Life List

Reposting blog from January 3, 2011.

How many times have you said to yourself and to others: When I have X, I'll do Y. When I have money, I'll travel. When I'm published, I'll buy a new car. Sometimes, both the X and the Y are dreams; often times, it's only the latter. Why hinge a dream on a pre-condition? That is the easiest way of ensuring that it will not be achieved. And all the time, you will feel a sense of dissatisfaction with life, because your dreams aren't being met.

A few years ago, I ran across an Amazon Short article by romance author Stephanie Bond titled Get a Life!: 8 Steps to Create Your Own Life List. She made me understand that the first step towards living a life of dreams is to create a Life List. The rest of this post is a précis of her detailed article.***

A Life List is a mondo-beyondo list of your life's dreams. There are no limits as to how many items there can be on this list. It's a personal list, so don't be shy of wishing for the most outrageous, the most selfish, the most greedy, the most anything. Every deeply held desire needs to be on this list. Don't compromise on your dreams. Be brave! And brainstorm away.

Once you've written down all your thoughts, divide the list's activities up into categories, such as: Travel, Health, Volunteer and Charity, Self-Improvement, Meeting Important People, Creative Ventures, Sports and Outdoors, etc. Devise categories so all items are all divided up.

Take another look at the categories and the items listed above. Try to generate more ideas if possible. Next, order the items in each category by importance, attainable in the near future, pre-requisite for another item, etc.

The most fun part of this process is concretizing the list. Write every item down and add or draw pictures and sketches and use different inks and fonts. This enhances the visual aspect of the list, thereby taking vague dreams and turning them into achievable goals.

The activities on the list are only attainable if you actually do things to make them happen and persist in doing them in the face of failures along the way. Setbacks are simply part of the process towards achieving the goals. Choose a set day and time in your schedule to look over the list and do something on moving one or more items towards completion. Take notes, and track progress.

And finally, once a year, remember to re-evaluate your list. As we grow and change, so do our dreams.

Hope this preécis of Stephanie Bond's article inspires you to create your own Life List. Do try to read the original article—it lays everything out in much greater detail and simplicity.

The first time I set up my list was in 2009. Now, thanks to Stephanie, I have been lucky to have achieved two of the items on that list. With such success behind me, it was with enthusiasm that I finished reworking my list for 2011 two days ago.

Don't let real life intrude and prevent you from living the life you want to live. Here's hoping you will achieve your dreams, too.

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*** Amazon has taken down it's Shorts program, and so Stephanie's article is no longer accessible online. She's making efforts to ensure that her articles are accessible by some other route.