Tracking Our True & Original Course With Ben Nemtin

22 Sep , 2023 podcasts

 

In this episode, we discuss the art of living a life of purpose, passion, and fearlessness with the remarkable Ben Nemtin, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Do You Want to Do Before You Die? and The Bucket List Journal. Today, Ben shares how to track our true and original course in life, unlocking boundless potential and fulfillment. He discusses how to create a culture that encourages individuals to pursue their bucket list dreams, both inside and outside the workplace. At the heart of this conversation is the powerful message that we often hold ourselves back due to fear—fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of the unknown. Join us in this exploration of fearless living, and remember, your bucket list isn’t just a list—it’s a roadmap to a life well lived.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Tracking Our True & Original Course With Ben Nemtin

Making The Impossible Possible

Greetings, my friends. Thank you for sharing your time with me. I hope this episode will inspire you to take small steps in big directions. My guest is Ben Nemtin, who was such a passionate voice for living a life that not only celebrates your true essence but is also in service to others. Ben is a New York Times bestselling author and Cofounder of The Buried Life Movement, which we will talk about.

He is challenging all of us to think about what we want to do in our lives. It takes intention and action to make what we may believe is impossible into a reality. Ben has crossed off 96 of 100 dreams. He has helped countless others achieve theirs as well. I have a feeling he is just getting started. I hope what he shares will catalyze something in you to move one step closer to your own dreams. Please enjoy the conversation with the amazing Ben Nemtin.

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Ben, thank you so much for taking the time out of your crazy schedule in life to be with me. This isn’t the first time we’re together because you came to speak at our national meeting in Orlando in June. I’m sure the audience has not had an opportunity to hear you speak live, but there’s the content of a speaker and then there is the skill. You are a very gifted speaker and your ability to impact people in the room and touch their hearts is huge. Thank you for doing that for us. We appreciate it.

Thank you for bringing me in. I had a fantastic time. Thank you for saying that.

It’s true. We’ve seen a lot and I’ve booked a lot of speakers over fifteen years. Some people are meant to do it. It’s their calling. It’s true for you and why your life has gone the way it’s gone. I would love to have a conversation about expansion, ripple effects, small steps, and belief in ourselves. You’re the perfect person to guide the way to illuminate our path. That’s what we’re going to do if you’re up for that.

Ben Nemtin’s Story: The Buried Life

Before we do that, some people may know your story. Certainly, the folks internally to the Coca-Cola company who saw you speak will know your story. There are a lot of people who tune in to this show who may not have. It’s important to ground everyone in the story of Ben and why you do what you do. Would you mind starting out with the story? I know you’ve told it a thousand times, but it’s so powerful.

I don’t get tired of telling this story because I tell it differently every time because it’s such a long story. If I told it in its entirety, that’s all we would talk about. There is so much to remember and to pull from a 15 to 20-year story. It’s my life story.

I’ll start when I was in my first year at university in Victoria, British Columbia, where I grew up in Canada. I always put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed. Now, I’m starting to look at why. I never understood why because my parents didn’t put any pressure on me. In fact, it was the opposite. They put zero pressure on me. They both are self-employed. They live life to the fullest. They don’t make a ton of money, but they are very rich in life experiences and friendships. They’ve been together for 40 years. They were a great beacon for me as it relates to how to live a life that’s true to me and to not listen to society’s narrative of what you need to do to be successful.

I always continued to put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed academically and athletically. I was on the national rugby team at the under-nineteen stage. I had an academic scholarship to school and I always wanted to do well. It stems from not my trying to impress my parents but trying to impress other people, gain their approval, and be liked by them dating back to elementary school. One day in elementary school, I came to school and for whatever reason, all my friends decided to run away from me in recess.

It was a group of my friends. It was a game. Kids like to do the weirdest and worst things in school. My worst nightmare was my friends all of a sudden weren’t my friends. They would run away for me. It was a game they played. It only lasted for a couple of weeks or maybe a week. I can’t remember. It felt like an eternity. At that moment I was like, “I never want this to happen again and therefore, I need people to like me so this doesn’t happen.”

It stems back to even earlier than that. Usually, a lot of our behavior is dictated by the first two years of our life, at least these patterns that we create. Some call them negative love patterns, these behavioral patterns that start to develop when we’re young based on survival. They fire automatically as we grow older. We’re not aware that these things are running us.

