After my divorce I found myself doing some new things that I hadn’t done before. It dawned on me that these new experiences were fun and exciting and gave me an opportunity to learn and experience new things. It just so happened that when my marriage ended that my youngest son went off to college so not only was I newly single but I was also an empty-nester at the same time! Crazy I know. I decided to make experiencing new things a conscious effort and thought through how I would go about doing that. I came up with the following:
- I wanted to have a goal so that I would make conscious decisions so I decided that my goal was to do 100 new things in 2018! Yes that as 2-3 things a week.
- I needed to make it more interesting and fun so I came up with another goal that these new experiences needed to be what I called “list worthy”. In other words I wanted to make it a challenge so I couldn’t simply go to a new restaurant and add it to my list. Now if it was a unique restaurant that has been featured on a TV show or something then it was definitely list worthy!
- I also decided to journal each new experience and looked into easy online journals. I ended up using the Penzu app. When I did something new that was list worthy I could quickly open the app and add my journal entry.
- My final requirement that I set for myself was to have a picture attached to each journal item. I love taking pictures and thought that this would be a lot of fun and would make looking back and reflecting on all of the cool things I did more exciting. I imagined being in my 80’s and pulling up my journal and sharing some entries with my grandkids and friends. lol.
I reached my goal and completed 100 new experiences and documented each one! Your goal could be different. You could reach for 10, 25 or 50 new experiences. I did some really cool things and will share some of them in other posts. I visited Lancaster, PA and had Shoe Fly Pie, I drank my first red bull, rode a camel in the UAE and went to an ice bar in Vegas! I hope that you find a little inspiration from my story!