Career Resource Center: The Lifetime To-Do List
"Cherish your visions and your dreams
as they are the children of your
soul;
the blue prints of your ultimate accomplishments."
- Napoleon Hill
If you haven’t started this list already, now is a good time to begin. You can write this list in a journal. Type it in a document on your computer. Publish it on your personal website. Scribble it on a paper tacked to the bathroom wall.
Pretend you’re 101 years old and sitting in your rocking chair enjoying some Reminiscence Therapy. What would you most like to be able to remember doing and being during the past century? Record your visions and dreams, your wishes and needs. For example:
- What jobs would you have liked to have held?
- What roles played?
- What, if any, accolades and awards earned?
- What accomplishments, personal and professional?
- What things do you want to have tried, even if you never did them
again?
- What do you want to have read?
- Where do you want to have traveled? Lived?
- What do you want to have explored? Learned?
Be sure to include a column for dates when you finish each item. Do what inspires you the most, and return to your list at least once a year to see how far you’ve come and where you still want to go. And of course, this list can be revised to accurately reflect your current interests, since that changes over time. What is vitally important at 30, for example, is not necessarily of interest at 60 or 90.
