A toast - to the last and next five years (and a career-planning tip for you, too.)

Five-year jumps.

I don't know about you - questions like "what do you want to have achieved by the end of your career" were always much too dauntingly abstract for me. In order to keep things tangible and set myself goals I can actually conceive of, I've been thinking in five-year jumps for about twenty years now.

Every five years, I'll sit down, look back at the last five years and what I loved, loathed, achieved and failed at, and make sure I rank all of it by decreasing order of importance - to me and those that matter to me.

And then I'll draw a list of decisions, split in three simple columns : start, stop, continue (you can take the boy out of P&G, but...).

Of course, being obsessed about brand building and purpose and strategic choices, it all fits into a broader, longer term direction for what kind of a difference I want to be able to say I will have made in the end. But boiling the changes of direction down to five-year period makes the whole process much more concrete and manageable. And in some ways, reassuring. (Plus, I'm a huge Bowie fan, and Five Years, besides being the title of one of the recent box sets commemorating his career, is the title of the stunningly beautiful opening track on landmark album "The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars", incidentally released the same year than I was; also - my granddad on my mum's side was a communist, so I guess there's something about five-year plans that must have gone into the gene pool.) (I do digress. Did I tell you I digress ? I digress.)

The only exception was the year after I left P&G, after 18 years of incredible experiences and the steepest learning curve I could have possibly gone through without falling backwards. I gave myself about a year to bum around watching unseen films, playing unheard records and reading books that had been gathering dust.

Even so, I'm about a year late for the five-year sit down. Some of it is because I was overworked for a significant chunk of the last couple of years. Some of it is because I slowed down along with the rest of the world this year, for obvious reasons. Some of it is because, as anyone who's ever worked with me knows, I'm not so hung up on sticking to the timings on the agenda, as long as the job gets done, and done as well as it should and could be.

So there. I'm late. But today is a better day than any to sit down and have the "start, stop, continue" talk with myself.

I left P&G because one life wasn't enough. I wanted to do - bar that. I wanted to "be" several things at once. I wanted to be a brand builder. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be both at the same time. I'm sure many of you will recognize themselves in that schizophrenic desire to express more than one facet of yourself in what you do for a living.

Well, five PLUS years into it :

1. I'm just about to complete freelance brand-building consulting mission number 100, without having had to pick up the phone and offer my services so much as once. And it's only mission 100 because I've turned down quite a few, among other reasons to make room for the stuff I really left P&G for (See below). That's the power of networking for you (I always sucked at it, but P&G and LinkedIn helped a lot).

2. My business partner in SoundAdvice and myself now have a solid body of music-for-advertising work (complete with very happy clients) to look back on, which hopefully means we'll make even more music for even more brands in the near future. Check us out at www.soundadvice.ch if you haven't, especially if something music-related gives your brand team a headache. Our job is to make those go away.

3. Last but definitely not least : at the age of 47 (to quote the immortal Marianne Faithfull's "The Eyes of Lucy Jordan"), and after years of learning that last job as part of a cover band we started AT WORK (and which I'm still incredibly proud of), I'm the frontman in a rock band which has played to literally tens of thousands of people in the early stages of its young career, and is, TODAY, releasing its first album. ALBUM, ladies and gents. like in the old days, when people's attention span was longer than that of your average tropical mosquito, and people would listen to ALBUMS back to back, from first song to last. We're immensely proud of it because we've made the music we wanted to hear, and it sounds exactly like we wanted it to, and we've done it at the age where everyone in the music world typically STOPS working, and in an era where music in general, and rock in particular, is probably the last thing you want to do for a living. But we don't care, because the reactions we're getting to it from reviewers are just the same as our own, and hopefully we'll bring enough unforgettable moments to enough people with it that it will be worth it even more than it was for our own sakes. (The band is called TRANK, you can find us at www.trankmusic.com, and if you like the idea of rock music that's both intense and accessible - then give us a try. We rarely disappoint.)

So this is a big day. It's also a big day, because for the first time since I've had those five-year sit-downs with my angst-ridden self, I don't want to change anything. I want to keep doing those three jobs, and being those three things, because, professionally, I've never felt that fulfilled in my life.

Of course I couldn't have gotten to this place of professional happiness if it wasn't for the support of my loved ones, and the faith and talent and dedication of many people around me (friends, peers, colleagues, clients, managers - YES, I used to have BOSSES, and many of them were great) - and around the band. Plus, TRANK are not exactly U2 (YET), and I'm not a billionaire, so if the above comes across like I'm the most successful guy in the world by anyone's "quantitative" criteria, then it's very wrong, and I should rewrite the whole thing. (Digression included.)

But mostly, and most importantly, my work life is happy enough that I want it to last as it is, and I don't think I could have gotten there if it wasn't for the simple trick I started this whole blurb with :

Five year jumps.

I used to think in "lifelong choices." I ended up not making any while it lasted, or not as many as I should have. Quit doing that to yourself. Make choices for a period of time long enough that you can give them a chance, short enough that you don't end up crushed into indecision by the daunting perspective of never turning back or changing course. Five years works for me. Maybe something a little less soviet-like or Bowie-like works for you. However long it is - I wish you all to get to a place where all you want to do, is more of what you do. I can't even begin to describe how it feels.

Thank you all for your support. In some way shape or form, you've literally made me happy :). Cheers. And see you in five years.

(Now go and check out the TRANK album, or find us on YouTube. Satisfied or your money back.)