I was run by this deep need to be liked by people. I put pressure on myself to do so. Cut to I made the national rugby team. I was training for the World Cup and I started to get anxiety. I worry about my performance in the World Cup. More specifically, I played fly-half, so I was kicking field goals and I was calling plays. There was a lot of pressure on my position, like the quarterback. I was worried about what if I missed an easy field goal. What if I blow it? This is my one shot and I shank it, and then I lose this opportunity for my career as a rugby player.

Rugby in Canada is like football in the South. It’s big. It was the cool thing to do. It meant a lot to me, stemming back to this desire to be liked by people. I started to get worried and anxious about this upcoming trip to the World Cup. I started losing sleep. I started feeling anxiety and pressure. All of this accumulated to the point where I started to get debilitated by this anxiety, which slid into a depression. I wasn’t able to go to school. I would get frozen in the car before I would go to university. I pulled into the parking lot. I couldn’t get out of the car. I would end up driving back home.

The next day, I felt like, “This is worse. I’ve already missed a class.” I missed two. All of a sudden, I’ve missed two classes. This spiral started. I started to not be able to go to rugby practice. I was like, “How do I go back to rugby practice? I missed three rugby practices. What do I say to my friends? What do I say to the coach?” I was frozen. This got worse and worse to the point where I couldn’t leave the house. I couldn’t hang out with my friends. I became a hermit in my parents’ house.

For someone who was A-type and was social up to this point, this was a complete 180. My parents didn’t know what to do and they tried everything. I was not interested in talking with a therapist or a psychiatrist. I wasn’t talking or interested in taking any type of medication to help me come out of it. I wasn’t interested in doing any type of emotional work. I thought I was broken. That’s what happens a lot of times when you go through your first mental health crisis. You don’t understand what is going on. You think you’re broken. You don’t think you can come back and that’s it.

 

This is the human experience. I was in this dark place. Luckily, my friends came and they rallied around me to bring me out of the house and to bring me to a new town for the summer after I dropped out of school. I was forced to do things that I hadn’t wanted to do so far, but things that ultimately were good for me. I was forced to get a job. I started feeling confident. I was forced to talk about what I was going through to my friends. I realized that they had gone through similar experiences, so I wasn’t alone. I felt better. I didn’t have as much shame around it.

I started meeting young people in this new town that were inspiring. I started meeting young people that were giving me energy, different from some of my other friends that I had. I realized, “Some people give me energy and some people draw energy from me. I need to be around people that give me energy. I’m going to going to try and only surround myself with people that inspire me from now on.”

After that summer away, I was driving home and I made that commitment to myself. That commitment ultimately would change my life forever because I came back and there was one inspiring kid I knew. He was a self-taught filmmaker from my neighborhood named Johnny. I thought, “If I’m going to come out and surround myself with people who inspire me, I’d better call them up.” Secretly, I’d always wanted to make a movie.

I told him, “Johnny, this is super weird. I’m calling you out of the blue, but you make movies. I want to make a movie. Let’s make a movie.” He said, “I was just talking to my friend Dave about something exactly like this. I thought, “Great. You call him, I’ll call your older brother, Duncan. How about the four of us get together and we can all talk about making this film?”

That’s exactly what we did. We had no idea what the film was about. We realized that the thing that we had in common was we all had all of these things that we’d always wanted to do or these dreams, but we’d never tried to go after any of them. They all were buried beneath the surface. We thought, “This is interesting. Maybe making a movie is one of those things that we always want to do. Let’s talk about making that happen.”

Before we knew what it was about, Johnny was assigned a poem in English class called The Buried Life, an old English poem that spoke to the same feeling of being buried. We thought, “That’s it. This guy wrote about this 150 years ago. Let’s use that name and we’ll call our film The Buried Life and then we’ll go after all of these buried dreams.” That was the commitment. That’s what started it all. I was coming from this dark place, connecting with my inspiring friends, and starting to commit that we’re going to try and go after these buried dreams inspired by this poem.

Flow From A Place Of Authenticity

First of all, because I know your story, I know that the texture beneath all of these chapters is pretty unbelievable, and all the things that you did. I want to unpack a few things that you said, going all the way back to that game that your friends played and this absolute primal need that we all have to be accepted. In a tribal sense, if you’re rejected from the tribe, you die. There’s something in our bodies that knows that.

As we’ve gone along in the Compassion Lab and we’ve explored Imposter Syndrome and inner critic conversations, and we start to bring these conversations to the surface, I am amazed at the commonality of everybody going through this dark night of the soul, where you feel somehow that you aren’t enough and that you have to do certain things.

As you said, your parents didn’t give you this drive to achieve, but something inside you created it. I appreciate you sharing that because it’s a very real and common pattern for all of us. Some people escape it and some people don’t. What would you say, knowing that probably the majority of people tuning in have either felt that way or feel that way now on how to start stepping out of that belief that you’re broken?

