Are bucket lists important?

Are bucket lists important? I have just watched this brilliant TED talk by Edward Readicker-Henderson about why we should give up having bucket lists.

Edward was told he only had a year to live on six separate occasions over a fifteen year period, so consciously lived the last year of his life six times.

He decided that rather than think of things to do before he died, he just wanted to do things while he was alive. He chose to do things because they were fun. He travelled to over fifty countries after being advised to stop travelling. He went to the Arctic, to Mongolia, to the Marshall Islands, and climbed down a volcano in Hawaii. He went to the perfume fields of France, to haunted houses in England, and to Venice.

Edward explains that his favourite occasion did not come from ticking off a bucket list item, but from a last-minute recommendation from a hotel concierge in Venice to visit the little town of Asolo.

Bucket lists are about you, about trying to stop time, to make your life into a collection of things that matter to you. But if you choose to just live because you are alive, you are present in time and are telling a story. Stories only work if you share them with the people you love.

At the time we approach our end of life, we won’t care about all the things we ticked off our bucket list. We will care about whether we told people we loved them, and that we were grateful for them being in our lives. As Edward says, when we stop dropping things in our bucket list, the world starts pouring things in, and all we need to do is say thank you.

Project 365

I set up this website after deciding that I want to build a more creative life for myself, so I can give up my job and be in control of my own destiny.

I have set myself a goal of publishing an article on my website every day this year, to document my journey from employment to self-employment.

The name I chose was Project 365 because I see this as a year that I have dedicated to learning and self-development, as I countdown to freedom. It started on 1st January 2021, so I have 188 days to go!