'What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?': 15 answers

Six years ago, stuck in a rut and feeling unprepared for adulthood, four friends made a list of the 100 tasks they wanted to accomplish in their lifetimes, then set out to check the items off the list. Since then, their quest to finish the list has been chronicled by the MTV show 'The Buried Life,' and for every item they checked off, the four have helped another person achieve his or her lifelong dream. For their new book, What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?, they asked for submissions from their fans for what the fans wanted to do during their lifetime. Here are 15 of the answers they received.

Excerpted from 'What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?' by The Buried Life: Jonnie Penn, Dave Lingwood, Duncan Penn & Ben Nemtin. Copyright 2012

1. Weddings

"I want to give my parents the wedding they never had."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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