What’s on Your “Reverse Bucket List”?
A bucket list is an itemized list of goals–experiences or achievements–that we want to accomplish before we “kick the bucket”–i.e. die.
In the conventional realm, these tend to be travel or adventure goals–visit a famous place, climb a famous peak, etc. The idea here is we’re “living our best lives” if we can check off all the items on our Bucket List / Wish List.
Our Bucket List expresses “who we are” in the form of aspirations that reflect our interests, character and dreams of what we might call a larger life than the one we live day-to-day.
There’s another way of understanding “who we are,” a process we might call The Reverse Bucket List, because it’s the reverse of looking ahead–it looks back–and it’s the reverse of an itemized list: it’s a list of things we experienced that either expressed our goals at that specific point in our lives, or happened to us rather than being chosen by us.
In his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, Steve Jobs described how we cannot understand the connective threads of our lives without looking back–a sort of “rear view mirror” Bucket List that only reveals itself by studying our own past.
Here is how Jobs summarized it: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
The example from his own life was his spur-of-the-moment decision to attend a class in calligraphy at Reed College. It was not part of a grand plan or a Bucket List item; it was just another semi-random interest he pursued in these years (working in a apple orchard, etc.)
But this knowledge of calligraphy led to Jobs insisting the first Macintosh PC have a selection of fonts to choose from–a major change in a PC world where users got a typewriter-font and no other options. This built-in menu of fonts was an integral part of what became the desktop publishing revolution.
In other words, our Reverse Bucket List is an accounting of all the experiences that shaped “who we are” not because they were items on a “life plan” Bucket List but because their importance is only visible in looking back: we wouldn’t be “who we are” now without these specific experiences.
This is how the Reverse Bucket List works.
1. The experiences are largely contingent / spontaneous rather than it-all-worked-as-planned. Things could have turned out completely differently with very small changes.
2. The experiences are not commoditized, meaning they’re not experiences that are packaged such as travel tours. Others might have taken this trail or completed this task, but this specific experience was unique to us.
3. The experiences are not necessarily positive highlights; they might be negative experiences we survived.
4. The “dots” can only be connected looking back.
5. How the experiences shaped “who we are” is not always clear. We know the experience is important but can’t distill it down to some causal chain–for example, “I did this and as a result I changed jobs.” The experience shaped us in ways we can only sense rather than define.
Here are a few examples from my own life that illustrate the idea.
In early 1978, my spouse and I built a micro-house without power tools on a friend’s plot of old sugar-cane plantation. We lived in a pup-tent without any water or power. There’s a pile of lumber and plywood and a few foundation piers. You wake up, decide where to put the micro-house, and get to work with a shovel, handsaw, square, level, snapline, hammers, screwdriver, etc.
When you move into the plywood shack–oops, I mean micro-house–it’s an incredible luxury.
I already had almost five years of construction experience by this time (from age 19 to 24), so I knew how to do the work, but this was my first experience building an entire structure on my own. As modest as it was, it was still there 30 years later.
Two years later, we built our own house, a conventional home in a conventional subdivision, this time with power and water. And four years after that, I was laying out a 43-unit subdivision my partner and I built as general contractors. Dot, dot, dot.
Building the micro-house with hand tools wasn’t one of my planned life goals; things didn’t go according to plan and this happened instead. But it was an important experience. It’s definitely on my Reverse Bucket List: I wouldn’t be “who I am” without it.
The same can be said of the experience of being a super-minority–being one of only a handful of “people who look like me” in a realm of people who don’t look like us.
In 1968, we spent the summer in the Highland Park neighborhood of Detroit. It was an African-American community and the only other Caucasians we ever saw were our elderly immigrant landlords. When you’re the only “different” folks around, you tend to be curiosities, and my brother and I had positive experiences. We walked to the local YMCA and ran the indoor track, and played pickup basketball with older guys.
A few years later, we moved to the island of Lanai in Hawaii, a pineapple plantation in that era. The only haoles (Caucasians) in the high school were myself and the principal’s daughter, and for a time, the town doctor’s daughter. My brother was the only haole in the elementary school. I was by default the only haole on the basketball team and on the local-students-only pineapple-picking crew I joined in summer.
History weighs heavily on these communities. We were not personally part of that history, but we experience the dot-connecting of history in our own lives.
Here’s an example of an experience that made the Reverse Bucket List but not for being an experience everyone would love to have. It was a damp day, with light rain, and I needed to trim off a piece of the metal roof on a two-story house we were building an a sloping lot, so the roof edge was 2.5 stories off the ground. I had a heavy worm-drive Skilsaw and a power cord, and I tied a rope around my waist and secured it to something on the roof.
Safety first, right? I was 29 and had been doing this kind of work for 10 years.
The pre-painted steel roofing was damp and I was on the edge. I slipped in a split second, fell quite a distance in another split second, hit the rope which then snapped, breaking my fall. I ended up on the ground, in that peculiar state familiar to those of us who’ve experienced accidents of this sort. If you haven’t been knocked out, you start moving limbs to see what still works, to assess how badly you’re hurt.
Miraculously, I was sore but not broken. And the 13-pound Skilsaw missed me.
I was lucky. But in terms of the Reverse Bucket List, you start thinking about fate, destiny, and God’s Will.
This experience–and other close calls involving tractors, vehicles and motorcycles–are on my Reverse Bucket List not just because I survived something that could have turned out worse. They’re experiences of how injury and death are never as far away as we might imagine. They’re always close by.
In another accident some years later, when a ladder slipped, I fell and was knocked out. I woke up. Not everyone does. Who survives and who dies in such circumstances boils down to small things–a few inches difference and your head would have hit a steel foundation anchor, or a concrete footing, and you might not wake up.
Nobody puts “almost get killed in a stupid accident” or “have a Near-Death Experience” on their Bucket List. Even if someone did have this on their list, the problem is engineering a spontaneous accident so you survive isn’t possible.
“Who we are” doesn’t distill down to a checklist, but it’s certainly true that we would be different if we hadn’t experienced all the things on our Reverse Bucket List. And if we find great value in all our life experiences, then we may treasure our Reverse Bucket List far more than our looking-ahead wish-list Bucket List.
If you’re of a mind to, it’s interesting to ask yourself: what’s on my Reverse Bucket List? What experiences am I glad I had, even if they weren’t conventional highlights?
CHS NOTE: If your curiosity and interests range far and wide, welcome home. Perhaps something here may change your life in some useful way. Writing is my only paid work/job, and I am honored by your readership and financial support.