A while back, I started a small project with the people closest to me: tracking our personal goals, what we needed to acquire, and the timelines we set for ourselves. It worked, in that things got tracked. But it left me with something more like a question than a system — I understood how to track a goal, not why I was setting it. Were the reasons underneath it genuinely mine, or simply things that sounded reasonable once written down?
I’m fairly sure I’d already heard the answer, more than once — clips from motivational speakers, corporate trainings, colleagues who’d say know your why like it was self-evident. I found it cheesy. I didn’t take it seriously until I had something closer to an actual epiphany about it myself.
That’s not a question a bucket list has ever had to answer. A bucket list is easy to write — see the northern lights, eat at a particular restaurant — and pleasant to imagine, but nothing you’d be worse off for missing. I wanted something with actual weight behind it: not experiences I hoped would happen to me, but commitments I intended to keep, on purpose, whether or not anyone was watching.
I found myself returning to a few ideas that became the basis for this. The Sustainable Development Goals — the UN framework the World Economic Forum has spent a decade championing and reporting on¹ — showed me how a large ambition could be broken into a handful of distinct, trackable commitments. Naga City’s 2028 Finish Lines gave me the model of an actual deadline, rather than an indefinite someday.² And a slim book, 12 Little Things Every Filipino Can Do to Help Our Country, was a reminder that meaningful change is usually made of small, unglamorous acts, repeated without an audience.³
From these, I built my own version — a personal manifesto: twelve values, over ten years, each one tested against the same two questions. Would this still hold true on a bad day? Does it cost me anything? Early drafts were full of values that sounded admirable but didn’t survive that test, which is part of why this took longer to arrive at than I expected. If I couldn’t answer both questions honestly, the value didn’t make the cut.
What remains isn’t a to-do list so much as a set of promises — to myself, to the people closest to me, and to the country I come from. Each value is paired with a milestone I can genuinely fail to reach, and a practice I can lapse on tomorrow if I’m not deliberate about it. I don’t expect every milestone checked off by then, and I’m making my peace with that in advance. The milestones carry a deadline; the practices don’t — they’re meant to outlast the ten years, not conclude with them.
If parts of this are still in progress, or carry into year twelve or year twenty, that doesn’t undo the effort. The value was never in the checkmark. It was always in the years spent actually trying.
If none of this changes the world, that’s fine. If I end up somewhere other than the Philippines once the ten years are up, that’s fine too. And if my time runs out before I reach all of it, that’s fine as well. What matters is knowing, honestly, that I did my part — and, I hope, that this is what I’m remembered for.
If this reaches anyone else, I hope it serves as an invitation: to sit down and work out what you actually believe, or to revisit whether your reasons still hold — or whether, somewhere along the way, you drifted from your own why.
Sources
1 United Nations. (2015). The 17 goals. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. https://sdgs.un.org/goals
2 City Government of Naga. (2025). Naga City’s 2028 Finish Lines: A strategic development framework [Executive Order No. 003, series of 2025]. https://www2.naga.gov.ph/naga-citys-2028-finish-lines-a-strategic-development-framework/
3 Lacson, A. L. (2005). 12 little things every Filipino can do to help our country. Alay Pinoy Publishing House. https://qcpl.quezoncity.gov.ph/catalog/1564