Revisiting the 10-Year Plan for a Remarkable Life

Plus more interesting reads and listens from the last week.

Thanks for reading Almost Sated, a newsletter about the messy process of detoxing from diets, diet culture and self-suppression. If you like what you’re reading, please consider subscribing and sharing! It’s free to join, and subscribing ensures you never miss a post. On Mondays, I round up the most interesting reads and listens from the last week.

I should make this topic its own full-length post some day, but for now I’ll just mention the 10-Year Plan for a Remarkable Life. This past week, I re-listened to a favorite podcast between author Tim Ferriss and writer-designer extraordinaire Debbie Millman. Obviously, it left an impression, because here I am writing about it six years after its debut. 

Millman picked up the idea of the 10-year plan from a former professor, and when he retired, she asked him if she could teach it to her students. Fortunately, now it’s available to us all. While it’s called the 10-Year Plan for a Remarkable Life, it’s less of a plan with actionable steps and more of a vision for what your life could look like if there was nothing stopping you from achieving your dreams. Millman says it’s eerie in how accurate it can prove to be.

The exercise is fairly simple. Millman prompts you to visualize a full day in your life 10 years from now, starting with waking and write it all down. Where are you? What are you wearing? Who are you with? What do you eat for breakfast? What are you doing? The more specific you can be in dreaming up this day, the better. Millman says there’s something magical about this assignment—and the more you can put your whole heart into it, the more you increase your chances of it coming true. 

“Dream big, dreams without any fear. Write it all down. You don’t have to share it with anyone other than yourself. Put your whole heart into it. And write like there is no tomorrow; write like your life depends on it because it does.” —Debbie Millman

She then recommends you revisit the plan once a year. 

I failed spectacularly in my first go-round of this exercise because I did not revisit it every year. In fact, I lost it.

Believe it or not, I have spent the last few months off and on poking around the house in all the places I would expect to find it and have been unsuccessful. I strongly suspect that I shoved it between a stack of House Beautiful magazines that lived in a basket in my bedroom two houses ago and that are now long gone. 

I am pretty sure that my original 10-year plan had me awakening in a villa—my villa—on the outskirts of an unnamed town in Italy. I spent part of the year there with my life partner, writing (novels, I think, but somehow also providing advice to readers) and at least partially living off the land.

This is all I remember, so it’s time to write a new 10-year plan. This time, I’ll put it somewhere I can find it. (Life update: I did a new 10-year plan for a remarkable life over the holidays, and it includes some of what I remember from my original plan.)

The entire podcast is worth a listen, but if you just want to do the plan, this site includes a transcript of the assignment. I’d love to hear from any of you who do it, or have done it.

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Finding Yourself Through Travel

There were so many good Substack reads this week, with

Janice Walton

’s “The Trip” among them. Walton is a new subscriber with her own newsletter called Aging Well News. She writes this week about self-discovery while visiting Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Glacier National Parks with her daughter and son-in-law.

“While the trip itself was amazing, something else happened that was equally awesome. I read three books on the long driving stretches. All of which I picked randomly - or so I thought. But their combined message was loud and rejuvenating.” —Janice Walton

Walton’s piece is less about the parks and more about her emotional journey through them to a place of healing and peace within herself.

I speak from personal experience when I say these beautiful landscapes are the perfect backdrop for self-reflection. Hubs and I revisited Yellowstone in May, which I wrote about here on Substack.

Each of these parks holds a special place in my heart, but none more than Glacier, because it’s where I married the love of my life last summer. 

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The Evolution of BJJ

Since starting this Substack, I have discovered so many other writers who are working to share their insights in their respective areas of expertise. Andrew Smith is one of those folks. His

GoatFury's FutureScape

tackles tech, society and the future, and he writes daily, which is a pretty remarkable feat. 

I particularly enjoyed his piece last week about the evolution of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He interviewed fellow instructor Daniel Frank (Smith owns a BJJ gym). What came through loud and clear is the passion these two practitioners share for their sport. 

I haven’t talked much about this here, but for five plus years, I devoted much of my non-working life to perfecting my technique as a recreational master Olympic weightlifter, and I was fortunate to be coached by two people who were so dedicated to the sport. Smith’s piece was so interesting because Oly lifting hasn’t significantly changed in terms of the movements and technique in the last two decades, while it sounds like BJJ is constantly evolving. 

“For instructors, the challenge now is to stay in tune with the ever-changing landscape of jiu jitsu. In the past, a black belt could have an encyclopedic knowledge of the techniques in the sport. Today, that’s simply impossible. With new techniques and concepts sprouting up every day, the role of the instructor is to stay adaptable and receptive to change. ‘The instructor does not have to be an expert in all aspects, but should be aware of the ever-changing jiu jitsu world,’ Daniel highlights. This ability to adapt and evolve with the sport is what sets successful instructors apart.”—Andrew Smith

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Where Are You in Your Fat Bias?

I reference Ragen Chastain’s writing quite a bit here, because she is doing amazing work helping to dismantle bias and stigma against fat people, particularly within the medical community at her

Weight and Healthcare

newsletter.

While I’m not a member of the medical community, I still found it interesting to read about the levels of advocacy for health practitioners with higher-weight patients and clients.

“This is where it starts. If you are still struggling with this idea, if you still think that it might be reasonable for fat people to have to become thin(ner) before they deserve full access healthcare (and research and lived experience tell us that you are definitely not alone,) then it’s time to do some work to unpack and dismantle your own weight stigma and bias.” —Ragen Chastain

As a lay person, you can read through the levels and do a quick check on where you are with your own bias. (Most of us have some level of fat bias, even if we are actively working toward weight neutrality.) Frankly, as someone who has benefited from thin privilege my whole life (while still battling my own weight issues), I had no real awareness of fat discrimination. It’s been an eye-opening experience to go through this learning process as I delve further into my own anti-diet work.

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