One of the hardest journeys in our lives is to love ourselves unconditionally so that we aren’t loving ourselves based on what other people think about us. That is a very long road for a lot of people. Some people are very good at it, others not as much. this self-love is so key in enabling you to feel comfortable to be who you truly are. Once you’re able to be who you truly are, the irony is then you’re ultimately accepted by more people. Even if they don’t agree with what you say or do, there’s a baseline level of respect for those who are unabashedly themselves.

One of the hardest journeys in our lives is to love ourselves unconditionally so that we aren't loving ourselves based on what other people think about us. Share on X

You can feel it and you can see it when people are embodying their true essence. You even mentioned that there are voices, like the voices of culture. It wasn’t your family, but other people. They do have parents who expect them to live out a life maybe they did not live. I agree with you, Ben. It is the ultimate journey for us to know that we are individual sparks of the divine, as George Mumford often says, and that we have our role to play in this world, and to do it in our own essence. You talk a lot about that. I think about it as being in alignment when I know I’m on the path that feels true. Can you talk a little bit more about what that feels like for you when you’re in that flow or when you’re in that place of authenticity?

When I’m in alignment and living true to myself, life starts to happen for me versus me having to struggle to make it happen. I’ve noticed a flow state occurs when I am truly aligned with my true self or my authentic self. I’ve realized this through my experience not just from the first depression but from maybe 3 or 4 fairly large dips in my life since the very beginning of that first deep dark depression. Each time I go through any type of struggle, I can navigate it much easier because I’ve learned things about myself. I’ve learned habits and tools. I also have great support from networks of friends and therapists that I can reach out to.

The great thing about going through hard times is you are forced to learn about yourself. It’s the same thing with a breakup. You’re forced to look in the mirror. These are not things you want to do when things are going well because they’re hard to look at, but you have no choice. That’s why they are so difficult. You have an opportunity to grow or keep floundering. This is your body telling you something. When you start to feel depressed, your body is like, “Listen up. Something is not aligned. You are suppressing a part of yourself. You are not living authentically. There’s a big part of your life here that is not working. You need to look at it and you need to get aligned.”

When I look back, there’s this consistent truth that anytime I get depressed, a big part of what I am doing is not true to who I am. With the first depression, I got quite depressed because I was living this perfect life. I was living the dream, but it wasn’t my dream. I was living the dream that I thought you needed to be successful and that other people would approve of. I realized what I wanted to do was be creative, have fun with my friends, and have that true creative self-expression, which is to go out there and start creating something or making something.

That’s what The Buried Life was for me for the first time. It was the first time I wrote down the things that I truly wanted, not the things that I thought other people wanted for me. It was the first time I started going towards those things. That’s when I started to feel liberated. That’s when I started to get energy. That’s when I started to feel more alive.

The next time I got depressed, I started a production company with the same guys that I started Buried Life with maybe a decade after we started it to make shows for other people who were creating cool things and wanted to bring them to television. Over a couple of years, I realized, “This is not what I’m supposed to be doing.” That was a very hard lesson for me because I felt like I’d worked so hard for three years to build this thing and now, I’m going to leave? What am I going to do? I learned this big lesson about recycling your career. Recycling your career is when you take all the things you’ve learned from this one job or this one thing you’ve been doing.

When you try something else, you’re not starting from the bottom. You’re pivoting and you were taking all those lessons and all those abilities that you’ve learned and you’re applying it to the next thing. That’s a very normal and organic thing to happen because as you grow, you change and evolve. Maybe your career also evolves. I learned that and I realized that’s why I was getting depressed. I was spending most of my time doing something I didn’t like.

The next time was when I realized I was in a relationship that wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t aligned with my partner. It had come to the point where it wasn’t the right partnership. Anyone who’s gone through any type of major separation, it’s very difficult. There’s a lot of fear that comes up. After I got out of that, I started to feel back to myself and feel this energy. I started to feel this life force and so did she. It wasn’t the right partnership.

I say those because maybe some of those experiences might relate to some people. If you think about your past when you’ve had a hard time, was there something that wasn’t aligned with you? Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re not living for ourselves when it’s happening. It’s a muscle you have to build. I’ve built this awareness over time and realized that this whole bucket list journey is a journey of returning to my true self. A bucket list is a reflection of all those things that make you who you truly are and make you feel more alive. The things that bring you energy and joy. The things that make you the person that you are meant to be.

