Design Your Next Five Years — On Purpose

Five Year Life™
Chart Your Five Year Future™

A Calm, Structured Way Forward – When Life No Longer Fits

There are moments when life changes so decisively that the path you were walking simply stops making sense. Sometimes it happens slowly – a growing dissatisfaction you can’t quite name, a quiet resistance to routines that once felt right, a sense that something important has drifted out of alignment. Other times it happens all at once: a job loss, a forced career pivot, a relationship rupture, a health scare, or the sudden realization that the world you prepared for no longer exists in the same form.

When that happens, most people don’t need hype or pressure. They need a calm, reliable structure that helps them regain clarity, stabilize their footing, and make grounded decisions without panic. The Five Year Life™ series exists for exactly that moment – not to “pump you up,” but to help you think clearly again, then move forward with quiet confidence and a plan that actually fits who you are.

What Five Year Life™ Is Really About

Over the past several years, something shifted – quietly at first, then unmistakably. Messages began arriving from people I had worked with decades earlier: founders, executives, professionals, and people who had done everything “right” according to the old rules. They weren’t asking for motivation. They were asking for a way to think again, because the world that made their plan feel safe had changed underneath them.

They all said some version of the same thing: their job was gone, their industry was shrinking, AI had erased roles that once felt stable, and the future no longer resembled the plan they built their lives around. These weren’t isolated stories. They were early warning signals of a much larger disruption – one touching every age group, every pay band, and nearly every profession. When enough people experience that kind of instability at the same time, “just be positive” stops being advice and starts sounding like an insult.

For more than forty years, I’ve mentored thousands of individuals through reinvention – career transitions, financial resets, relationship upheavals, and the quiet devastation of feeling lost inside a life that no longer fits. But never – not once – had I seen this many people needing clarity at the same time. That wave of disruption is what gave birth to the Five Year Life™ series: practical frameworks that help you replace fear and confusion with structure, perspective, and grounded decision-making.

Start Where You Are – This Series Was Built for Real Life

Five Year Life™ is a series of books designed to be used, not admired. Each title meets you where you are – whether you’re in crisis, transition, or quiet reevaluation – and helps you move forward without rushing, spiraling, or pretending. You will not be pushed into “burn it all down” thinking here. The goal is alignment: getting honest about what’s true, deciding what matters most, and taking steps that you can actually sustain.

Each book stands on its own. Together, they form a coherent system for navigating change with clarity and dignity. If you only read one book, you’ll still get value. If you move through multiple titles, you’ll start to see how the same decision architecture applies across work, identity, relationships, and the practical realities of money and uncertainty.

Featured Books

Your Last Paycheck™

Navigating Job Loss and Layoffs in the Age of AI ™

Roughly 40 million Americans lost their jobs through layoffs and discharges in the last two years (Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS; 2024 total and 2025 annualized through November). This may include some of the same people losing their jobs more than once!

That number does not include the additional ~78 million resignations reported separately by the Bureau of Labor Statistics over the same period – a category that also captures a meaningful but uncounted number of “forced resignations!”

Job loss is never just a financial event. It’s an identity shock, a loss of stability, and a rupture in how you understand your own value. And in today’s economy, finding stable work often takes far longer than people expect – especially as AI continues to reshape entire professions. Your Last Paycheck™ was written to prevent panic-driven decisions during one of the most vulnerable periods of a person’s life.

The first half of the book provides a calm, step-by-step stabilization plan for the critical early weeks: what to secure, what to protect, how to preserve both finances and emotional footing. The second half offers a realistic blueprint for navigating the AI-driven job market – including how to assess which roles are expanding, which are quietly disappearing, and how to reposition yourself without chasing false promises.

Coming Soon – in Kindle, paperback, hardback, and Audible formats!

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/YourLastPaycheck

Reset Protocol™

Beyond The Road Less Traveled: The Road Most Desired™

There comes a point in nearly every life when the internal alignment that once held everything together begins to fracture. You feel it before you can explain it – a heaviness, a resistance, a sense that you are living slightly out of phase with yourself. Reset Protocol™ exists for that moment. It guides you through 108 carefully sequenced questions designed to reveal patterns you’ve lived with for years, surface truths you may have been avoiding, and help you see your life with clarity rather than judgment.

You’ll also learn the Five-Year Lens™ – a future-focused way to evaluate decisions based on who you are becoming, not just what you’re trying to escape. Reset Protocol™ is not about blowing up your life; it’s about realignment – done deliberately, honestly, and with realistic compassion.

Coming Soon – in Kindle, paperback, hardback, and Audible formats!

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocol

Reset Protocol Workbook™

The Companion Workbook for Deep Reflection & Immediate Action

Reset Protocol Workbook™ is built for the moment when reading a powerful framework is not enough. Some people absorb insight by reading. Other people need a structured place to apply it immediately – to write, reflect, decide, and turn clarity into a next step they can actually take. This workbook is the write-in companion to Reset Protocol™, designed to help you make the 108 questions personal, practical, and real, in your own words.

