"My Life List"

One rainy afternoon an inspired 15-year old boy named John Goddard sat down at his kitchen table in Los Angeles and wrote three words at the top of a yellow pad, “My Life List.” Under that heading he wrote down 127 goals.

These were not simple or easy goals. They included climbing the world’s major mountains, exploring from source to mouth the longest rivers of the world, piloting the world’s fastest aircraft, running a mile in five minutes and reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

Now, a generation later, he has accomplished 109 of these quests, and has logged an impressive list of records in achieving them.

(Quote from: http://www.johngoddard.info)

Today I went to a meeting at my company’s head office.  Part of the meeting was about setting goals.  First, my trainer asked us “can you remember the goals you set when you first started at this company, on your very first day of training, when you had just arrived in Japan?”.  Only one of the ten or so people present could remember and actually had her list with her.  I made my list almost 22 months ago, and I have no idea what they were or where my list is.  I’m sure “improve my Japanese” would have been on there, though!

Next, my trainer said “reach as high as you can”.  We were sitting at this point, and I was the only person who stood up straight away (seemed obvious to me!).  Then he told us to try one more time, and then asked us “did you reach higher the second time?”.  We nodded.  “Why didn’t you reach that high the first time?  I told you to reach as high as you could”.  Interesting.

Then, my trainer told us about John Goddard, who I had never heard of before.  As you can see in the quote above, John started out as a 15-year old boy with big dreams.  Now, he is “the world’s greatest goal achiever”, and an actual paid adventurer!

You can see John’s list of 127 goals (of which he has achieved 109 so far) here: http://www.johngoddard.info/life_list.htm.  His goals are many and varied, but all thoroughly inspiring.  So inspiring, in fact, that I have decided to write my own list…

My list is here: http://muskett.wordpress.com/my-life-list/, and I will update it as and when I think of new goals (these 40 are just the first ones that spilled out of my head today!), and also when I have achieved goals I will cross them off and make a note in red.

I will aim to always reach as high as I possibly can! がんばります！:D