A bucket list is a reflection of all the things that make you who you truly are and make you feel more alive. Share on X

My definition of a bucket list is a little bit different than most people. It’s not just adventure and travel-related. It taps into all ten categories of your life so that you are a true embodiment of who you are meant to be. I believe we all have gifts and talents that only we are able to bring to the world. A lot of times, we suppress those because of fear.

Everyone has the responsibility to share those because your purpose is sharing those gifts with the world. You’re going to impact many people by doing that. You don’t want to die regretting not ever trying to go after those things. Coming back to this idea of being your true self, it’s more than having fun. Although that’s part of it and that’s something we shouldn’t overlook, we usually don’t take time to have fun. That’s something that we should do, but it’s more than that.

This is about you sharing the most powerful essence of who you are. The gifts that you’ve been given by the creator, God, your parents, or whoever you believe in that made you who you are. There’s no one else like you. However many billions of people are out there in the world, you’re the only one. That means you have these unique gifts. Those gifts are going to impact people if you are able to muster the courage to take steps towards doing those things and being that person. If you don’t, those are the things you’re going to regret at the end of your life. That’s what research says. If you don’t, you may feel suppressed, which is the root word of depression, suppressing that true self or those things that you truly want in your life.

A lot of times, we think it’s selfish to go after those things because we have responsibilities. We have a family to take care of. We have a job. I’m not negating those things. I’m not saying you should pack up your bags and travel around the country for ten years, crossing things off your bucket list like we did. What I am saying is that you should stop and think about the things that you truly want.

This is not a selfish act. This is an act of service because you can’t take care of those around you if you don’t take care of yourself. That’s what this is. As I said, self-love. It’s coming back to those things that you truly want and starting to protect time to go after them, knowing that that is going to be in the service of others. You’re going to be able to be the best version of yourself to help those around you.

 

I mentioned your speaking gifts earlier, but as I watch you talk, it’s like you are channeling a wisdom that has been growing inside of you your whole life. It comes out in an exquisite way of all the ways that you’re connecting these dots. There are a few things that you said that I want to punctuate. One of them, your definition of a bucket list is so important because I think we hear it. There was that movie too, The Bucket List, with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, which is an awesome movie. People think it is like, “I got to go jump out of an airplane and I need to go to the pyramids,” and all this stuff, which may be on it.

However, the reason that getting in a car and traveling around the country is not on everyone’s bucket list is because it goes back to what your definition is of an expansive life. It may never be leaving where you are, but inventing and creating or writing or doing something that is truly inside you waiting to be born, which is incredible.

The other thing you said was this whole idea of integrating what you’ve done even if you need to go down a different path. I was having a conversation with someone who used to be a medical doctor and she now is doing much more speaking and writing and some world-changing things. She said, “Initially, I wanted to separate myself from the doctor, that life, that world, that whole past, but then I realized that I needed to integrate it and take it along with me and evolve with it,” which is what you said, because every experience teaches us.

When I first got out of college, I had my first job and I absolutely hated it. I would go into my office and close the door. I called my mom and cried. I felt like you felt. It’s like, “My life is never going to be good again.” You know what it’s like to be bummed out or in a funk. When you enter depression, it’s a different space. It’s a space of very little light. It can be hard for people to reach you because you are in a place where you’ve convinced yourself that you’re broken. You’ve convinced yourself that there’s no way out.

“Track Our True Original Course”: The Bucket List

When you walk through that and come out the other side, you know there is a way out every time you do that in your life, “By the way, when I walk out of this cave, I’m going to be so much stronger and better and see more.” A friend of mine is like, “Can I please stop growing? I’m done growing.” Before I ask you the next question, I have to read this. I printed out The Buried Life poem. It’s three pages long. I don’t know how long it took for him to write this, but I love it.

They didn’t have anything else to do back then in the 1850s.

I picture him by the candlelight writing this thing.

There’s a lot of ink right there and a good quill.

There’s a stanza here that I thought was good. It says, “But often in the world’s most crowded streets, but often in the den of strife, there rises in unspeakable desire after the knowledge of our buried life/ a thirst to spend our fire in restless force in tracking out our true original course/ a longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart which beats/ so wild, so deep in us to know when’s our lives come and where they go.”

There are two more pages of things like that, but I thought that stanza said it so well. As you’re listening to this conversation, there’s that deepest part of you that says, “Yes, I want that. I want to feel my true essence. I want to feel expansive. I want to find that.” I know from being in this world of working in personal development, people struggle with where to start. They tell themselves many things like, “I can’t leave this job because I have this responsibility.” There are all the reasons why we can’t do something. What would be your guidance to help people?