For each of the 108 questions, the workbook gives you guided space to think more clearly than you can in your head, plus additional angles to consider so you do not accidentally answer in the easiest or most socially acceptable way. It is not therapy, and it is not busywork. It is decision architecture in workbook form: honest reflection that leads to a grounded 24-hour action, so you build momentum without overwhelm.

Most importantly, the workbook works for both ends of real life. It supports readers who are in distress and trying to stabilize, and it also supports readers who are doing well and simply want to redesign the next five years with intention. Open to the question that fits today, write the honest answer, choose one small action, and stop. That is a complete win – and over time, those wins become a reset you can actually sustain.

Coming Soon – in Kindle, paperback, hardback, and Audible formats!

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocolWorkbook

Efficient Love™

I Had 1,200 First Dates So You Don’t Have To™

“I had 1,200 first dates” sounds like a gimmick. It wasn’t. It was the byproduct of an accidental experiment that started with a simple website: NovelistSeeksHeroine.com.

That page described the 28 traits I believed mattered most for long-term compatibility. More than 15,000 women responded, convinced they matched. What followed was a decade-long journey — roughly 1,200 first dates, over 300 second dates, and a hard-earned education in the difference between attraction, projection, and true alignment.

Out of those 15,000, out of those 1,200 first dates, there was one — and only one — woman I asked to marry me. She said yes. That was more than two decades ago… and we’re still happily together and counting.

But this book isn’t about my story. It’s about yours.

Efficient Love™ shows you how to avoid years of unnecessary detours, identify real compatibility earlier, and find the person who is right for you — where you also happen to be right for them.

It distills everything learned from that journey — including the Three Lists — into a practical, repeatable approach you can apply immediately to your own search.

Coming Soon – in Kindle, paperback, hardback, and Audible formats!.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/EfficientLove

Stark Naked Startup™ (Special Preview)

An upcoming novel by Robert Lee Goodman – not part of the Five Year Life™ series, but worth a look through the keyhole

Stark Naked Startup™ is a separate project – a novel set in Florence, Italy that blends intense romance, entrepreneurship, reinvention, ethics, and human connection inside a rapidly changing technological world.

While it is not part of the Five Year Life™ series, it explores themes that echo across the nonfiction work: identity, disruption, alignment, and the cost of getting success right and the future wrong. Maybe even dead wrong.

Coming Soon – in Kindle, paperback, hardback, and Audible formats!

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/StarkNakedStartup

Advance Reader Copy (ARC)

ARC stands for Advance Reader Copy.

Before a book is released publicly, there is usually a short window where it can still become stronger. ARCs are generally available only about 30 days on either side of Launch Day, and I invite a small number of readers to join the Team as Team Members on a book-by-book basis.

Team Members receive a free advance copy and share candid, real-world feedback on clarity, pacing, tone, and practical usefulness with the goals of making each book more meaningful and more helpful to its readers – and then helping spread the word to reach more folks who can benefit from the book’s guidance. If you choose to leave an honest review around launch, it is appreciated – especially near launch – but it is never required.

Questions about ARC? FiveYearLife.com/ARC

Get updates on all Five Year Life™ releases, ARC openings, and major milestones:

If at any point you prefer to follow only one specific book, you can visit that book’s page and join its individual list instead.

Chart Your Five Year Future™

Reinvention is no longer optional for many people – it is required. But reinvention does not have to be chaotic, and it does not require burning everything down. With the right structure, the next five years of your life can be approached calmly, intentionally, and with a deeper sense of ownership than you’ve ever had before.

That is the promise of Five Year Life™: a warm, seasoned guide and a practical system that helps you move forward with clarity, dignity, and a plan you can actually live.

Warm regards,

robertsig

Robert Lee Goodman

Your Last Paycheck™ was written to prevent panic-driven decisions during one of the most vulnerable periods of a person’s life.

The first half of the book provides a calm, step-by-step stabilization plan for the critical early weeks: what to secure, what to protect, how to preserve both finances and emotional footing.

The second half offers a realistic blueprint for navigating the AI-driven job market — including how to assess which roles are expanding, which are quietly disappearing, and how to reposition yourself without chasing false promises.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/YourLastPaycheck

There comes a point in nearly every life when the internal alignment that once held everything together begins to fracture. You feel it before you can explain it — a heaviness, a resistance, a sense that you are living slightly out of phase with yourself.

Reset Protocol™ exists for that moment. It guides you through 108 carefully sequenced questions designed to reveal patterns you’ve lived with for years, surface truths you may have been avoiding, and help you see your life with clarity rather than judgment.

You’ll also learn the Five-Year Lens™ — a future-focused way to evaluate decisions based on who you are becoming, not just what you’re trying to escape. Not the familiar path, but the one most aligned with what you actually want.

Reset Protocol™ is not about blowing up your life; it’s about realignment — done deliberately, honestly, and with realistic compassion. It’s how you move beyond the road less traveled and step onto the road most desired.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocol

Some people prefer to read and reflect. Others need to engage, write, and move. This Workbook is built for action.

