Bucket List 101 the How's and Why's to Write One ...

The bucket list should evolve and grow as time progresses. Rather than sit down and cement an unchanging list, produce your list spontaneously. Goals and ambitions change as you get older, but your real DREAM dreams – which should be the content of your bucket list – will likely always be a fire within you, a passion, a secret ambition; and more and more of these secret ambitions will crop up as life so often inspires them. So always grow your list. Until you really do kick the bucket.

Dreams occur in the imagination. They are imaginative. So should your bucket list be. Don’t be afraid to get a little creative and random with your items listed. For instance, “hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu” may appear on many a travel-minded bucket list. But you could push it further and make it your own with a little bit of random and a whole lot of imagination – “hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in the company of an alpaca named Pachacuti.” Seem a bit unattainable? Who said YOU couldn’t be the one to name the alpaca after the famous Incan leader? Anyway, the changes don’t have to be quite that specific, but you catch my drift. Personalize your list, spice things up, and make it your own.

A bucket list is certainly a dream list, but you may want to keep a teensy smudge of practicality in mind in order to make these dreams attainable. If you’ve created a mile-long list of things that’ll likely never happen in a million years, whether you work towards them or not, then your list won’t be very effective. However, there is a fine line in drawing up your dreams, as you should push your limits. Otherwise, what’s the point? This is no ordinary list, so don’t make it a list of ordinary goals. I mean, “go see Star Wars” or “eat twenty hotdogs” is great and all, but Joey Chesnutt can eat 69 in one sitting, so...

Which reminds me – don’t compare your bucket list to others’ bucket lists. These are YOUR goals, these are YOUR dreams. So I guess, if going to Star Wars or eating twenty hotdogs really are your biggest goals and dreams, then who am I to judge? Go for it. Own it. And feel empowered. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be inspired by other people’s lists. But don’t make your dreams a carbon copy of someone else’s. You are original and unique, and so your dreams should be.

Though, as I mentioned before, a large portion of my list is travel-based, due to my travel-based priorities, I also mix it up by targeting different areas of my life. For instance, career-wise, I’d like to “write and publish a novel” which is yet unchecked. Financially, I hope to always live economically but make enough to one day “donate a big lump sum anonymously”. When it comes to hobbies, I’m a painter, so “exhibit in a gallery” is on my list. Spiritually, I’d love to “meditate in silence for ten days without technological stimuli” which I’ve yet to do; but it’s there, calling me to do it. And that’s what the bucket list is, really – a call to LIVE LIFE.