10 Things I Want To Accomplish In The Next 10 Years
Top 10 Bucket List Items
I’m a person with many interests and many goals. I decided to create a list of my top 10 goals that I would like to achieve in the next ten years (I’m 23 now). Even if I don’t achieve them by my 33rd birthday, I still hope to achieve them.
#1 Run A [Half] Marathon
I joined a recreational track and field team when I was 11-years-old. This sport has allowed me to get an athletic scholarship for college, where I was able to compete in one of the highest levels right below the professional level. Oddly enough, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with running. I used to dread running workouts because I had terrible endurance compared to my teammates and I had exercise induced asthma (ironic, right?). As side from my natural jumping ability, this is another reason why I pted for the jumping events; I only had to run for 100 feet before jumping. When my collegiate career ended, I took off to allow my body to fully recover from the abuse my legs took from high, long and triple jumping for the past 9 years. I started running again after 2 months because I was bored from not working out, and I realized it gave me therapeutic feel (which never happened during my years in track). I ran a local 5k race and was surprised how quickly I ran it, given the amount of time I took off. Since then, I became motivated to increase my mileage. Furthest I’ve ever ran was 10 miles. I hope to work my way up to running a half marathon and then a marathon one day.
#2 Get A Scuba Diving Certification
As a child, I watched Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Even though I had no interest in voluntarily swimming with great white sharks, I did want to explore the deep blue sea. It’s a whole nother world down there. I heard Thailand is a common and affordable place to get you diving certification. Since I will be based in Asia later this year, I hope to venture back to Thailand and take classes there.
#3 Become Multilingual
I studied Spanish in grade school and for two semesters in university. I regret not practicing the language outside of the classroom and taking more foreign language courses in college (I was just 2 classes away from completing a minor requirement). Learning Spanish was so easy to me. I hope to improve my fluency in the language so I can have complex conversations in the language. I also want to learn Mandarin Chinese outside of the basics. I also want to learn Arabic, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Swahili. A lot of native English speakers don’t see the need in learning another language because everyone is trying to learn theirs. I think learning multiple languages can open up the doors in employment opportunities, and it can give you a whole new perspective in how you think and view the world.
#4 Visit A Country That Isn’t A Popular Travel Destination
This is can be relative. A popular destination from a person who is of A nationality can be different from a person who is of B nationality. I don’t want to visit a least traveled country for brownie points on Instagram. I wrote a post about the special snowflake syndrome victims in a previous post. I want to visit a least-traveled country because I most likely no absolutely nothing about it and believe it would be a great learning experience.
#5 Read Texts Of Every Major Religion
I was raised in a Christian household (Baptist to be exact). Over the years, I’ve become a bit skeptical about certain things because I was never given an [convincing enough] answer to things in the Bible that were unsaid and/or sounded contradicting. Nowadays, I don’t subscribe to any religious title; I simply believe what I believe. Religion is a very sensitive topic to a lot of people because everyone loves to rant about how their belief is right and why everyone else’s is wrong (or why every belief is wrong in the eyes of atheists). I’ve always had interest in learning about how people practice their spiritual beliefs. Most people’s religious influences are based on the region of the world they grew up in. For example, if I was born in Thailand, there’s a very good chance that I’ll be Buddhist because that’s the primary belief of that country. One thing religion debaters often miss completely is all of the great philosophy points in each belief that can be applied to their daily lives. Is religion a controlling mechanism? Yes, it can be; history is more than enough proof that religion has been used in a destructive manner. Even though I personally believe that all of the world’s and life’s answers aren’t solely found in religious texts, I still want to read them all from cover to cover to get a better understanding of different viewpoints and to connect the dots.
#6 Learn A Martial Art
A lot of people assume I know how to fight because I’m tall with an athletic build; however it’s far from the truth. I can sneak some good hits in, but I’m not good at fighting. I want to learn a martial art of some sort, maybe jiu jitsu.
#7 Go Volcano Boarding
I saw a video on YouTube of people going volcano boarding in Nicaragua. I didn’t even know it was a thing. I became easily amused and wanted to do it. Though I wouldn’t mind traveling to Nicaragua, I won’t if any countries in East Asia offer the same activity (mainly since I’ll be based in that region of the world for the next few years).
#8 Write A Book
I have some ideas in the works, but I’ll go into detail once I’m closer to the finished product :)
#9 Visit Every Continent At Least Once
So far I’ve visit 3 of 7….or 6 if you subscribe to America being one big continent (I’m still planning on visiting South America anyways if you view the continent that way). In all honestly, I’m interested in a visiting a country on every major region of the world, so by default, if all goes well I can achieve this goal.
#10 Learn How To Draw/Paint
I suck at drawing. I’m more of a doodle, but that doesn’t even look that interesting half of the time. Art was an interest I put at the back burner because I wasn’t that talented in it, so I opted for art history classes when I was in university to get my artistic fix.
What’s on your bucket list?
