Re: 5 year plans
I can't make them - not even 5 month plans. Life's too uncertain.
20 year plans - yes, those we have, full of contingency sub-plans. But they're not detailed.
When I was 10, I decided what i wanted to do with my life.
I wanted to travel the world.
I wanted to emigrate to Australia - thanks to a school project I did at age 6 on the place.
I wanted to work on a space program in the year 2000. Maybe offplanet - that didn't seem unlikely in 1968.
I wanted a husband, and children.
I wanted a PhD in Pure Maths and Astrophysics, like Zoe (the Dr Who companion).
I had to make certain concessions to reality when it came to implementation, though not major ones. The biggest was that I didn't have a female puberty, I had to pretend to be a boy. That actually made a lot of my career choices easier, though emotionally it was devastating. I ended up falling in love with another gal, so it had advantages there. She's straight.
I also found out I was Intersex, and was told the odds of me ever having children were remote. 100:1 against - though we now know that was wrong, more like 100,000,000 to 1 against. But... we had a child anyway. I wanted a large family, but for me, 1 is larger than could reasonably be expected.
At Uni, I kept up with the Pure Maths, but dropped Physics because I found Computer Science more interesting. And because there were (and are) a lot of Astrophysicists driving cabs, you had to be in the top few percent.
More through luck than effort, I got the rest. The family emigrated to Australia (I only got 2 weeks notice). I travelled the world as part of my job - from Zuerich to Seoul and Southampton, Bremen and Bangkok to Akron, Ohio and Hengelo, Overijssel. I played a major role in Australia's second space program - before, like the first one, it too was shut down after achieving spectacular success. Shut down in fact because it was so successful, like the first, accomplishing all objectives, but with no plans by a myopic government for any follow-up.
Now I better get back to my thesis if I'm going to get my doctorate. I have all the published papers, it's just a matter of writing it up.