Given that lengthy lists are unachievable, they need to be slimmed down to a manageable and realistic size.
I was reading Ted Turner’s biography yesterday and this advice by his father stood out to me:
[Turner’s father] was having a really tough time reevaluating things and coming up with a plan for the rest of his life. He then told me something I've never forgotten. He said, "Son, you be sure to set your goals so high that you can't possibly accomplish them in one lifetime. That way you'll always have something ahead of you. I made the mistake of setting my goals too low and now I'm having a hard time coming up with new ones.”
His father ended up dying early and right in the midst of trying to sell his company out of fear, which the son Ted Turner wanted to run.
I think his father was basically right in that you shouldn’t set limits on your goals, as you just might achieve them all and not know what to do with yourself. Getting stuck in a local maximum is a very real risk for most people.
It’s better to adopt a mindset that accepts the fact that you won’t quite get everything you want, but what you do get will be vastly more than if you had just settled and “sacrificed for”, to use the author’s term. It’s more of a process-oriented outlook than a goal-achievement one.