#2 - How to Build Your Own 100 Life Goals List

Ryan breaks down exactly what a 100 Life Goals list is, where the idea came from, and how to build your own — starting today.

This isn't a complicated system. It's a brain dump, a timer, and a living document that grows with you.

In this episode:

• What a 100 Life Goals list is and why 100 (not 10 or 50)
• The book that started it all — The Three-Word Journal by Randal A. Wright
• How John Goddard inspired the concept
• Ryan's own list from 2015 — what's still on it, what's been crossed off, and what changed
• A simple step-by-step process to build your own list today
• Stephen Covey's "sharpen the saw" categories as a framework
• How to use the list once you have it
• Why it's okay to change, update, and remove goals

Your challenge this episode: Get a piece of paper or open your notes app. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Brain dump every goal you can think of. Don't categorize yet — just write. Come back to it if life gets busy. Set a reminder if you need to.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Three-Word Journal by Randal A. Wright
• John Goddard — explorer and one of the original 100 life goals pioneers
• Stephen Covey's "sharpen the saw" framework — physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual

Transcript

What Is a 100 Life Goals List?

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Now, what is a 100 life goals list? Well, it's exactly what it sounds. It's a list of about a hundred goals that you want to accomplish in your life before you die. Some of them are big, some of them are small. And why 100? Well, there's nothing magical about the number 100. It's just that 100 causes you to stretch and causes you to think. Just like one of my heroes, John Goddard, did. He's kind of like my inspiration for the Hunter Life Goals and the inspiration of a lot of people who have who have done this sort of sort of thing. Or you your goals could be varied. They could have financial goals, travel goals, career goals, family goals, all sorts of things. So again, you could actually do 95 goals or 90 goals, but I just routed up to 100. And the whole point is that you're not just going to do 10 goals or 50 goals. You really want to do a lot more than that because it's going to cause you to work. Even when you're setting your goals. And let's just say that come 70 years old, you look at this list that you created all those years ago, and you look at this list and you realize, you know what, I only accomplished 20 of those goals that I set all those years ago. Did I waste my time? The answer is very much so no. Because if you hadn't set those goals in the first place, it's quite possible that you hadn't even that you wouldn't have even accomplished the 20 that you did. And where did this idea come from? The first time this idea came to me was from a religious author named Randall Wright from Austin, Texas. He in a couple of his books refers to John Goddard, who is what one, I think, newspaper called the original Indiana Jones or the real Indiana Jones. When John was a teenager in Los Angeles, he I don't know if he was inspired by something or what caused it, but just one day he wrote down what he called his life list. And it was this list of about a hundred goals of things that he would accomplish in his life. A lot of them were travel and adventure goals, but not all of them. And Randall Wright wrote about John Goddard in the book that he was reading. He wrote a book called The Three-Word Journal that he talks about it in. He wrote a book called Achieving Your Life Mission. The Three-Word Journal was not religiously oriented, but the Achieving Your Life Mission was. I don't remember which one I read first, but I loved both of them. And I still use my three-word journal from time to time now. But that's where I got the idea from. And then several years later I read a book called Ninja Selling, which is a sales book, but they were also heavily inspired by John Goddard, the author Larry Kendall. And those are like multiple different sources where I learned about John Goddard and was inspired by the 100 Life Goals. And my wife and I were married in 2010, and we were influenced by the idea of 100 Life Goals from very early on. And so we were we set those goals very early in our marriage, and we've been looking at them off and on ever since. Now the goal of the 100 Life Goals is for you to look back at your life when you're older and see progress. Not perfection, but progress. I don't believe anybody is going to actually achieve their full potential in this life because nobody's perfect. Everybody's going to make mistakes. But let's say you set a 100 life goals, and years down the road, you're 70 years old, let's say you look back at the list and say you've accomplished 50 out of the 100 goals. Well, it's very possible that you will would not have achieved that many goals if you had not taken the time to write them down and then follow through on them as much as possible. Should you feel bad that you didn't hit all 100 of them? Well, I guess it depends. The real question is, why didn't you? Were you busting your butt the whole time, trying to accomplish your goals and for whatever reason just life got in the way? Like, did your spouse get sick and you had to spend money on that instead of something else? Well, then no, I don't think you should feel you should feel bad. It's not a race. You're not comparing it to anybody. You shouldn't compare your accomplishment of your goals uh against somebody else's. My wife and I have a lot of different goals on our on each of our different goals lists, and I've accomplished some more in some areas than she has in other in some of her areas, but it doesn't really matter. The only judge of of the life goals list is you. It's completely customizable. Now I'll just share. When I made my list, my my wife and I had not even been married a year. We read the book, like I mentioned, and I think I was 26 years old when we first made it. When I first made it, and and my wife, I kind of robbed the cradle. She was a bit younger, she was probably 19 or 20 when this happened. But we we were just we had all