Why You Should Have A Career Bucket List
For Life, We Call it “A Bucket List” but For Work, We Call Them “Goals” and We Give Them “Do or Die Energy”
We love a bucket list, a fun list of things you want to do in your life, whereby there are no repercussions should you not complete them. You have an aim, sure, but no one gets mad at you if you change your mind, cross something off the list, and you do feel a sense of accomplishment when you go about doing the things on the list — what fun!
Go skydiving, check! Travel to China, check! Camp out at a National Park, check! Go fishing off the coast of Aruba, check! Hike Camelback Mountain near Scottsdale, check! Go to the Superbowl, check! All fun. All, in the grand scheme of things, inconsequential.
Found this picture of me in the archives, sitting in a film director’s chair… How kismet.
I was thinking about my relationship with my bucket list recently, and the energy around the things on it. Separately, I thought about my “career goals” and the energy around those items.
With my bucket list, I felt unrestrained, I could put big things on there, small things on there, really whatever I wanted to with minimal thought, if I did it one day, amazing! And again, if I didn’t, it was okay too. Making the list elicited high intent, I really do want to do these things; and yet simultaneously the list calls for a level of detachment or equanimity around how these things get done, in which order, or in some cases, if they ever even happen at all. Climb Everest? Yes, on my bucket list. Will it happen? Not quite sure, a lot would have to go right in order to check that one off the list.
My “career goals” list on the other hand, those are serious. Make X amount of dollars. Get promoted. Get promoted again. Get to XYZ level before my 40th birthday. Start my own thing. Scale it. Sell it. Do it again. Yeesh. See what I mean? These goals are linear. They leave no space for a wrong move. No space for exploration. No time for messing around. The energy around them is Heavy. Serious. It’s giving do or die. Anyone else feel this way?
What if we stopped giving those “goals” do or die energy, and instead made a Career Bucket List?
The bucket list has typically reserved for the things you want to do in your life away from your desk. The places you want to travel, the adventurous things you want to do, all the life you want to live.
But what bucket lists fail to account for is that you spend 1/3 of your life at work, a shit ton of life happens at your desk, as much as it does away from your desk.
A thought came to me recently that inspired this post “What if I created a career bucket list and approached it with the same, fun, creative energy that I approach my life bucket list with?” What if I gave myself the liberty to simply write stuff down that maybe one day I want to cross off, but in like a no-pressure kind of way. What if I let it be okay if I changed my mind? What if I let it be okay that I didn’t know how these things would get done, in which order, or in some cases, if at all. How would just simply shifting the energy with which I was approaching these desired goals, change how I felt about them entirely?
So that’s exactly what I did. I wrote myself a career bucket list. Big things and little things that I would love to cross off some day. And it felt good. The energy felt fresh, creative, exciting, and fun. The energy felt a lot like how my life bucket list feels. And this was a major unlock for me: What if we approached our work goals with the same joy and fervor that we approach our life with? Because, again, at the end of the day, work is as much a part of life, as life is!
What if we approached our work goals with the same joy and fervor that we approach our life with?
Here are a few things I added to my Career Bucket List, let me know if you spot a pattern, if you see a trend, because for me, there’s no linear path, just a bunch of fun shit that I’d like to do at some point, if
Make more than $$$ dollars in a single year
Make >$10M (take home dollars) in a single transaction
Take a Board Seat for a company with a mission that inspires me
Write a second book, maybe a third, we’ll see
Get my MBA from a really great school; possibly become an adjunct professor
Start an investment fund that invests in the future of consumer (cpg, tech, retail, media) with a focus on companies that help make our lives better, healthier and more productive
Host a cooking show or home show on a TV network where I interview really inspiring business women (and men) while we cook something delish together
Get really good at standup and sell out a theater, maybe the Chicago Theater, that seems like a good one
Film a Netflix standup comedy special
Write, sell, and executive produce a feature film screenplay… maybe the one I’ve been dreaming up based on the Christmas Cards my parents have written every year
Mentor and invest in young women, help them succeed in life and business
Give a Ted Talk about the perils of social media and drives people to an organization that does something to help young girls with mental health
Take my daughter on a really cool work trip with me, spend a long weekend wherever we go and enjoy the fact that I get to be a working mom and teach my daughter the value of hard work and being a good person
Are these goals? Yes. But just the process of calling them items on my career bucket list brings a different, more open to possibilities, and creative angle to how I might approach them. Careers are non-linear. They are full of twists, turns, and opportunities.
Feeling stuck in your career? Feeling like you are making the pursuit of greatness in your career too serious? Putting too much pressure on yourself to get it exactly right?
What if you said “fuck it” and just made a bucket list instead?
Next Steps / Recommended Actions: Make a Career Bucket List
Step 1. Take all pressure off.
Step 2. Write a list of stuff that you would love to have be true at some point.
Step 3. Put this list somewhere you can edit it, revise as you go, there’s no pressure to keep stuff on when you don’t feel like it belongs on there any more
Step 4. Let me know what you think! I can’t wait to hear from you
