Big Plans
Feast Day of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist
A Day to Indulge in Grand Visions
About Big Plans
Today is Big Plans (all caps), an invitation to indulge in your most ambitious, outlandish, and wildly impractical dreams. Forget pragmatism or feasibility. Today is about imagining a life without limits. Always wanted to start a goat yoga retreat on a remote island? Time to draft the business plan. Thinking about writing a novel or reinventing yourself as an opera singer? Today is the day to envision it. There will be plenty of time later to pare down your plans into something achievable, but for now, embrace the idea that you’re capable of anything and see where your imagination takes you. And speaking of unbridled imagination, Big Plans coincides with the Feast Day of St. John the Apostle. As the (alleged) author of the Book of Revelation, St. John offered one of the most enigmatic works of the Bible, filled with cosmos-rupturing imagery. Can the Book of Revelation inspire your Big Plans? (That’s a joke, folks. Please do not start a cult.)
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Write down your wildest dream in one sentence and share it with a close friend or family member.
(B) Recommended
Host a Big Plans Brainstorm with friends or family. Gather everyone together over coffee and pastries and take turns sharing each other’s wildest ideas, no matter how outrageous.
(C) High effort
Create a full vision board for your Big Plans using magazines, online images, or drawing supplies. Include everything: mood, colors, goals, and even wild travel destinations. Display it somewhere prominent to keep the dream alive!
Inspiration
There’s a particular restlessness that follows Christmas. The festivities are behind us, and the new year hasn’t quite begun. It’s a good day for drafting outlines, sketching ideas, or naming the thing you aren’t quite ready to attempt. The scale doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about how to start, where to find investors, or whether there’s a market for your sci-fi M*A*S*H reboot (Hawkeye runs triage for rogue AI agents). On Big Plans, we’re unconstrained.
Yuletide (12 Days of Christmas) This is the first of several days set aside for unedited thinking. My tendency is to scale ideas to fit what seems manageable, something within reach, something I can frankly explain to my spouse without embarrassment. Most things I’ve accomplished began as too ambitious or plainly impractical, until I excised the crazy bits. Today is about writing those things down anyway. You’ll have plenty of time to sanitize them later.
Adornments
Read
Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
Taught at Stanford, this book takes design thinking principles and applies them to life and career planning. Full of useful tools—like reframing problems and building prototypes of your future—it’s an excellent guide for mapping dreams into structures.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
It starts with an arresting premise: our lifespan is, on average, only 4,000 weeks long. Burkeman encourages readers to embrace limitations and focus on what truly matters, rather than trying to do it all.
Deep Work by Cal Newport
This guide to focused productivity makes the case for carving out time to concentrate intensely on your most ambitious ideas. Newport’s framework of eliminating distractions and structuring effort is ideal for anyone who’s ready to take their “big plans” seriously.
Longitude by Dava Sobel
Sobel chronicles 18th-century clockmaker John Harrison, who set out to solve the “longitude problem” of navigation by building an accurate marine clock. A classic, engrossing work in the history of science.
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
A historical novel inspired by the life of Mary Anning, a working-class woman in 19th-century England whose fossil discoveries upend the scientific world.