*** Create Your Bucket List

Recently there was an inspiring Adidas ad that read: “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

Most of us have lost track of what we once thought was possible. We are stifled by our limiting thoughts and beliefs and because of that we are achieving very little in our lives. We need to reconnect with this idea that our country was founded on. Anything is possible is the quintessential American Dream that allowed people like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford to become legendary. It was this thought that gave birth to the largest food chain in the world when Ray Kroc bought an idea from two budding restaurateurs – The McDonalds brothers. It was the belief that anything is possible that gave wings to a sixty-seven-year-old Colonel Sanders who set out to change his circumstances with a great chicken recipe. Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps are live, vivid examples that Anything is Possible. Yes, The American Dream is alive and well today, for some of us though, we need to find it again for ourselves.

A creative movie came out in 2007 starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, called Bucket List. In the movie, two terminally ill men escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die. They call their list, the bucket list, everything they want to do before they kick the bucket.

Lou Holtz, the legendary football coach at Notre Dame, created a bucket list when he was 28 years old. At the time, he had been fired from his assistant coaching position and his wife was pregnant with their third child. To lift his spirits his wife gave him a copy of The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. The book inspired him and he sat down at his kitchen table and wrote out a list of 107 goals he wanted to accomplish in his life. These goals included things like, meeting the Pope, eating dinner at the White House, and coaching at Notre Dame. To date, Lou has already achieved more than 80 of the goals on his list!

Creating your own bucket list will expand your mind to new possibilities. It will help you to imagine the success that you can have in your life and develop the faith necessary to achieve it. This is one of the best excertcises you can do to reconnect with the belief that Anything is Possible. I challenge you to take the time to write 101 goals that you have for your life. Think of who you want to be, the places you want to go, the things you want to do. The ways you want to contribute and what you want your life to mean. This process may take some time, and you may have to come back several times to get it done. Just don’t limit yourself or second-guess anything. Open up your mind to unlimited possibilities. I created my bucket list a few years ago and have already achieved many of the goals I made. Have fun and let your imagination run free, remember - anything is possible.