You don’t need a five-year plan. You need a direction and the guts to adjust it.

Long plans fail less from bad planning than from the fact that the person who made them does not exist yet. At eighteen you cannot know what twenty-three wants, so a detailed schedule commits a stranger to your current preferences. A direction is more robust: roughly this field, roughly this kind of life.

Write one sentence about the direction and a list of the next two steps, which is all the resolution you need. Then set a date to look at it again. Changing it on purpose is not failure; drifting without noticing is.