Brooks advocates something called a “reverse bucket list”.
“During a moment of quiet reflection, sit down with a piece of paper and write a list of your wants or attachments,” he says.
“Perhaps you hungrily await your next pay raise, or are attached to a particular set of political beliefs. Perhaps you deeply care about what others think of you, or are self-conscious that your car isn’t as nice as your neighbour’s.”
The point is that over time, you will be less attached to [your desires] if you contemplate them seriously.
— Arthur Brooks, leadership professor
What you’ve written down is less a list of goals than a list of weaknesses, he says.
Now, your job is to close your eyes and imagine life in five years. You’re happy, peaceful and living a meaningful life.
Now, write another list. This time, you’re listing the forces that will bring you this peace and happiness. They’re perhaps things like your friendships, family, meaningful work and perhaps faith.
“Take another look at your reverse bucket list. It’s very likely that your wants and attachments aren’t the things that will make you happy and peaceful in five years’ time. If that’s the case, strike out those items on your reverse bucket list,” he says.
“This doesn’t mean that your desires will suddenly go away, but the point is that over time, you will be less attached to them if you contemplate them seriously.”
He suggests making or amending your reverse list once a year, and checking in on it twice a month to remind yourself of what you really need.
Control or regret?
In a study published in May this year, Leah Williams Veazey, a researcher at the University of Sydney, interviewed 54 people who had been diagnosed with cancer and 28 of their friends and family. She wanted to know how such a drastic diagnosis reshaped one’s relationship with the future, and how meaning tied into that.
She found that while for some people being able to progress through their bucket lists returned to them a sense of power and autonomy, for others, their sudden inability to complete their bucket lists, due to finances or difficulty travelling, became just another thing to grieve.
Leah Williams Veazy found bucket lists provided a sense of autonomy for some, but a source of regret for others.
“When we were talking to people, bucket lists came up quite a lot and I think partly it was because a lot of people … thought that they ‘ought’ to be going out and doing things,” she says.
“I remember this one particular woman who said, ‘You know, I just wouldn’t have stopped if there wasn’t something to stop me. But actually, I’m quite tired.’ There was really a sense that maybe we go along with this narrative that’s been put in place, rather than actually spending the time thinking about what’s meaningful to us.”
Williams Veazey doesn’t have a bucket list, but she thinks they can be a useful framework for discussing what’s important to you.
Smaller than you think
This is ultimately the crux of any successful plan for your life, says Cheers: figuring out what’s important to you. It’s also one of the hardest questions to answer.
When his clients are struggling to figure out what is meaningful to them, he asks them to do this thought exercise.
Picture this: you’re at your 80th birthday and reflecting on your life. Your friends and family are there. Someone you care about deeply gets up to give a speech about the life you’ve led, and the way you make the people around you feel. Then ask yourself, how do you want them to describe you?
This will help get you close to understanding what drives a sense of meaning in your life. Maybe you’re adventurous, maybe you want to be creative, or maybe you want people to remember you as kind.
If what is meaningful to you aligns with big-ticket goals such as travelling more, learning a new skill or completing something like a marathon or a book, Cheers says it’s critical to not put off the actions required to get there.
“There’s this idea about positive thinking, where if you just visualise your goals … that it makes it more likely to happen. But more recent research [by New York University psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen] shows that just thinking positively and dreaming doesn’t motivate you to change your life,” he says.
“It feels good to dream, so you can kind of trick your brain into feeling good.”
Big goals should not distract you from enjoying the simple things every day. Getty
Put simply, there’s no need to wait for retirement to start trying to achieve those goals. Start now, he says. If you want to write a book, start the writing now. If you want to complete a marathon, start the running now. If you want to learn Japanese, start learning now. And if you want to go on a safari, start saving now.
But be careful of using these bigger goals to distract yourself from the smaller, or less glamorous changes that could lead to a happier life in the meantime, he adds.
“Rather than having a goal-focused life, what would your life look like if you focused on what is meaningful to you every day?” Cheers asks.
The scary thing is that once you have dug deep, you might find you don’t actually need a bucket list. Rather, you might need to ditch that toxic relationship, or find a new job.
Beyond those radical changes, Cheers uses a “daily bucket list”, or a set of actions, that he carries out over 24 hours and which align with his values.
They include things such as messaging family members to check in, telling his partner that he loves them, getting off one tram stop early and walking through the park, listening to his favourite song in the morning.
“They’re little things, right? And it’s about noticing that the little things make a difference to your life. Sending a message to someone makes a difference to them.
“The more we start with the little things, it builds the capacity to do the bigger things. Just doing one thing differently today that is meaningful to you helps build towards that bigger change in your life.”