That’s my favorite part of the poem too. I think that one line about that thirst, then he says, “Tracking our true original course.” That’s the nugget right there. That’s what it’s all about. You have this true original course and you can either walk that road or you can walk the road that wasn’t paved for you. It’s not your course. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to walk and find out what that true original course is.

 

That’s why a bucket list is such an easy entry into starting to discover what that road is because you’re not following your head. You’re following feelings. Your question was, what do you do to start? First, you write your list. I’m going to get back to the following feelings, but this is the first step. The reason why this is important is because it physically forces you to slow down, stop, and think about what you want.

You’re not writing it with your partner. You’re not writing it while you’re driving or listening to a podcast. You have to sit by yourself and physically write the things down. It’s an active step towards your goal because you’re creating something that’s real that didn’t exist before. Your thoughts become tangible. You take something that doesn’t exist or an intangible thought, and you make it real. That’s a step towards your goal that creates accountability so that it exists. As you get buried by the day-to-day, you come back to your list, and it’s a physical reminder that these things exist.

It’s a small step, but it is a step. I believe the small steps are the best because they’re the easiest. You want to start to create this feeling of inspiration through small steps of action versus waiting to feel inspired to go after it, which is what we’ve all experienced. We’re like, “Yes, I want to write the book, but I don’t feel inspired yet to write the first page. I want to learn the guitar. I don’t feel inspired to pick it up yet.”

You’re going to wait forever. The only way you’re going to feel inspired is by picking up the guitar and playing it. You’re going to start to feel inspired by taking action. Mood follows action, as Rich Roll says. Your first step is to get a notebook, or you can get The Bucket List Journal, which is why I created The Bucket List Journal. You’re going to start to imagine that you have all the money in the world and you have the ability to do anything. There are no barriers. This is the mind frame that you want to come into writing your list because you want to be this childlike person that anything is possible.

We can start to look at do we want to do this. Is the risk too high to do this, not the fears that are ego-driven? Is this a risk? Therefore, I don’t want to do it. You can look at that later. The first step is to write down everything you’ve always wanted to do as a kid. Now you thought, “I wanted to do this since I was ten years old. I used to love playing tennis. I don’t do it anymore. I’ve always wanted to write that book, or I want to travel to Australia.” Anything that you’ve wanted to do.

When you’re writing your list, sometimes it’s overwhelming to look at a blank piece of paper and think about all my passions. What’s my purpose? What are all the things I want to do in my life? That’s why, in The Bucket List Journal, I break the list writing process up into different categories. You write your list in ten categories of life. First, you write your travel and adventure-related goals, which are probably the easiest to think of. What are the experiences you want to do? Where do you want to go? What adventures do you want to go on?

You then start to look at, how do I want to give back. What are my giving goals? What are my relationship goals? One of the top five regrets of the dying is, “I wish I would’ve stayed in contact with friends.” That’s pretty brutal. We don’t want to die like that, having not taken the time to call a friend or book a trip with them to stay reconnected or spend time for quality time with our loved ones.

Those goals go in your relationship category. There are physical health, mental health goals, and creative goals. As I said, creativity for me was a huge pillar of my well-being. It’s because when you’re creative, you are expressing the true essence of who you are. That’s why when you see people playing music, they’re in flow. Even playing sports, you get this flow state. Drawing, painting, writing.

Get out of your head. You’re in the moment and you’re present. My definition of self-love is presence. Anything that I do where I’m present is an act of self-love. Creativity is this true expression. It’s therapeutic. That goes in your creative category of life. There are material bucket list items. It’s okay to want things to make you happy as long as they’re making you happy and you’re not doing them for the validation of others.

The intention is important here, or the why.

If you want to look at these ten categories and use them as a guide, I have them listed on The Bucket List Journal website, which is WriteYourList.com. You can check them out and use them as a guide, or you can get The Bucket List Journal on Amazon. I spoke a lot about writing your list. It’s not that complicated. I just wanted to give you the whole framework of what I use to do it. Here are the bones. Get a notebook, find some quiet time, and start writing down all the things you’ve ever wanted to do. That’s your list right there. That’s step one. The reason that’s important is because you want to start to identify those things because sometimes we’re living life and we don’t even realize we’re not living for ourselves.

That’s step one. Also, if you have trouble thinking about some of these list items, don’t think. Feel. Follow feelings. What are the things that excite you? What are the things that energize you or give you energy? What are the things that make you feel more alive? What are the things that you’re curious about? I’ve always been interested in marine biology. Maybe there’s a list down there. Maybe scuba diving. What excites you when you think about it? When you book a trip with your family or friends and the thought of going on the trip or the group chat goes off, you’re thinking, “I can’t wait.” We get more joy. We get as much joy or more joy from looking forward to a trip than we do going on the trip.