these ambitions when we were we were younger, and we still do. My wife loves to travel, so she has a lot of travel goals, and I have some travel goals, but not as money as many as her. And again, that is okay. And then basically, we just we were newlyweds, we didn't have kids at the time, so we had plenty of free time, and we just made the list over a week or two, a couple weeks maybe. And uh going back to my old list, I don't know if this is the original list, but it is an old list from at least 2015 or 2018. I'm just looking at some. One is some of these are still on my list today, like squat 300 pounds, deadlift 400 pounds, do a tough mutter. Those are some physical ones that I still have. Actually, I don't think tough mutters on on mine anymore. They've been bought by Spartan Race, but I have done two Spartan races. Do a Go Ruff Challenge, and actually I did complete in 2016. Let's see. Master of Martial Art. That one is not on my list anymore because I've replaced it with become a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Let's see. Read the Old Testament. That one I have already completed uh a few different few years ago. Stop being judgmental, and I would say that's a work in progress. I don't believe that's on my list today. Um the chili cook-off. That's a fun one because I love chili and I love chili cook-offs. I've I've gotten second place in the chili cook-off, but I have never won a chili cook-off. Learn to cook, learn to grill. See, some of these I could really I could really spend the rest of my life learning how to do, or several years doing it, but you know, I kept them vague on purpose throughout the years because I want to be able to refine them. You know, these are living documents here. Just working through, let's see, some let's see some other categories. Husband, learn how to dance with Latisse, learn and play songs on the guitar for her, take her to Hawaii. So, yeah, some of these are still still on my list, and and some of them have have been taken off for one reason or another. I remember one of them I earned was earn a master's degree. I completed that, and then I on my old list was earn a PhD, and on my current list, that one is no longer on there because I have no desire to go back and get a PhD. Here's another fun one. Eat clam chatter by the sea in New England. That one I did accomplish back in 2021, but I want to do it again. It wasn't as good. I remember the clam chatter wasn't actually as good, and it was a really crowded area. So I want to go back and I want to do that again, actually. So, anyways, that's that's kind of fun. And those are some examples of of my old goals lists compared to my new goals list. So, how does someone actually build their own list? The simplest way to do it is to simply set a timer for a certain amount of time for maybe 20 minutes and just go. Just brain dump, just write down all the different goals that you could possibly think. You might go 10 or 20 goals and then feel like you can't go anymore, but you can, I promise. You just keep thinking and thinking and thinking and writing and writing and writing. Don't worry about categorizing them at all at first. What you once you've written as much as you think you can, then start categorizing them. Now don't go back and edit anything. Just start categorizing. Start with what do I want to have, and then go to what do I want to do, and then what do I want to be? Then what do I want to stop? And then where do I want to go? Another way to look at it, at least that I was doing when I first started, was Steve Covey's sharpen the saw categories physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual. Make goals around each one of those, and then you can think of the different roles that you have in life. So your different family roles, your future family roles if you want to have a family and you don't yet, or different work roles, whether it's work that you want to have or that you currently have, different hobbies, that sort of thing. I think you will realize that it's actually pretty easy to hit a hundred if you just keep going and don't quit. I think the biggest mistake that people make when trying to make these goals is overcomplicating it. Like I said at the very beginning, just start your timer and just go. That's really the best way to do it. Don't worry about categorizing at first, don't worry about any of that. Just write them down. You can you can categorize later, but only after you've got a list. Once you have the list, I would say set a timer for between five to ten minutes, if you want, only if you want. But set a timer and then do a quick organization of it. Don't spend too much time on it because this is a document that's gonna be living and breathing. It's okay to change goals, it's okay to update it, but right now you just you want to get it printed out and posted somewhere where you're gonna see it frequently. How to use it and how how to offer to revisit it is a topic for another episode, but for now I'll just say that you need to have a scheduled time to revisit it. It's it's fine to look at it every day if you want, but there has to be at least a bare minimum amount of time, and we're gonna cover that in detail at a different time. So, my challenge for you is to do this. Make your list. And you don't have to do all of it in one setting, you don't have to perfect it in one setting. Just get a piece of paper or get your notes app on your phone open, set a timer, and just start typing or writing. You can even feel free to stop when your timer goes off and then come back tomorrow or later in the day, or even a few days or a week later. I know I did that. Sometimes life just gets busy or you forget, and maybe what you could do is set an alarm on your phone to go off to remind you to finish it up in a day or two. I would love to hear what some of your goals are and how you've structured your your goals or categorize them. I get excited when I hear about people's goals, and and sometimes it gives me ideas for what I might want to do. And that's okay because there's no copyright infringement here, no plagiarism here. There's plenty of life around for all of us to accomplish all of our goals.