Bucket List and Life Goals

What’s the purpose of a Bucket List?  When I saw the movie, The Bucket List, I was enamored with the concept of a list of things you want to do before you kick the bucket.  In fact, the words “Bucket List” have seated themselves nicely into our vernacular.  Those same two words are searched on Google over 45,000 times per month.  Don’t confuse a bucket list with life goals, though.  I see them as very different things.  Here are examples of a bucket list and life goals.

Life Goals

I’ve never really been a big believer of writing down goals, although this has recently changed. I enjoy doing vision exercises to get in touch with my deepest desires.  I typically don’t make New Years resolutions, either.  I just find it all a bit too confining.  If I make a commitment, I stick to it, and so I didn’t like to write stuff down that I might not ultimately choose to do.  I’ve never been totally aimless, though.  There are concepts that I worked toward.

As an example, when I first got married to my second husband, I was working two jobs.  One was full-time, and the other was part-time.  I was trying to make enough money to pay off personal debt that I had taken on from my divorce from the magician.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go back and read this post. Because I had only known him for 3 weeks before we married, I didn’t know he was a felon. (What!?)  In addition to some jail time, he had to pay restitution. 

Even though we were only married a little more than a year, I agreed to pay off his debt in order to get him to sign the divorce papers.  So, I worked two jobs and knocked it out quickly. That was a goal, right? To pay off that debt so that I could work just one job.

Professional Goals

Then my goal was to make as much money working one full-time job, as I did working the two jobs.  That’s when I got the job with the company where I stayed for 35 years.  I was thrilled to be able to work just one job and make a little more than I made working two.  That extra time and extra pay was super valuable to me since I was married and had two kids.  It’s hard enough to be a working mom, but when you work every single day, plus most evenings, it’s even harder.  Believe me, I have total respect for you moms who had to do it all without a partner to help.

Financial Goals

My next goal was to make $30k before I was 30.  I’m not sure why that was a big deal to me, but it was.  So, I put it out there with my boss.  Almost every time we spoke, I asked what I needed to do to increase my pay to $30k.  I took on every project that was asked of me, and overtime was a nightly thing. I met that goal, and then wanted to out-earn my husband, earn enough to support the family on my income alone, earn six-figures, and more! Whatever additional responsibility I needed to take on to meet my goal, I did it.   

I never actually sat down and wrote out these goals. They were simply my singular area of focus.  There were many of these types of goals, both professional, and personal.  Buy a house, help the kids with college, stop living check to check, max out my 401k, save a month of expenses, then 3 months, 6 months, and finally a year so that I could quit my job before I was old enough to access my investments without penalty.

Plain Old Ambition

I hope I’m never without a vision for my life.   Ambition gets me up in the morning.  People have said I’m driven.  Even in “retirement”, I still have life goals and I meet daily commitments to myself.  It’s funny that I resent arbitrary “rules” set up by other people for the sake of keeping order, or to meet their arbitrary deadlines.  Yet, I set these similar areas of focus for myself all of the time, and I make myself stick to them very single-mindedly.  I only wish I could apply the same discipline to diet and exercise!

Bucket List

What’s a bucket list? You have to accomplish life goals in order to check off those bucket list items.  I think of these items as enrichment.  We do these to expand our perspective, challenge ourselves, or for just plain fun.  These are fluid, and I’ve dropped items that have been on my list for decades, as I’ve added new. I’ve always loved to travel, so much of my list contains travel destinations and experiences.    

Travel Dreams

• Visit every U.S. State
• Drive from Vancouver to Calgary Canada
• See Niagra Falls
• Visit more countries than states
• Sail on each of the seven seas
• Step foot on every continent
• See all seven of the ““Wonders of the World”.
• Take an around the world cruise (Not sure this is even attainable due to the cost, but it’s on my list.)
• Visit every Disney park (yes, I’m a huge Disney fan).
• See the aurora borealis and/or aurora australis (I’ve been chasing the elusive northern lights for decades.  Maybe I’ll have more luck down south.)
• Live in France long enough to become fluent in French.
• Dive the Great Barrier Reef
• Ski Banf and stay at the Fairmont Hotel
• Zip-line in Costa Rica
• Take a cushy “glamping” photo safari in Africa.

Then there are the more experiential items that are more about the activity than the travel.

Experiences

• Visit an elephant sanctuary
• Attend the Oscars
• Attend New York Fashion Week
• Go to the airport, buy a plane ticket, and fly somewhere spontaneous
• Take a white-water rafting trip through the Grand Canyon
• Hold a Koala
• Experience a white Christmas
• Have a post go viral

There are so many more that I could come up with, and I guess I should make a spreadsheet.  Or maybe I’ll add it to the spreadsheet I already have of the states and countries I’ve visited. I have more than half of the states crossed off, and very close to as many countries.

What’s Your Why?

I enjoy having bucket list dreams to inspire my “why”.  Why do I work as hard as I do?  Why do I get up in the morning?  I do it all to check off items on my life list, and my bucket list.  As I’m getting older, there are fewer life list items left for me than bucket list items.  But I still have both goals and aspirations.  I truly feel it’s important to challenge and inspire oneself.  It’s the “dream quotient” that inspires me. 

Dream Quotient

My brother used to buy 2 lottery tickets a week.  I’ve never even bought one.  He would tease me that you can’t win if you don’t play.  But I feel like I have the same dream quotient that he has.  Over the years he’s spent lots and lots of money dreaming about what he’d do if he won lots and lots of money.  I have had the same fun dreaming, and it hasn’t cost me a cent.  Maybe some day he’ll win.  I hope so!  And I hope he’s writing down those dreams for that rainy day.

Share the Dream

I think it’s a wonderful, intimate exercise to review bucket lists together.  A friend of mine, on a milestone anniversary, asked her husband to come to their anniversary dinner with a list of 10 bucket-list items. They spent their evening enjoying a wonderful dinner and comparing lists and making plans for the next many years.  The shear act of sharing your dreams makes them more likely to come true.

What’s on your bucket list? I’ve created a free PDF to get you started on your dream list. It’s offered in my new subscriber email series so if you’re interested, please subscribe! Jot down a few bucket list items and then share them in the comments.