The Definitive Guide to Developing Your Life (i.e. Bucket) List
A few weeks ago, I identified 12 ways to develop your life list. Coincidentally, this is a hot topic right now with the movie Bucket List in theaters. If you’re looking for ways to develop your own “Bucket List”, I’ve put together a comprehensive guide on how to do it. This is based on my personal evaluations of 10 of the 12 ways to develop your life list. Here’s a brief summary of what I’ve learned:
- SuperViva. My first impressions were correct about SuperViva - this is a great site to get ideas for your goals, keep track of them, and even categorize them by different aspects of your life. It is easy to set up a free account and get started by looking at the different categories for ideas that others have and select those that you are interested in. You can also add notes to your goals (so you can remember a year from now why the heck you picked the goal) and you can even keep track of your completed goals. The other bonus is you get a weekly email with recent ideas that other users have added, and a reminder to go check out your list. Overall, this is a great site that I plan to use to track my life goals. You can check out my current list here.
- Life Tango. Initially I thought the brainstorming section would be really helpful. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out in practice. While it was really easy to write in your own goal, looking at other ideas for inspiration was difficult. Also, many of the goals that are listed by other users are worded too simplistically to be useful (e.g. “Japan” or “Travel”). Overall, this site isn’t worth it.
- My 50 Things to Do In A Lifetime. This site has a lot of great ideas to start your brainstorming. What I especially liked is their list of 50 suggestions for life goals. For each one, they have a detailed description of the goal, and why they think you should consider it. I thought almost half of them were worth adding to my list. They also have a lot more ideas within different categories of life (Travel and Holidays, Activities and Sport, Education and Learning, etc). to take a look at. If you like one, it is really easy to automatically add it to your list. The one downside of this site is that it is difficult to just randomly browse through other users’ goals. You need to search by keyword, which is hard if you are just trying to brainstorm. That said, this is a great site to get ideas.
- Day Zero. This site is more about trying to accomplish specific tasks within a 1001 day window (hopefully I have more than 1001 days to accomplish my life list, but you never know). I still plan to come back and check out this site when I get down to specific near term actions.
- John Goddard’s Life List. If you are going to read anyone’s life list for inspiration, this is the one. Most of his goals are very adventurous (in more way than one), but the fact that he has completed so many of them is amazing. Definitely a great place to start.
- 43 Things. This site is well known for identifying the key items you want to accomplish in life. I looked through the different categories of goals of other users, and picked a few extra ideas. Nothing all that unique, but it is another place to look.
- 1000 Places to See Before You Die. This book is definitely useful for identifying places to see in the world. However, there are so many places it is overwhelming to really figure out what you want to see. This book is probably best used to identify specific places within a location once you decide on your top countries/regions etc that you want to travel to. For example, if you really want to go to Australia, you can use the book to find out what to see while you are there. Or, if you are a world traveler already and have seen most of the major places the rest of us travel-challenged people want to see first, you can find some unique places to add to your life list. I wouldn’t run out and buy this book just to help develop your life list (but it is a good reference for where to take next year’s vacation).
- Smithsonian Magazine’s Life List. This was a really great source of ideas for places to see. There is a little blurb on why you should check out a specific location. Definitely worth a look for getting some ideas.
- Your 100 Things. I did get a few ideas from other user’s lists for this site. There are good categories to choose from, but it is a little hard to read the ideas easily. I’d suggest passing on this site unless you really are desperate for more ideas.
- Men’s Journal Method. This was the original article (a couple of years old) that introduced me to life lists. I really enjoyed it at the time. Unfortunately, it isn’t *officially* on-line (although a Google search may turn something up), so it isn’t that useful today. You can probably get the same information from the other sources I’ve listed here.
- Success Begins Today Method. This method involves answering some open-ended questions regarding your life (what 5 things do you want to accomplish, what 5 things to you want to achieve, etc). For me, this was a good follow-up to brainstorming by looking at ideas for inspiration. It forced me to really think about what I wanted out of life. However, I would have a hard time starting with this method - I need to look at other ideas first.
- No Opportunity Wasted. I haven’t had a chance to read this book so can’t comment. From the description, it seems like a collection of stories of other people’s goals and how they have achieved them. Some of them have gone to great lengths to make this happen.
Lessons Learned
As I tried out these various methods, I learned a few things to consider when developing a life list.
- Looking over other people’s goals is great inspiration, especially for identifying what you *don’t* want to do in life
- Some life list goals are ongoing (e.g. see a sunset once a year), others are one time events (e.g. go on a safari). You need to consider both types.
- Consider adding a goal to complete things on a separate list (e.g. visit all National Parks). This keeps your life list a little cleaner and easier to focus on the big picture.
- For each goal, add a short description and explanation of why you picked it
- Looking at other people’s goals for inspiration is great, but it should be balanced with asking yourself specific questions about what you want out of life. It is your life list after all!
Recommended Approach
Here is my 5 step guide to developing your life list:
- Set up an account at SuperViva for collecting your life goals
- Review the goals within the different categories and select those that interest you (don’t worry if they aren’t exactly worded right - you can modify later)
- Visit the following websites for more ideas and add them to your SuperViva life list (paste them in as a full list) - John Goddard’s Life List, My50.com, and Smithsonian Magazine’s list of 28 places to see
- Work through the Life Goals worksheet from Success Begins Today to help identify other areas you haven’t thought about and add to your list
- Finalize your list - remove duplicates, merge those that are similar and move those that aren’t ready for primetime to the ‘Backburner’ to think about later.
- Go live your life! [I'll be evaluating methods for developing a specific strategy to implement your goals in future posts - so subscribe to the feed if you're interested]