Words By Ian Child
There’s a lot to be said for bucket lists. They’re collections of dreams, and we all have one in us. However, too often our dreams are left un-chased.
A few months ago, I returned from the northern-most reaches of Scotland, having completed the iconic ‘North Coast 500’, a 500-mile road trip around that country’s incredible coastline. Rugged mountain passes, beautiful shorelines and endless, twisty driving roads. Not to mention some excellent food and lodgings. It had been on my bucket list for years, and it certainly didn’t disappoint; why had I not done it sooner?
The decision to take the trip came about one rather rainy afternoon when my business partner and I were chatting about diaries in the office. Ours is a busy business, and while this is great news in many respects, it means that we tend not to have a great deal of free time. So, as we were forlornly trying to shoehorn yet another event into our burgeoning diaries, it occurred to both of us that we might be going about things the wrong way. We’re both petrolheads, so discussions about cars and road trips were, for us, very regular occurrences. Yet, were you to peek in our diaries, you’d see lots of meetings, speaking events, training seminars and business journeys. But not many road trips. In fact, none. Which on that particular rainy afternoon, it had dawned on us was a bit of a problem.
As the author of a book about time management, my family take great pleasure in regularly reminding me that I often fail to take my own medicine. And here was yet another case in point. I seemingly had enough time to focus on my business but not enough to achieve one of my top bucket list items. Which is why we ended up cancelling every meeting and event for five days straight, so we could go ahead and do the trip. We realised that unless we made a conscious effort to prioritise the trip above everything else, it simply wouldn’t happen.
We also realised that when we looked back on this year in the future, we wouldn’t remember the meetings we attended in Manchester, the training sessions in Birmingham, or the countless Zoom calls we had with all and sundry. But we would remember sea kayaking in the aftermath of storm Katrina, walking across beautiful, desolate sandy beaches, hiking across the hills at Knockan Crag, and driving some of the best roads in Europe against jaw-dropping backdrops of sea, land and sky.
To share the driving, I’d invited a good friend of mine along with me whose approach to motoring is more-or-less an entirely practical one. For him, it’s more about getting from A to B, and, as an electric car enthusiast (if that’s the right word), he also enjoys that added frisson of danger that only range anxiety can bring to proceedings. So, this was something of an unfamiliar trip for him, one where it was all about driving a fossil-fuelled sports car purely for the hell of it, and he didn’t have to perpetually worry about running out of juice. On our return journey back down South, he’d admitted that he’d thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would love to do it again.
This then sparked a further conversation about cars, namely what his preferred make and model would be to take on such a journey. After going around numerous houses, he eventually confessed that he’d long held a schoolboy crush on one particular sports car and that this would be his car of choice for a road trip. At which point, I said, ‘Why don’t you go out and buy a second-hand one, and we can use it next time?’. And the argument he put forward is what I can only describe as the antithesis of ‘man-maths’. Whereas I can use man-maths to justify any luxury purchase under the sun, I was instead subjected to a torrent of pragmatism and common sense. Apparently, if one factors in the finance costs, running costs, depreciation and insurance, it becomes impossible to justify such an extravagant purchase based on price alone. And, if money was your yardstick, it was an argument with which I had to agree wholeheartedly. The numbers simply didn’t add up.
But that’s where we all rather tend to lose the plot. Because, while such arguments may make sense financially, it doesn’t mean that it’s the right course of action to take. Let me give you an example at the other end of the scale. Imagine you were to pop into your local coffee shop for a flat white, and you spied a cheeky maple pecan Danish nestling in the display cabinet, winking at you. There are probably dozens of very reasonable arguments you could put forward for NOT indulging. Your expanding waistline, the additional expense, ruining your appetite, and clogging your arteries are just a few. But then you think, what the heck, I just want it. So, you buy it, consume it, and it marks a happiness high point in your day, even though it went against all that good reasoning. Were there some pretty sound reasons not to do it? Yes. But you did it anyway because you enjoyed it, and it made you feel better.It was one of the day’s high points.
This is an example of what I call a ‘happiness pocket’, and your days will be full of them. Little pockets of happiness that make each day bearable. It could be a snack, a chat with a friend, a glass of Rioja, a meal out or a takeaway, or a trip to the cinema or the local pub. You won’t recall them individually in years to come, but they’re essential for making your day-to-day life enjoyable. These happiness pockets also happen on a yearly basis as well as a daily one. Nice holidays, family parties, and luxury purchases all serve to make the year bearable, and they also give us something not only to look forward to but also to remember.
Admittedly, buying a sports car to take on a road trip sits at the more expensive end of the spectrum, but in the end, everything is relative. We always need enough funds to cover the basics, so we can only fund our bucket list requirements out of our disposable income. But, whatever the dream, we often use unjustifiable cost as an excuse for not doing it, even if that cost is a lot more modest than buying a car.
Given that I had my friend’s exclusive attention for the duration of the twelve-hour drive back home, I took the opportunity to share a different perspective on his potential purchase. I asked him how much money it would cost to own his ideal road trip car for three years. He worked out a rough number, which sounded reasonable. It wasn’t cheap, but neither was it ruinous. Then I asked him to imagine sitting out in the garden on a summer afternoon someday in the future when he was in his dotage, looking back on his life as the sunlight faded. Now imagine that sum of money sitting in the bank account along with many other monies accrued during his lifetime. Would he really be so grateful that he hadn’t spent the money, given that he could see it there in his account? Or would he rather be able to recount the memories and say that, during his lifetime, he HAD owned his dream car and used it to go on exciting road trips with his friends?
Exactly what is the point am I trying to make here? Well, simply put, it’s this. Life is way too short not to have dreams, but we need to ensure these dreams actually happen. And while long-term goals are great, we must also enjoy the journey. If you only settle for a cheeky Danish now and again, you’re selling yourself short. But saving every penny and dying with millions in the bank isn’t a great ambition either. Instead, I would urge you to make sure you have a bucket list item on your agenda for EVERY year of your life and do whatever is necessary to make it happen. It can be big, or it can be small, expensive or cheap. Will you always be able to justify it financially? Nope. Luckily, some items on the bucket list can be very inexpensive. Either way, in years to come, when you sit in your garden in the fading sunshine on that same summer’s afternoon, reminiscing on a life well-lived, the value you ascribe to money not spent could be very different. To be blunt, you won’t be able to spend it where you’re going next.
Ian Child, co-founder, propertyCEO and author of ‘Your own personal time machine – a guide to getting your life back’
Imagery by
Glenn Carstens-Peters
Stephanie Klepacki
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