I got back from a trip with my boys. Planning and reflecting on it have been as joyful as doing it.

That’s research that came out not too long ago. Those are the feelings you want to follow. Now you’ve written your list. The next step is how you now start to move towards them. Choose one thing you want to do and circle it or write it on another piece of paper. Underneath that list item, you write three things that you can do or three steps that you can take in the next 48 hours. That’s 48-hour action items.

They don’t need to be big. You don’t need to achieve it. Those steps could be starting to research, booking the trip, or calling friends to see if they want to come with you. Communicating how important this is to your family saying, “I want to write a book. I’ve been talking about it forever. I’m going to do it this year. I need your support.”

When you think about those 48-hour action items, you want to commit to them. They can be the smallest and easiest steps. Commit to doing those. The next thing you can do, which might be part of your 48-hour action items, is talk about that list item. You should go to your family, friends, and leaders. Say, “I’ve always wanted to run a marathon. I’m going to do it. I’m going to do the marathon. I’m doing the Boston Marathon. I signed up for it. I’m going to be taking this time off and I’m going to be training every Tuesday and Thursday at 6:00. I’ll be offline.”

You want to communicate that because it creates accountability. You feel accountable to the people you share them with. By the way, the only reason we don’t do these personal goals, hobbies, passions, and dreams is because there are no deadlines. We have deadlines for everything else. That’s why something always will be more important. We think we have all this time. We’re like, “I’ll run the marathon next year. I’ll do it next year. The kids got swim classes at 6:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays this year. We can’t train. We’ll do it next year.”

You push it until you die, and then you regret not doing it. Seventy-six percent of people on their deathbed regret what they didn’t do, not what they did. Their biggest regret is not living for them. That’s why this whole thing is so important because it’s your biggest regret on your deathbed. That’s the importance of sharing. Now that you have your list, you feel accountable.

You get evangelists. You share it with people who want to support you so that when you don’t feel like doing it, your partner is like, “I’ll clean up after dinner. I know you got to go train,” or your boss says, “I know you got training. You can skip this meeting that we have to call after hours,” or whatever. You start to create accountability. You start to get a support system and it becomes real. These are all important things in driving you towards your goal.

If you want to increase your chances by 77%, you have an accountability buddy checking in with you down the line. You send regular updates to an accountability buddy. That comes from research out of Cornell by Dr. Gilovich, who found that in 76% of people, their biggest regret is not living for them. He found it to combat this problem that we have, which is there are no deadlines for these goals. You need to create accountability, so you’re 77% more likely to achieve your goal. If I tell you I’m writing a book and I’m like, “I’m going to send you a chapter every month,” I’m going to write the book. You’re going to message me like, “Where’s the chapter?” I’m like, “I got to do it.”

 

Those are three steps, write your list, write three 48-hour action items, and start to talk about it and share why it’s important. Ask for help. Ask someone to be your accountability buddy. Those three things will help kickstart the inspiration and the momentum. If you get going and you start to feel like, “This training for the marathon, I don’t like it.” You’re not getting the energy from it and it’s becoming more of a chore. Now you’re like, “I got to do it.” If you don’t like it, don’t do it.

You’re free to change any time.

The whole point of this is you’re like a scientist looking for data. Your bucket list is you’re gathering information. The information you’re gathering is like, “If I do this, do I get energy? If I do this, do I feel more alive? If I do this, do I have more fun?” You’re testing all these things and if you don’t, screw it. Do something else. You’re trying to test all of these things so that you understand what are the things that bring you back to your true self. You’re like, “More of that,” or “Now I know that does it, great. I’m going to make sure I spend time doing that and protect time for that. Now I’m going to try this or I wonder if a road trip by myself would be fun, or what if I do swim lessons with the kids?”

These are the things that you want to follow. It’s important too to be aware of what stops us. I’ve mentioned two of them. If you look at the research from Cornell that I mentioned, there are three big problems. One is no deadlines. You have to create accountability. How do you create accountability? Write down your goals, share your goals, and get an accountability buddy. Set a deadline for your goal. Choose a reward for yourself so that you get something when you do it.

When I didn’t want to go to the gym, there was this great smoothie at the gym at Equinox. I was like, “Every time I workout, I’m getting a smoothie.” I literally would go to the gym to have the smoothie. Reward yourself so that you get something. The second problem is that you’re perpetually waiting for inspiration. You’re perpetually waiting for the perfect time to start. Those don’t come. You have to create inspiration through action. That’s why you write down the three easiest things you can think of and you start to create. Just do it. You’re going to suck at first. Nobody is good at first. You’re going to suck at the first try. By number 100, you’ll be good.

