I deleted my bucket list

While enjoying a few quiet days in the Swabian countryside, I’ve been thinking about the bucket list page. It hasn’t been around on this blog for long — and yet — today I redesigned it and, in doing so, buried it.

I introduced the page because I had seen it on a few other blogs and thought it was a cool idea. At the time, I was training for a half marathon that I wanted to finish in under two hours (and thus more than 20 minutes faster than the previous time). A “real” goal. I was motivated to do more things like that and write about them.

Today, I’m not so sure about that anymore.

Sure, I have „goals“ in my head, ideas or thoughts about what I want to achieve, have, or do in life.

At the same time, there have been a few things lately that have made me think. At work, I took a test about my leadership skills, which among other things found that I hardly have any long-term goals, let alone stick with them to achieve them. Of course, my first reaction was to be annoyed by the result and question the entire test. But the longer I think about it, the more I find myself thinking: yeah, somehow that’s true.

After school, I spent half a year in Australia and New Zealand. Back then, I made lots of plans. Where and what I would work. Where and how I would travel. What I would see and explore. In most cases, those plans were abandoned after a few days or weeks. The job didn’t work out, I missed the bus, the weather wasn’t right, or I met someone interesting and decided I’d rather travel a little further with them than follow my plan on my own. I learned to appreciate living more in the moment, seeing what happens, having a rough idea but always being open to change. Being free, rather than frustrated when something doesn’t work out as planned.

These days, I came across this TED Talks podcast and this blog post (🇩🇪) again (I had written about it). What I found particularly interesting in the podcast was the idea that setting goals means — perhaps — achieving those goals, but that those goals aren’t necessarily the best I could have achieved. At the same time, goals that are unattainable are bad for motivation.

Today, I decided to delete the bucket list. The URL will remain (for reasons) — but will simply point to this post. I moved some of the items from the list to /about.