Obsessing Over 5 Year Plans vs. Deepening Your Character
I believe in vision.
I believe in dreaming big about the future, setting meaningful goals, and doing the hard work of moving toward them with intention.
I do not think thoughtful leaders should drift. I do not think passivity is a virtue. There is a real dignity in clarity, courage, and long obedience in the same direction.
But I also think something has gone wrong in the way many leaders have been taught to think about the future.
Too often, leadership formation gets reduced to planning horizons, measurable outcomes, and the endless management of goals, metrics, and milestones.
A five-year plan can clarify your direction. It cannot form your character.
That matters because the future is shaped not only by the quality of your ideas, but by the quality of the person carrying them.
A leader can be strategic, disciplined, and wildly productive while becoming impatient, brittle, emotionally distant, and inwardly exhausted. A leader can build something impressive while shrinking as a human being. Some leaders are very clear about where they are going and strangely unaware of who they are becoming.
That is what bothers me.
I am not troubled by ambition. I am troubled by ambition detached from formation.
I have seen enough of leadership culture to know how easily this happens. A person starts with a genuine desire to serve, build, heal, or contribute. They want to lead well. They want to be useful. They want to steward their gifts faithfully. But over time, the deeper questions get crowded out by the visible ones. Results take center stage. Internal erosion gets ignored because the external indicators still look healthy.
The tragedy is not always moral collapse. Sometimes it is subtler than that.
Sometimes the tragedy is that a leader achieves the future they wanted and arrives there as a thinner, harder, less present version of themselves. They got what they were aiming for, but they did not become more whole in the process.
That is one reason I keep returning to the language of 2 Peter 1. Peter does not tell us to add a brand strategy, a scale plan, or a five-year projection to our faith.
“For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.” (2 Peter 1:5-7 NRSV)
That is not an anti-action list. It is a formation list. It is not telling us to stop building, leading, deciding, or planning. It is telling us that the inner architecture of a life matters more than most of us admit.
Peter gives not just a list of ideals, but a path.
The movement matters. Faith becomes virtue. Virtue deepens into knowledge. Knowledge requires self-control. Self-control grows into steadfastness. Steadfastness is shaped into godliness. Godliness opens into brotherly affection. Brotherly affection matures into love. This is not accidental. It is cumulative. It describes a life being built from the inside out.
And that is where so many thoughtful leaders quietly lose the thread.
Thoughtful leaders are often very capable of thinking ahead. They can anticipate consequences. They can build systems. They can articulate vision. They can live in the future mentally. But the danger of that strength is that it can make present formation feel less urgent. The future becomes so vivid that the current state of the soul gets neglected.
But no future you build will ever outrun the person you are becoming.
If you are becoming more reactive, more ego-driven, more tired, more performative, more emotionally cut off, that will eventually show up in your leadership no matter how polished the plan is.
If your soul is thinning out, your strategy will not save you. If your character is underdeveloped, your gifts will eventually strain under the weight of what you are asking them to carry.
Character is not accidental. It is cumulative.
You do not drift into virtue. You practice it. You choose it. You fail and return to it. You let your life be interrupted by truth. You ask harder questions than, “Is this working?” You also ask, “Is this making me more honest? More loving? More grounded? More trustworthy? More free?”
That is why I think the better question for many leaders is not, “What do I want to accomplish in the next five years?”
It is, “What kind of person will be able to carry the future I say I want?”
That question does not kill vision. It refines it. It does not weaken ambition. It humanizes it. It does not make planning unnecessary. It puts planning in its rightful place.
Vision is helpful. Virtue is essential.
There is nothing wrong with making a plan. Make the plan. Set the goal. Build the thing. Dream bigger than you think you are allowed to dream. But do not let the plan become the primary measure of whether your life is going well. Do not let outcomes do all the talking. Do not let stats and metrics become your functional spirituality.
The future matters. But the self that walks into that future matters most.
So maybe the invitation is not to abandon five-year thinking. Maybe it is to subordinate it. Let long-range vision serve deeper formation, not replace it. Let goals be held inside a larger framework of virtue, self-control, steadfastness, and love. Let your plans answer to your character, not the other way around.
Because if I want guidance for the future, I do not first need a five-year plan (who can predict what can change in five years’ time anyway?).
But every leader I know (including myself) is still in need of an ever-deepening character.
Sometimes these writings evolve into deeper conversations. So I work with thoughtful leaders navigating growth, burnout, relationships, and emotional health through leadership coaching and I also help churches, nonprofits, and other organizations communicate with more clarity, warmth, and intention through communications consulting. If you’d like to talk, you can start a conversation.