12 Ways to Develop Your Life List
After developing my personal vision statement using the corporate ‘vision and mission approach’ (see the results here), I’m following up with development of a life list. Yes, you know the kind - the “I want to do these 10,844 things before I die” kind of list. With the New Year’s resolution season upon us, there are a lot of these lists being created right now (with many of them to be forgotten in a few weeks).
My first exposure to life lists came from this article in Men’s Journal. (I’ve heard rumors the text of the article is on-line somewhere) It inspired me to put together a great list about two years ago. Which I have pretty much ignored since then. Hopefully this time I can find a way to translate more of my life list into action.
There are a number of methods I’ve seen on how to develop a life list. Some of them also help you track life goals and share them with others. I’ve put together a list of some of the better methods that I have found. The next step will be to evaluate the different methods by using them to revise my life list.
Use On-Line Tools
- SuperViva. This site looks like a great place to develop and track your life list. They have lots of ideas that you can use for inspiration in various categories. What I especially like is the way your goals are displayed and tracked on the site. This is one I definitely want to check out, both for brainstorming ideas for the life list, and for the implementation and tracking of my goals.
- Life Tango. This is another website that allows you to document and track your life goals. Although I haven’t tried it out yet, I really like the brainstorming section. It is broken down by different categories, with questions that you answer (e.g. where do you want to live, what job title would you like to achieve, etc). This is one that I will come back to and review.
- My 50 Things to Do In A Lifetime. This website has good ideas and suggestions, categorized into different aspects of life. You can track your goals and document achievements. This looks like another good site for coming up with ideas and maybe for tracking them as well.
- Day Zero. Technically, this site is for helping you complete 101 tasks in 1001 days, so it isn’t focused on the kind of life list that I’m developing. But I really like the concept, and plan to come back and evaluate this site when I start getting down to the nitty gritty.
Read Other People’s Lists for Inspiration
- John Goddard’s Life List. You can’t read much about life lists without running across the name John Goddard (I first heard about him in the Men’s Journal article) He wrote a list of 127 things he wanted to do in life. Pretty sporty for a 15 year old kid. The things on the list are pretty sporty as well - visit every country in the world (he still has 30 to go), climb Mount Everest, learn to fly a plane, as well as some more mundane things like reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, milking a poisonous snake, and climbing Mount Kilamanjaro. So far he has accomplished 110 of them. Although his life list isn’t so much a method for developing your own as it is a way to make you feel like your life is very, very boring, I think this is a great example of thinking big. If you don’t really stretch yourself, you’ll never experience that moment of satisfaction that comes with accomplishing something difficult.
- 43 Things. This is another site for developing and tracking your life list. They recommend sticking with 43 goals for life as a way to not get overwhelmed. There are also ideas for life goals based on their popularity with other users. This is another method I may look into.
- 1000 Places to See Before You Die. Patricia Schultz’ classic is a great way to brainstorm life goals related to travel and experiencing new places. The one danger that comes with reading this book is that you may get depressed when you realize there is no way to see all these places before you die. Unless Great Aunt Melba kicks the bucket and you end up with that huge inheritance you’ve always wanted. (There was a reason you wrote all those thank you notes for your $10 birthday checks after all) For the rest of us that have to work for a living (even if it is only 4 hours a week), you’ll have to settle for a more realistic number of places to visit.
- Smithsonian Magazine’s Life List. Along the same lines as 1000 Places, Smithsonian Magazine’s current issue has compiled a list of 28 places to see. What I like about this list is that 28 places seems extremely reasonable. Assuming you still have a few good years left, you could check off one or two of these a year and make a serious dent in your list.
- Your 100 Things. This website set up by Caroline Miller (that’s Coach Caroline to some of you) lets you develop and track your life list. While it has categories for getting ideas for your life list, there is something about the design of this site that just doesn’t do it for me. I may take a quick look through it after going through some of the others.
Do it Old-School - With Pen and Paper
- Men’s Journal Method. In the previously mentioned article “99 Things to do Before You Die”, there is an 8-step process for developing your own life list. This is the method I used to create my life list 2 years ago. They suggest getting some quiet time to think through everything you might want to do (don’t censor yourself), group your ideas into categories, brainstorm some more, and then get out there and do it. I found it to be a good overall process, and combined with the 99 suggestions they had in the article, was a good place to start. At the same time, it really helped to have other sources of inspiration for life goals.
- Success Begins Today Method. Just in time for this exercise, John Richardson at the Success Begins Today blog has a post on Lifetime Goal Setting. His method involves generating top 5 lists within 20 different categories (e.g. Top Five Jobs You Want to Have, Top Five People You Want to Thank). He also has some handy worksheets to help you generate your answers, and some others to generate action steps to accomplish them. This is one method I’ll come back to and evaluate.
- No Opportunity Wasted. I haven’t read this book (by Phil Keoghan - yes, that Phil, the host of the Amazing Race), but the subtitle ‘Creating a List for Life’ caught my attention. This may be one to follow up with later on.
Various Special Life-Lists. In addition to the travel lists I mentioned earlier, there are tons of ‘must see or do’ lists for very specific interests. Birds that you must see (if you are a bird watcher), books you must read (for the bookworms out there), foods you must try (some of them are pretty scary - like eating poisonous fish), and reality TV shows that you must watch (hey - even couch potatoes make lists!). I’ll leave those alone for now, maybe if I suddenly decide I want to see every species of caterpillar in the world, I’ll come back to them.
In follow-on posts, I’ll work through some of these methods and give you my evaluation of how they worked. For now, I’ll just focus on evaluating how well they help to generate my life list. Later on, I’ll come back and evaluate how they help track my goals.