Bucket List

Once again, someone's bucketlist made the front page of Yahoo. An 100-yr old NH, woman got her bachelor's degree, 3 weeks after her birthday and the day before she died.

Brenda had also sent me an email recently and mentioned something that she was putting on her buckelist, and I seem to remember another friend writing a blog about bucketlists last year.


I think that creating a “bucket list” is a great way to expand your sense of who you are and what you’re capable of. Even if your day-to-day life is routine and completely unglamorous, doing something outrageous once a year–such as hang gliding or visiting an exotic destination–can bring back the sense of life as a daring adventure.

There are many things in life that we wish we could do. When you make the association with death, you understand that there is an undertermined deadline so to speak. This could either cause one to take on a list of things they wish they could do, or just give someone a chance to think about it. Let's look at the bigger picture. If we all understand that our days are numbered, we might choose to live more passionately. Thumbs-up to people who live well and enjoy the amazing gifts life brings. Unfortunately, I don't always and therefore, stress can weigh me down more then I would like.

Here are our suggestions for creating and managing your Bucket List: (found this online)
1. Make sure you get satisfaction and joy from your day to day stuff. Don’t suffer the 99% to get to the 1% you enjoy. Make the whole experience an enjoyable one.
2. Don’t buy into your ideas and turn them into goals right away. Mull them over. If you weigh them carefully, you’ll probably find you can improve, replace or cancel them while enhancing your overall life experience.
3. Make a plan and enjoy the process. Planning is not optional. It is a generally accepted as being a requirement by most of the experts in the field of setting and achieving goals.
4. Review list items often to make sure you still want to do it. The bucket list should be open ended. Maintain enough flexibility that you don’t become a slave to your own list. Make sure you keep working on adding new items while completing others.
5. Find ways to make each goal more meaningful. Include dimensions of quality within the items on your list. If you involve like minded people in group activities, you’ll likely get much more from the experience than if you don’t. For solitary pursuits, take steps to ensure you get the most from the experience.
6. Document and share your goals for added enjoyment. If life is worth living, it ought to be worth writing about so commit some of these planning steps to writing. Writing the stuff down is a proven technique for turning goals into reality. Sharing them with others helps to cement your commitment to the goals and to bring others into the process. Don’t involve pessimists or nay-sayers in the process.
7. Don’t get obsessed with big “retail” goals. You are not required to share your secret fetish goals, or any goals for that matter, with others if you don’t want to. One strategy is to identify public and private goals and only share the public ones. Keep quiet about the private ones. Financial goals are often ones that are wise to keep private. But do celebrate your private accomplishments as you would your public ones. Don’t worry about it if they aren’t big or flashy.
8. Ensure your goals are consistent with who you are. Or reshape them to suit your style and preferences. For example, introverts and extroverts alike can enjoy a certain travel destination like say the Eiffel Tower, yet experience it quite differently.

Now as a kid, I remember joking with my brother saying stuff like "when I get big, I'm gonna do------ & ----- (fill in the blanks). I'm sure all kids assumed they would get to do exciting stuff SOMEDAY in the future. Well for some people, someday never gets here. Kids get uncurable diseases, or die in some tragic accidents. Then some people just exist through life going through the motions of a minor trivial day-to-day existence.
We might not be Jack Nicholson in a movie and maybe my bucketlist won't be as exciting as his, but thats ok cuz we life in real life not a Hollywood movie. But it's a great movie and I advise everyone to see it.