Grand Plans, Not Grand Visions

As we once again open the new year with people pushing unrealistic goal-setting and unreasonable expectations upon us, I want to remind everyone: It’s OK not to have a grand vision for your career or for your life in general.

I say this to myself as much as anyone because it’s something I’ve struggled with forever: feeling “less than” for not having a defined set of career goals and for not being serious and committed about what I wanted to do in life.

On one of my first days of grad school, our incoming group of journalism students gathered for an orientation session where we were asked to stand up one at a time and share what we hoped to do as a career.

And as we went down the rows, everyone else was like “I want to be Christiane Amanpour” (shades of Rory Gilmore), or “I’m going to work at Newsweek,” and I was like, “I loved Sassy magazine and I want to be the next Jane Pratt.”

Which wasn’t even entirely true! But I couldn’t outright lie and tell anyone my dream was to write long-form investigative pieces for the Chicago Tribune or whatnot. And people had told me I was good at writing and I did love reading magazines, so being an English major and then going to grad school for journalism felt like my next logical step, even if I didn’t have a clue about why I should be doing it.

After I unhooked myself from the corporate world, I started writing about food because people told me I cooked well and explained how I made my meals in a clear and easy way, not because it was my dream to be a food blogger.

And even as I carved out what felt like a successful niche in food writing, I berated myself for not focusing on a more impactful way to make a living. But I didn’t know what else to do with my life. I used to make food and take pictures of it day in and day out. I wrote cookbooks about homemade snacks and pierogies.

And that was fun for a while, until it very much wasn’t.

Any time a life coach or counselor or well-meaning (but sadly misguided) person would ask me, “What’s your dream job?” I’d tell them my honest answer: “Not to have one!”

Even worse, then these coaches would inevitably push and push toward some kind of answer and I’d say, “sure, that’s fine, it’s something I could do” and then, ugh, they’d make me set GOALS.

Which I’d then dutifully try to meet, and never manage to do. No revenue benchmarks set, no x number of new clients, no sign-ups for whatever workshop or class or offering they had convinced me to put out there.

And then. Something happened over the past two years, as I’ve been working on unhooking myself from a certain notion of a work identity and getting really, fully comfortable with being me as a creative human.

It’s a lesson I learned from years of exploring my Human Design: Just because you’re good at doing something doesn’t mean you have to be doing it.

I’m finished with setting arbitrary career goals. I’m done inventing benchmarks that I have no personal interest in meeting. And I’m definitely through with the notion that we need to have a single dream job we work toward.

This is the revelation I’m having now: that I have a ton of grand plans, which are way more fun than one single grand vision.

I want to ride a roller coaster in the middle of an art museum. I want to spend the day visiting Daddy Warbucks’ mansion. I want to watch every episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I want to live by my my 10-Point Manifesto For a Life of Fun and Adventure.

Some people can just go forever at one thing and enjoy the long ride — Generator types in Human Design, people with the 53-42 energy channel, which vibes on committing to seeing something the whole way through, or people with the 48-16 channel of mastery through repetition, for instance.

But that’s not me.

I am here to do awesome things and have fun experiences — to see what happens without expectation — and share stories about about what I did with other people. I’m here to move to my own rhythm and find my own flow.

For 2026, I changed the text on my phone lock screen to read “52 weeks paid vacation” (from the Amanda Shires song “Gone for Christmas”) because that’s how I want my life to feel, like I’m on vacation every day no matter what’s on the docket.

That’s a pretty grand vision right there, don’t you think?