How to Write a Great Bucket List

The term "Bucket List" became part of our lingo after director Rob Reiner released a movie of the same name in 2007. The film depicted two two terminally ill cancer patients -- portrayed by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman -- on a madcap round-the-world race to do all the stuff they'd always wanted to do. Since then, the idea of creating a checklist of things that you aim to accomplish or experience during your lifetime has become a pervasive cultural meme.

That's particularly true for those of us in our forties and fifties, who are just awakening to the realization that we don't want to be like the guy futilely chasing after the sinking sun in that old Pink Floyd song "Time," or like Harry, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, who who lies dying in a tent in Africa and thinks of all the memories he'd been planning to turn into novels someday, but now never will. (Poor Harry -- if he hadn't been in such a Lost Generation existential funk, he might have realized that he actually had lived a life so rich and full of adventure that a lot of less daring souls would envy him.)

Fortunately, we've got plenty of guidance these days on how to put together our own bucket lists. There's a growing library of advice books on the subject. My personal recommendation is the whimsical Ten Fun Things to Do Before You Die by hipster folk painter, author and Catholic nun Karol A. Jackowski.

The internet also offers plenty of bucket lists we can peruse for inspiration. Makeuseof.com offers this list of six bucket-list websites that help you compile a list for all your friends and the rest of the world to see. At Bucketlist.org, users have posted nearly 16,000 lists containing about 310,000 items, ranging from climbing a volcano to learning to play the oboe.

In that spirit, here are some of the more interesting approaches to writing bucket lists that I've come across.

1. Think really big.

As a 15-year-old boy, future adventurer and motivational speaker John Goddard sat one afternoon at his kitchen table and wrote down 127 things he wanted to accomplish in his life, including visiting Easter Island; retracing the travels of Marco Polo and Alexander the Great; learning jujitsu; running a mile in five minutes; building a telescope; playing the flute; and riding an elephant, camel, ostrich and bronco. So far Goddard, who is now in his eighties, says he's completed 109 of the items. (He still has to study dragon lizards on Komodo Island and become a ham radio operator.)

2. Help someone with your adventures.

After her marriage to Ted Turner ended in 2000, actress, activist and fitness entrepreneur Jane Fonda says she composed a bucket list that included hiking Peru's sacred Inca trail to the ancient city of Machu Picchu, visiting the Galapagos Islands, scuba diving at Australia's Great Barrier Reef and making another movie in French, which she hadn't done in 40 years. A creative altruistic twist: Fonda has persuaded others to donate $100,000 to her nonprofit organization, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, for each item she checks off the list.

3. Get outside of your comfort zone, just one time.

Former NFL defensive back and kick returner Deion Sanders, who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in August, has accomplished just about everything that can be done in his chosen athletic endeavor, from winning two Super Bowls to making the NFL's All-Decade Team of the 1990s. That may be why 43-year-old Sanders told ESPN that his bucket list now includes some new, unfamiliar physical endeavors in which his legendary running speed won't be much help, including deep-sea diving and jumping out of an airplane. But instead of aiming for mastery, he says he'll be satisfied if he can do each thing just once.

4. Put up a list in a public place, and invite your neighbors to add to it.

New Orleans artist Candy Chang turned the side of an abandoned house in her neighborhood into a giant community bucket list. She stenciled the message "Before I die I want to _____" onto the wall multiple times and invited passers-by to fill in the blank with chalk. (They've written items that range from "run a marathon" to "Go back to Corsica and see my little French girl again.") Since then, Civic Center, a local arts organization, has created the Before I Die Toolkit, an $85 package that includes a stencil, boxes of chalk, and other items that enable you to replicate the common bucket list in your own town.

5. Have an artistic aim.

Instead of compiling a list of dissimilar experiences that range willy-nilly from cliff diving to learning to paint a passable sunset with oils, you might find it more meaningful to focus your list on a particular artistic or creative passion. In 2010, for example, Lee Mergner, editor of Jazz Times, came up with this great list of 40 jazz-related things to do before you die. He includes items such as attending one of the prestige European jazz festivals in Italy or Spain, listening to all of Miles Davis' LPs in chronological order and hosting a concert by local jazz musicians in your own house.

Finally, here's an interesting bit of trivia about the movie The Bucket List, which started the whole trend. In this interview, screenwriter Justin Zackham reveals that he got the idea for the film when he was making up his own bucket list and included "write a script that becomes a Hollywood movie" as one of the items. A light bulb went off in his head, and the idea of writing a bucket list became the subject he'd been searching for.

SecondAct Asks: What's on your bucket list for 2012? Share your comments below.