Bucket Lists are for Losers
Hint: Integrate all the activities in your life
The desire for a bucket list of moments to be experienced before death reveals a set of beliefs held by the majority of people in our culture today. There is another, much harder, but much more fulfilling view you can hold. And its best modern representative is Steve Jobs
On Saturday, July 31st, 2004 Steve Jobs spent most of the day on the operating table. A tumor had been spotted and the surgeons were removing a small part of his pancreas.
Most people would return from a radical surgery and take it slow. Most people would create a “bucket list” of things they wanted to do before they died. But not Steve Jobs. For him there was no separation between “life” and “work.” Whenever, for instance, he vacationed at a hotel, he would analyze and assess the design of every single item. That’s just who Steve Jobs was. He saw the world through a paradigm of design.
Knowing his time on earth was coming to an end, he did something very unusual. As his wife, Laurene, said “he doubled down.” And Tim Cook, Steve’s successor as CEO of Apple, said “when he came back from that surgery he was on a faster clock.” Instead of making a bucket list, Steve Jobs made one of the most impressive to-do lists in corporate history — a “productive list” of things to create before he died.
The rest, as we say, is history. Next would come the greatest innovations of his career: The iPhone and the iPad. Along the way would be incredible advances to each of Apple’s products, the building of Apple University, as well as the sale of Pixar Animation to Disney; these accomplishments made Apple the most valuable corporation on the planet. Steve Jobs worked to the very end of his life because he was doing what he loved. For Jobs, there was no need for a random list of experiences to be had, but a purposeful set of accomplishments to be finished before he passed.
