Reading Others Lists

In doing preparation for my own Bucket List, I first started by looking to see what others have done. This has helped with a few things that I think has been really beneficial. But one thing that I think is fairly true that you need to keep in mind, is that the list really NEEDS to be true for you. So my discoveries, while true for me, may not speak the same to others.

Two of my biggest influences are lifelisted.com and http://www.johngoddard.info/life_list.htm. Lifelisted is done by a guy, who like me, was depressed and decided to make drastic changes to his life and made a list of about 155 things to do before a given date (that date was earlier in 2017, and yes, he finished them all. John Goddard is essentially the grandfather of bucket lists. He had 127 items, most of which he completed before he died.

One of the first things that I really noticed when I looked at Lifelisted, which I didn't particularly like, was how he doubled up on his goals. Now, he doesn't entirely number his goals and I haven't gone through on how many he has on his life list page, but at least how he has it presented, he has a good number of goals which fulfill 3+ goals at once. This gives him the appearance of doing more than he actually is really doing. The best example I can give of this is that he has separate goals for seeing the Great Pyramids, Going to Cairo, and Going to Africa, this also plays into yet another goal of going to every continent in the world. Now I think most of these are worth doing (not sure if I'd go to Cairo for any other reason than the Pyramids, but I digress)... But given his around 155 items, he can cross off 3 (or 2%) with one trip. He has more than one item like this as well, which makes me think his life list is actually around 80 items, still nothing to scoff about, but it certainly got beefed up for no reason. I will say, that given one of my overall goals with my own bucket list is to fulfill a sense of accomplishment, having several items knocked off by doing a couple of tasks would really feel good when I do it, but ultimately I want to feel good for each individual item on its own. And the way my brain works, I think I'd see the lie and that'd bother me.

Contrast this with John Goddard's list... Goddard doesn't have any blanket "visit every continent" type goal, though I'm sure he did. Instead, he chose very specific things to do on the continent and there is little to no overlap at all. When he checked off an item, you know it meant something. This lead me to a concept of... yes it's great to visit all 50 states, but simply visiting isn't enough. I need to do something in all 50 states. So I've come up with a concept of meta goals. These aren't actually goals on my Bucket List at all, but rather goals that I am creating for myself to create for the actual bucket list so that  when all is said and done, I will have done things like visited all 50 states, and all 7 continents. But the things I did to do this meant something too, and it wasn't just, well I had a plane layover in Atlanta so I guess I can check Georgia off my list.

Another thing that I really liked about Goddard's list was grouping of smaller things to make a bigger thing that meant more. A good example is this: "Become familiar with the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Ibert, Mendelssohn, Lalo, Liszt, Rimski-Korsakov, Respighi, Rachmaninoff, Paganini, Stravinsky, Toch, Tschaikosvsky, Verdi." In doing this, John Goddard is essentially comparing one thing to another. He's saying, becoming familiar with Bach isn't all that challenging compared to exploring the Nile River. But when he groups up a dozen such composers, all of a sudden that one goal, is kind of a big deal. My personal Bucket List is going to be fairly heavy on books, movies, TV Shows, and video games, and there is truth in the idea that each one of these individually, just isn't as much of an accomplishment as a "bigger" goal. And so I think I like Goddard's idea of grouping to increase the accomplishment earned.

On the other side, Goddard did something very wrong with the "become familiar" item... it was very general. In fact, he even made a note that he doesn't need to know every work in each. Which means accomplishing that goal is pretty subjective. If he feels he's done enough, he can check the box, even if all he did was listen to like 2 of each composer's works. It just doesn't feel right. I believe in being specific with your goals, which lifelisted does a much better job with.

Goddard also does something else wrong. He thought too big with a couple of his items... most notably "visit the moon." Maybe it was made during the mid-60's when there was a lot of optimism about the future of space exploration, but it was something that he had absolutely no control over. Even now, it is only beginning to be do-able to visit space let alone the moon, which we've almost completely given up on. I could see space being on someone's list, but even that feels more than slightly out of my control (currently, I'd have to be ultra rich or famous, neither of which I am). This leads to a lesson of keeping your lists grounded in reality. You want to think BIG, but not too big. In particular, I want to try to not create items that are completely out of my control. Another example I could think of is to see X animal in the wild.... what if X becomes extinct? Or if I created an item that says something like.... "See the Mona Lisa in The Louvre." What's to say it will always be in the Louvre. Now I could edit or delete an item if it ever needed to be (or retired?), but that would be very disheartening. I'd rather have big goals that are within the realm of possibility.

So these are the major takeaways that I have gotten from reviewing other's lists.... Make items that are big accomplishments, but still attainable. If you have a goal you want, but think it might not make for a great accomplishment, consider grouping that goal. Gear away from general goals, and try to make specific bucket items that you can tick off. And the other thing about reading other's lists is that you kind of get a good starting idea of what you want to do with yours.