The Reset Protocol Workbook™ transforms insight into execution. It follows the same 108 carefully sequenced questions, but provides structured space to capture your answers, clarify your thinking, and turn reflection into forward momentum.

This is where your Reset Protocol becomes your own — not just something you understand, but something you actively work through, decision by decision.

Whether you use it alongside the main book or on its own, the purpose is the same: to move you from awareness into alignment, and from alignment into action.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/ResetProtocolWorkbook

“I had 1,200 first dates” sounds like a gimmick. It wasn’t. It was the byproduct of an accidental experiment that started with a simple website: NovelistSeeksHeroine.com.

But this book isn’t about my story. It’s about yours.

Efficient Love™ shows you how to avoid years of unnecessary detours, identify real compatibility earlier, and find the person who is right for you — where you also happen to be right for them.

It distills everything learned from that journey — including the Three Lists — into a practical, repeatable approach you can apply immediately to your own search.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/EfficientLove

It begins with a problem that has quietly grown into a worldwide epidemic, spreading across cultures, countries, and generations, affecting not just millions, but hundreds of millions and even billions of souls on this planet, often without being openly acknowledged because it hides so easily behind lives that appear complete from the outside.

Call it loneliness, if you want, though that word barely captures the full weight of it, because what is actually being felt is not simply the absence of company, but the absence of being truly known, truly understood, and truly connected in ways that feel real, dependable, and impossible to fake, whether in romantic love, friendship, family, or the quieter forms of human connection that give life its meaning.

Four founders come together around that recognition, not because they believe they have all the answers, but because they share the conviction that this epidemic is neither small nor inevitable, and that if something could reach deeper into the human experience itself, it might be possible to change not just how people meet, but how they connect, how they trust, and how they come to understand one another at a level most people never reach.

What draws them forward is , and at the beginning it still looks, from the outside, like a startup story, a few brilliant people building something ambitious in the face of a problem that seems too large for any small company to solve.

Then something changes, though not in the clean, predictable way breakthroughs are supposed to arrive, and not in any way the founders would have been able to recognize at first for what it really was.

Because when two people connect through , the experience does not unfold the way attraction is supposed to, and it does not wait for permission to begin, as though some older rhythm has suddenly been replaced by something faster, deeper, and far more difficult to resist.

It does not feel reckless. It does not feel confused. It feels certain in a way that is almost unnerving, because the usual distance people rely on to stay in control seems to thin almost immediately, leaving behind the sense that something beneath the surface has already recognized what neither of them has yet spoken aloud.

Time does not disappear. It accelerates until hesitation has no place to live, until desire and certainty arrive together, and what would have taken months becomes something neither of them can delay, and neither of them would ever choose to.

There are no careful steps, no slow negotiations, no uncertain pauses, because what is building between them does not feel like something forming so much as something revealing itself, something that was always there and is only now impossible to ignore.

Desire is part of it, unmistakably so, but it does not stand alone, because what rises with it is something far more disarming, a sense of alignment so complete that the usual friction simply is not there, no second-guessing, no misread signals, no quiet holding back that people are used to carrying even in their most intimate moments.

Here, there is to correct, to reinterpret, and almost no place left for the old courtship minuet people mistake for intimacy.

Because when passion and certainty arrive together, when closeness is not being negotiated but uncovered, there is no familiar rhythm left to follow, no pattern to retreat into, no safe distance to return to once it begins.

And once it begins, it does not remain contained, not within a single moment, not within a single relationship, but in ways that start to extend outward into , , and , touching connection, trust, and something far deeper than attraction alone.

What began as an attempt to address a global epidemic starts to take on implications far beyond anything the founders imagined, becoming less a product than the early edge of a black swan event, one capable of shifting outcomes no one involved is prepared to fully understand.

And that is when the attention shifts, because something like this will never be left alone once even fragments of it are recognized by those who see not connection, but leverage.

What follows is no longer simply a question of whether the founders can protect what they have built, but whether what they have touched can remain what it was meant to be once others begin trying to control it, contain it, or turn it into something else entirely.

Especially once it becomes clear that beneath everything, beneath the emotion, the intimacy, and the lives already changing, there may be elements of that extend beyond fiction.

That realization was never part of the original plan, and yet somewhere in the process of developing this story, it became impossible to ignore the possibility that what was being explored might represent , with , , and intentionally withheld.

This is not just a story.

It is a partially redacted case file.

And whatever is happening inside it… has already begun.

For more information: FiveYearLife.com/StarkNakedStartup

Five Year Life™ Chart Your Five Year Future™

A Calm, Structured Way Forward – When Life No Longer Fits

What Five Year Life™ Is Really About

Start Where You Are – This Series Was Built for Real Life

Featured Books

Your Last Paycheck™

Reset Protocol™

Reset Protocol Workbook™

Efficient Love™

Stark Naked Startup™ (Special Preview)

Advance Reader Copy (ARC)

Chart Your Five Year Future™

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Five Year Life™
Chart Your Five Year Future™