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Dare to Create a List of 100 Things You Want
Then do this with it
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Here’s what happened when I challenged myself one Saturday to come up with a list of 100 things I want.
The inspiration
I was intrigued by the idea to make the ‘100 wants list’ from a podcast episode by Rich Litvin. He apparently has all his new clients do it. As a coach myself, I wanted to understand why.
What new insights could this bring?
Making the list
To be honest, coming up with a list of 100 wants took much longer than I anticipated. I’d get stuck, take a break, new wants would pop up, and I added them to the list. I also enlisted the help of friends to remind me of things I’d mentioned in the past.
There were many repeats and wants that turned out to be parts of other things —a luxury bathtub or hardwood floors are both things that are part of my definition of ‘a small, gorgeous detached house’. I counted these as three separate things. Even so, my final list was closer to 90.
It was easy to come up with the first twenty or so wants. The middle sixty stretched my brain. And the final twenty was when the real challenge began.
The insightful part was what happened next.
Making sense of my desires
Once I had made my list in Excel, I added category labels to each item. I came up with the labels spontaneously, based on what made sense to me.
Here are my emergent categories (yours will be different):
- Purchases: these are things I could buy outright — a powerful, eco-friendly car, a fire pit, a large spinning globe (I’ve always wanted one of these!)
- Ego and vanity: this category included things like laser eye surgery or more tattoos
- Quality of life: here were the things that would make my life better and more enjoyable, such as quick access to a surfing beach, a lush and sunny garden, two cats
- Success: My measures of success were grouped…
