Creating and Achieving a Bucket List: Advice, Ideas, and My Story

I’ve recently been going through stuff from when I was younger, and I found a piece of paper. On this piece of paper written at the top was "Rosalie’s Bucket List," and the rest of the page was filled with activities, goals, and inspirations to achieve during my life.

On this list were many items I now laughed at, have achieved, or even thought about trying at that very moment. This list consisted of things from skydiving to learning a new hobby. I had become so intrigued by doing these things when I was younger, and I have already achieved so many of them by the age of 19 - which shocked me.

Bucket lists have many benefits, but they can become overwhelming. I decided to create an updated bucket list and even chose to keep a lot of the items from my old bucket list. I looked back after I finished my new bucket list, and I noticed the strategies I had used to create it.

When I started, I was completely lost, which takes me to my first piece of advice.

Create categories. This helped me focus on what my bucket list was really about. Categories will be varied. Some ideas for categories include adventure, lifestyle, mental health, school, hobbies, goals, etc.

My second piece of advice is to create a time period to achieve your items. For example, you can have yearly goals or adventure trips you plan to go on during a set period of time. For me, I had many items I wanted to accomplish during my college years and was mainly focused on those. Some set time periods could be monthly, yearly, decades, etc. By creating this set time, it was easier for me to see what my goals were for my college years.

With just these two pieces of advice, I had a really good place to start. I began to focus on the categories and wrote many ideas that I wanted to do in college. I ended with a full bucket list for college with items related to my major, adventure thrills, budgeting, a healthy lifestyle, and even just new hobbies I want to try.

After reading my updated bucket list, I figured out something about me. I had found out what my main goals were for college. My bucket list had many common themes throughout it. I had subconsciously set a goal for my college years by listing the little things I would like to do. This made me realize why bucket lists are so beneficial. Mine helped me realize what I really wanted to achieve.

My last piece of advice is to just make a bucket list. Make one every time you want to. Change them. Make them with other people.

Lastly, enjoy it.