You're going to suck at the first try. By number 100, you'll be good. Share on X

You’ve got to build a muscle of creating and experimenting. You got to get in the groove of doing it.

The last piece, which we haven’t spoken about, is the biggest, so it’s important. The number one reason why people don’t pursue their personal passions and dreams is because of fear. It’s the fear of what other people think or the fear of failure, coming back to this innate fear that we have of what other people think that drove me into this depressive episode when I was younger.

How do we get over the fear? That’s a hard one. I mentioned before about delineating between fear and risk. There’s a big difference between risk and fear. Fear is ego-driven. What is this person going to think? What are they going to think if I fail? The truth is they’re not even thinking about you. You’re worried about what other people think. They don’t care. They’re doing their own thing. They’re worried about what other people think about them. They are living their life. The people that care, great. Now you know who not to care about. That’s a perfect indication of people who should not be in your life. It’s the people who care that you failed at doing something.

Failure is great. The only reason they care is because they don’t have the courage to do it themselves. Failure is a course correction to success. All you’re doing is collecting data. You’re learning about yourself. That discomfort that you feel when you feel that fear, that’s net positive. That is you growing. A snake does not feel uncomfortable if it’s shedding its skin. It busts through its old skin to have its new skin. That’s how it works. That’s the only way you grow. You can coast and you’ll probably be okay, but you’re not actually going to grow the way you should because that fear of the unknown and discomfort means that the thing you’re doing is meaningful because then you have to be vulnerable to do it.

The discomfort that you feel when you feel fear is a net positive. That is you growing. Share on X

It means something to you so that you get comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you stop and think back in your life, those moments when you were uncomfortable, even if it wasn’t the outcome you thought or you wanted in reflection, you can see the positives that came out of being vulnerable and taking the step through that fear. That’s different than risk. Risk is real. Risk is, “If I do this, do I compromise the safety of myself or the well-being of myself or my family? Am I going to compromise my financial well-being? Is this decision going to put anybody at real risk?”

That’s why I’m saying everybody is different. You need to decide what the risk is. There’s also a big risk of not doing it because you don’t want to be the person on your deathbed, looking back in your life and thinking, “God damn it. I didn’t even try because I was afraid of what other people would think. Now I’m on my deathbed and I don’t get another shot.” That’s a real risk. That’s a risk that most people don’t realize is going to haunt them at the end of their lives. That’s why 76% of people realize that they waited too long.

Your message and your inspiration are to try to wake people up to this fact before it’s too late. You are the ghost of Christmas past, present, future, and all these things to help people live a better life. We had a sidebar in Orlando about how do we even institute this path within the company. It’s something I’m thinking about for the lab. I’ll probably talk to you more about this at another time about how we bring it into the business setting.

What happens all the time is these personal aspirations go over here because of the deadlines of work that you’ve already talked about. We have an opportunity together as a community, whether it’s a community at work, a community of friends, or however you want to do it, to show up for each other to go on this road so that we have far less people getting to the end and regretting anything. In the last few minutes we have, first of all, I want to make sure everyone knows how to find you. If they want to continue to follow you, access your material, work with you, or book you, how do people find you? I don’t want to miss that piece.

Implications To The Workplace

Before I go, I want to touch on the one thing that you said because this is extremely important. How does this all impact the professional setting? The old-guard way of thinking is it doesn’t. You have your work and then you have your personal life. That doesn’t fly anymore. The reason why this has real implications for the workplace is because if we want to create a culture where people are enabled to be their true selves, and therefore feel enabled to make their biggest impact at work and feel enabled to do the things outside of work that energize them to be the best version of themselves inside of work and create a work-life harmony, that exists only in companies that embody this message of investing in the full person and showing they care about the full person.

There are many different degrees of how to implement this but it starts with taking a real interest in the person and the human being, helping them find purpose in work, and also helping them find purpose outside of work. That can be simply asking your team, “What’s on your bucket list?” Check-in on it because as leaders think about it, all we have in workplace are layers of accountability.

That’s how Corporate America works. It’s people keeping us accountable. It’s a salary that keeps us accountable. We don’t want to let down our team. It keeps us accountable. There are these inherent levels of accountability already baked into the workplace, so just insert the personal goal into the workplace, and then you have leaders checking in on the personal goal at the end of the meeting.

