Why it may be a mistake to cross everything off your list.

In 2009, I made my first life list. I wrote down everything I wanted to try and every place I wanted to travel to. The list has grown significantly over the last decade–the original was only about a page long and now it’s nearly 18 pages long, categorized and ordered by date.

For several years the intention was to cross things off as quickly as I could. In 2009 I traveled to Australia to swim the great barrier reef, went skydiving, ate bugs, learned to surf, crashed a wedding, cooked my first Thanksgiving turkey, went on my first blind date, and made the first big portfolio piece of my career.

But a decade later and there are things on the list that have missed their window and will likely never get done. Get a black eye. Get a tattoo. Bowl over 200. Get a job at Pixar.

These things are just not important to me and don’t fit into my life the way I thought they once would.

I might run away at the opportunity to get a black eye or tattoo at this point in my life.

As I get older, I’m learning that being a slave to our lists can be dangerous because we are not always the same person that we were when we first made them.

As we change, so should our list.

The purpose of a life list or set of goals is to match the experience you want to have from having accomplished them. We assume that if we cross everything off, we will get the experience we desire– happiness, adventure, experience, partnership…

But we don’t always stop to question if the goal at hand still resonates with the experience we currently desire. If we blindly cross off the things on our list without ever taking the time to evaluate whether this goal still is relevant or important to the life we want to create, then we’re not giving space or credit to the fact that we grow.

So as we’re reviewing last year’s goals, planning next year’s, or just setting out on the course of our most recent list, let’s agree to do two things. First, to take some time every so often to evaluate, update, and change our list. And second, let’s not be so hard on ourselves for crossing off everything on our list. Let’s be forgiving and allow ourself to fall short or change our mind.

Changing your mind is not a sign of failure, it’s a sign of growth.

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