It Starts with Passion, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 9Creating your life to-do list

The best activity I can give you is to write down 100 goals you want to achieve in your lifetime. People often call this a ‘bucket list’. When a doctor gives you six months to live and you decide to write down all the things you want to do before you kick the bucket — that’s your bucket list! One of the best ways to discover what is important and meaningful in your life is to complete the ‘100 Goal Challenge’.

For me it started when I was 23 years old. At school I was academically challenged, not a high achiever at all, and at 15 I dropped out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life so I took the first job I could get. I began as a labourer and got a job working for Klaus, a 6 foot 4 inch German bricklayer. Klaus was a record-holding brickie who could lay bricks faster than I could get them to him. After six weeks I thought to myself, ‘I have to be smarter than this job. I can’t do this for the next 40 years,’ so I took the easy option and went back to school.

School didn’t get any easier for me. I just got worse at it until one day my mum said I was wasting my time at school and suggested I get a job. Mum asked me what I wanted to do and my response was, ‘I don’t know!’ Mum was solution oriented, but aren’t most mums? She had a lot of push in the local council — she was the tea lady. She got me my first real job working in local government with Albert Shire Council in the Water Supply and Sewerage Department, the bowels of the ...