Prioritize Your Bucket List (Or, How to Die Happy Any Time)

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Prioritize Your Bucket List (Or, How to Die Happy Any Time)

This post was previously published on the BucketList.org blog in August 2014.

If you’re like me, you have a lengthy bucket list and all of it sounds fun.  We want to skydive while traveling across Europe on our way to a meditation retreat at which we find the love of our life, right?

How do you prioritize your bucket list and make sure you actually start living your deepest dreams and goals?

Well, I took six steps toward my bucket list and the last two years of my life have been drastically different from the ones before. Give these a try and let us know how the steps work for you:

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The Bucket List Life

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The Bucket List Life

I’ve had a “bucket list” since I was about 13 years old. I didn’t call it a bucket list back then, but it was still a list of all the things I wanted to do with my life.

The list is kind of crazy. It runs the gamut, from learning lots of languages to learning how to use nunchucks, from traveling all over the world to living in a town where people know my name at the coffee shop. It’s clear that sometimes I was just on a roll and listed every musical instrument I might want to learn. Other times, careers were on my mind and I wanted to reach for the pinnacle of success. I wrote the list on index cards and added to it over the years.

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Getting Out of Debt: The Bucket List Goal to Make All Other Goals Possible

Posted by On Filed under Bucket List, Money
Getting Out of Debt: The Bucket List Goal to Make All Other Goals Possible

This post was previously published on the BucketList.org blog in September 2014.

I’ve been racking up debt since college. A few years after graduation, I had over $42,000 of it, from student loans, a new car and the day-to-day reliance on credit. Over 1,500 BucketList.org users have “getting out of debt” as a goal, so we are not a small tribe.

After getting out of debt in 2013, I can definitively say that this is the one goal that will make many other goals possible.

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Non-Profits and Facebook Audiences

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Non-Profits and Facebook Audiences

No one has been exempt from Facebook’s “curation” of our News Feeds. At any given time, you’re seeing 1/10th of the posts from all of the pages and friends you’ve liked, possibly even less.

As a non-profit (or small business) marketer, you’ve seen the flip side of this coin: your Facebook posts are going out to 20%, 10%, 3% or even less of your Facebook fan base.

If you’re on top of all the changes, you’ve improved your game by:

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100 Greatest Books (and more): A 28 Year Project

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100 Greatest Books (and more): A 28 Year Project

Six years ago, I combined several 100 Greatest Books lists and began reading my way through some of the greatest literature available.

Read about the journey so far here.

It’s been a truly rewarding experience, especially as I begin reading through the older Pulitzer Prize winners. Andersonville, by MacKinley Kantor (1958), for example, took me a month to get through, but the characters have continued to live on very vividly in my imagination. The Way West, by A.B. Guthrie (1950), too was a refreshing migration-westward novel.

Others were a bit forgettable or, rather, it was interesting to ponder why they’ve become so iconic (ahem, The Old Man and the Sea).

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Getting to Zero Waste: Q4 Results and Year 1 Summary

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Getting to Zero Waste: Q4 Results and Year 1 Summary

For the past year, I’ve been trying to minimize the amount of garbage, paper, plastic and glass leaving my home and heading for the landfill or recycling center.  While I’ve long been a re-user and recycler further down the waste stream, this has been my attempt at reducing my footprint from the point of consumption.

In the first quarter of the year (January-March), I realized I was a long way from zero waste. Although, at an average of 0.79 lbs of trash per day, I was also a long way off from the average American household, which disposes of 4.4 lbs of trash per day!

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The 100 (or 300) Greatest Books

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The 100 (or 300) Greatest Books

I’m slowly but surely making my way through my list of “100” greatest books of all time. I put “100” in quotes because I merged several top 100 lists and recently added the Pulitzer Prize winners in the Novel (1917-1947) and Fiction (1948-present) categories. This leaves me with a list of the 300 greatest books from varied sources.

The list is below. The titles in bold are the ones I’ve read. With 65 out of 300 read, I’m at 21.67%. I’ve been working on this list since 2008, so if I continue at this pace, the list will provide me with good reading for the next 20 years.

That seems both daunting and delicious.

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