You have team members being celebrated for their personal wins. You have peer-to-peer facilitation of dreams eventually, where people are helping each other. They’re creating a marathon club. They’re someone’s teaching span. These are real things that happen. People are doing a secret GoFundMe to help their team member’s dream come true. There are bucket list challenges where people are promoting these achievements. It’s inspiring other people. There are companies that now do stipends to help people fulfill their dreams. There are dream funds that pop up.

Instead of awards, they give out dreams at the end of the year. These are all ways that you can prove to your team that you care about them as people. That’s how you attract the best talent. That’s how you get people to stay. This is a big idea that people are starting to come around to, but they still don’t realize how easy it is.

It’s so easy. All you have to do is ask, “What’s your dream? What’s on your list? What’s your goal? What’s your passion? What’s important to you? How can I help make that happen?” By doing that, you make it happen by checking in on it because that creates accountability. They associate that achievement with you as a leader and with the organization. That builds loyalty. Most people leave because they don’t like their managers. If a manager cares about you and understands who you are, you’re probably going to stay.

Most people leave because they don't like their managers. If a manager cares about you and understands who you are, you're probably going to stay. Share on X

This is going to be a part of the Coca-Cola Compassion Lab. I’m putting it out there so I have accountability to everyone who heard me say that we’re going to be doing this. I would also encourage anyone to bring this into whatever space you have. This doesn’t have to be a path that we go alone. It’s usually not effective when we try to do it in isolation. We have to do it with other people.

I do want you to share where everyone can find you, but I’ll also close on my end with what you mentioned about fear. I’ve heard in so many different places that we have a choice in our lives and maybe every day between fear and love. Choosing love means love of self. By embodying this whole self and your passions, you are also loving humanity and others because you’re raising the space of consciousness. You’re raising the inspiration for us all to go to this great place together. I’m so grateful for your message because it needs to be heard and there’s incredible power in it. I want to turn it back to you for closing comments or what you want to make sure you leave everyone with from this conversation.

The closing comment is just think about your 90-year-old self. If you ever feel confused or you’re unsure whether you should do something or not, or you’re feeling stuck, think about yourself at 90 years old and ask your 90-year-old self for advice. Ask your 90-year-old self, “Will I be happy with the time I’m spending right now living for me?” If you’re confused about making a decision, “Will I regret not doing this?” That can sometimes be a compass for you. I’m a big believer in thinking about our death and reminding ourselves as much as we can that we’re not here forever because it’s the only thing that puts things in perspective.

 

It’s the ultimate deadline.

That is one thing to consider. If you want more of this type of content, I’m most active on Instagram, but I’m also active on LinkedIn. It’s @BenNemtin. If you’re interested in checking out The Bucket List Journal where you write or list those ten categories and then start to build accountability by creating deadlines and rewards, you can get it on Amazon. A lot of people get it for their teams, as you did. It’s a great tool to show your team that you care about them by giving them a journal and saying, “Let’s choose one item on your list.” A division of Uber gives it to every new hire. Check out The Bucket List Journal. At least use those ten categories on the site to be a guide and share your list. That’s it.

Thank you so much, Ben, for all you do. We appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

 

Important Links

• Ben Nemtin
• The Bucket List Journal
• The Bucket List Journal – Amazon
• Instagram – Ben Nemtin
• LinkedIn – Ben Nemtin
• The Buried Life Movement

 

About Ben Nemtin

Ben Nemtin is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Do You Want to Do Before You Die? and The Bucket List Journal. Ben is ranked the #2 Motivational Speaker in the World by Global Gurus and starred in The Buried Life, MTV’s highest rated show on iTunes and Amazon. As the co-founder of The Buried Life movement, Ben’s message of radical possibility has been featured on The Today Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, FOX, and NBC News. President Obama called Ben and The Buried Life “inspiration for a new generation” and Oprah declared their mission “truly inspiring.”

In his first year of university, Ben was unexpectedly hit with a depression that forced him to drop out. In an attempt to feel more alive, he created the world’s greatest bucket list with his three best friends. They borrowed a rickety old RV and crisscrossed North America, achieving the unthinkable. And most importantly, every time they accomplished a dream of their own, they helped a complete stranger cross something off their bucket list. From playing basketball with President Obama and having a beer with Prince Harry to reuniting a father and son after seventeen years and surprising a young girl with a much-needed bionic arm, So far, he’s crossed off 96 of his 100 list items and in 2025 he’ll be crossing of #100: Go to Space. Ben’s message of radical possibility has inspired millions to unlock their true potential.

 

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accountability, bucket list, imposter syndrome, negative love patterns, original course, The Buried Life

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