The Someday List Is Where Dreams Go to Die Quietly
I found one of mine in an old notebook a few years ago. Written in my late twenties. Learn to sail. Visit my grandfather’s village. Start the school. Write the book. Of the eleven items, I’d done two, both of them more than a decade after writing them down, and only because circumstances forced my hand.
The other nine weren’t failures. They were never attempted. They lived on the list, which felt like progress and was the opposite.
What the list actually does
Writing something on a someday list gives you a small hit of the feeling you’d get from doing it. You’ve acknowledged the dream. You’ve made it official. The pressure drops a little. And that drop in pressure is precisely what guarantees it stays on the list, because pressure was the only thing that was going to move it.
The list is a pressure valve disguised as a plan.
Things never calm down
The condition attached to every someday is “when things settle.” I’ve been waiting for things to settle since 1989. There was always a reason: the kids, the business, the money, the move, the health scare. Each one was real. Together they added up to a life in which the settled period never arrived, because it doesn’t exist. Busy is the permanent condition. If a thing can’t happen during busy, it can’t happen.
The sorting
Take the list out. For each item, ask one question honestly: do I actually want this, or do I want to be the kind of person who wants it?
About half of mine were the second kind. I didn’t want to learn to sail. I wanted to be a man who sails, which is a different thing and not worth the money. Cross those off without guilt. They were never yours.
What’s left is the real list, and it’s shorter, which is good, because you were never going to do eleven things.
Then pick one and give it a date
Not a year. A date, with a first step before the end of this month. “Visit the village” became a flight booked for a specific week, and once there was a ticket, every other obstacle got solved, because that’s what obstacles do when there’s a ticket.
The step doesn’t have to be big. It has to be irreversible enough that the dream has left the notebook and entered the calendar. Deposits paid. Classes registered. Emails sent that you can’t unsend.
What the list taught me
Every item I actually did changed my life more than I’d guessed. Every item I didn’t do cost more than I’d admitted, in the quiet way that regret works. Not a sharp pain. A dull sense that a different life had been available.
Today
Find your list. Sort it. Pick one item. Do something before Friday that makes it real enough to be inconvenient. Someday is not a day of the week.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.