achieved my five-year-plan. OK, technically it had taken a smidgen longer than five years to complete, but still, I had done it and without a list, I don't think I would have felt quite the same sense of achievement.
Since my first and inaugural five-year-plan, I've had a few more and most goals have been accomplished, while one was quite literally shelved when I met Kristin in Australia and suddenly my five-year-plan completely changed. At the moment, I'm at the beginning of a new five-year-plan. I would tell you my goals, but it's against five-year-plan rules. The first rule of five-year-plans? Don't talk about the five-year-plan!
The important thing though (for me at least) is that I have a plan. I can't imagine going through life without a plan. I need goals, something to achieve, otherwise I'm just aimlessly bumbling along, hoping that something good happens to me. Maybe I'm a bit crazy, but it works. It makes me believe that I'm in control of my own destiny. Call it free-will (even though free-will as a concept doesn't actually exist), but it lets me at least imagine a future, think about what kind of person I am and want to become. It may just be a To-Do list, written down on a piece of paper, but to me it's more than that and I think that as long as I live, I'll always have a five-year-plan.
Blog soon
