Ditch the Bucket List for Your Life List

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s to not take life for granted. The COVID-19 pandemic has showcased how vulnerable we are and how quickly things can change. Add in crazy fires out west, a vitriolic election, plus major racial tensions bubbling throughout the country and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a historic year that will be taught to future generations yet to be born. If there is a positive to be gained from all of this, it’s perspective. Our individual daily hamster wheel activities have been interrupted by a global pandemic which has forced us to reflect on what’s truly important. Have we been living our best lives? If not, can we live a better life? If so, what does it look like to be living a full and happier life?

Refocusing Our LIFE Goals

As an operator of a business that challenges comfort zones every week, we at Skydive Monroe have a unique perspective on how people are reacting to these unprecedented times. It would seem that the pandemic and our societal challenges have awakened our senses for the need to break our daily patterns of stress and live more fulfilling lives. We are seeing this in the form of prodigious numbers of people coming out to make skydives with narratives we haven’t heard in such volume in a long time. Terms like “bucket list”, “goals”, and “living my best life,” is what we are hearing over and over again. While many are getting overwhelmed by what’s happening in the world, there are many in society that are rising up with indignation to not let the problems of the world bring them down. 

We have one life to live and live it we must, however, we have a unique perspective on what’s happening. As skydivers, we are in the active practice of living fully by breaking out of our comfort zones routinely. We don’t believe in bucket lists, but rather “living lists”, and we think it’s a mindset that everyone should adopt. 

“Living List” versus “Bucket List”

The term “bucket list” was injected into our lexicon following the 2007 film, “The Bucket List” and not surprisingly, the movie begins with two geriatric characters played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman making a skydive. As we see it, there’s a problem with the term “bucket list” – it’s the list of things we wish to do before we die, and this list is usually created only after we get bad news like a terrifying health diagnosis or a global pandemic. Amidst all that’s happening in the world, we think much better terminology to use would be to create a “Living List” – a list of things you want to accomplish this year without the open-ended “one day I’ll get to it” mentality of a bucket list. None of us know when our time will come, and there’s no guarantee that we’ll get a diagnosis that estimates how much time we have. If we are truly wishing to get the most out of life, it’s time to ditch the bucket list skydiving mentality and embrace a living list. Time to write down a concrete list of experiential goals you want to achieve this week, this month, or this year. We all assume we will live past the age of 80 giving us a false sense of time to do the things we desire. What would we do if we only had 30 days left? How would our lives change then? Undeniably for the better for we would look to get as much out of those 30 days as we would in 30 years.

How To Create Your Living List

In Michael Hyatt’s book Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals (we highly recommend this book), Hyatt spells out a clear path for accomplishing goals using the acronym: SMARTER.

Specific

Measurable 

Actionable 

Risky

Time-Keyed 

Exciting

Relevant

Without giving you all the cliff notes on the book, we’ll highlight three important keys that should be attached to every goal on your Living List – a). Write it down b). Set a due date c) Review your goals often to prevent life from distracting you from what you want to achieve.

An Open Invitation

If you’ve landed on this page, it’s likely that you’ve been thinking about skydiving and getting more out of your life. If that’s true, we invite you to join us here at Skydive Monroe. Our community is filled with positive people punctuating their daily routines with adventure every weekend. You will find a community that’s welcoming and will celebrate your willingness to be vulnerable in order to grow by stepping out of your comfort zone. 

We invite you to ditch the bucket list skydiving mentality and instead join us for an adventure that we know you will love and will spur you on to accomplishing even more for if you can go skydiving and love it… what else can’t you do? 

Have Questions? Contact us today or review our FAQs page, or send us a message via Facebook or better yet, come visit us, meet our team and members of our community and ask them lots of questions!