Ben Nemtin
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The only way that we cross things off our list is through the help of other people. I just want to be very clear on that. We had no business or no ability to achieve any of the things that we have achieved, but people always stepped up to help us in unexpected ways because we shared our goals. And I think that you had the idea for this podcast. 99% of people will have the idea.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They'll want to do it, but they won't take that first step because of fear, right? They're afraid of failure. They're afraid of what other people think. And that's ultimately what stops people. And that's through research. And we can talk about like where that comes from, but that's the number one barrier when it comes to stopping people from achieving their personal goals.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But when you don't put it out there, no one can help you. You're on your own. And if you think about it, when you hit a challenge at work, typically, what do you do? You go to your leader, you ask for help, go to a mentor. Hey, have you ever been through this? I don't know what to do. You ask a friend. But with these personal goals, we don't ask for help because of the fear.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're afraid of failure, afraid of what other people think. And then we just have a lower chances of succeeding because we're trying to do it in our head on our own. So I always say when you give someone a chance to be a hero, they usually take it. And so you experienced this when you started to put this, it's how you took the leap.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You move through that discomfort of like, oh shit, like what are people, is this going to be good? What if it's bad and it fails? And- Then you started to see that people were gravitating towards it because you were doing it from your true, it came out of what you truly wanted to do. This is a reflection of your true self.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think that at the end of the day, that is the big goal is to be true to yourself in a world that is so hard to stay true to yourself because everything pulls you away from that. Social media pulls you away from that. You know, being disconnected pulls you away from that. The fear pulls you away from that. But when you are true to yourself, I think you're unstoppable.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You are the only person that can be you. And we spend most of our life trying to be other people. And anything you could do to remind yourself of who you are. And that's why I think a list is a great device to remind you. friends that keep you accountable to these things are great reminders.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So my dad was actually a clown and he was like a theatrical clown. So he played music and he wasn't necessarily the clown that like does balloons and parties and stuff. He would do theater shows.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
What you saw is that when you were true to yourself and then you started to do this thing, it was like this gravitational pull. And then you start to see this thing happening and then you follow that momentum. And I think that sometimes we feel like we have this plan and we got to stick to it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I've done that a lot, but I've realized that you need to follow the energy and you need to follow what's easy and what was easy for you. Not that it is easy as in
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
it didn't take a lot of work easy and is as in you saw there was momentum and that's what you followed and so for me that's been speaking i didn't mean to be a speaker but i did a tedx talk and then some people asked me to speak and i love doing it and i feel like it's easy for me to do and i work really hard but i see that it's working and so i thought okay i'm going to leave the pro i started a production company with the three buddies that we started the buried life with after the show and i left that production company
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
which is very hard to do speaking because I could see that it was, that was more true to me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we would travel around to different kids festivals or different cities and he would do a show and it would either be in some sort of exotic location like in Africa or somewhere like Sweden or it would be on a ski mountain. So we had this really interesting relationship upbringing where we would kind of travel with him to these cool locations. He played music.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So what he would also do is like when my mom and my dad met, they would travel Greece and they would play music in the tavernas for a free room upstairs. So in Greece, you have the bar and then you have a couple of rooms above it. So they would play music, pass around the hat and their payment would be free room and board. And so my parents have been to Greece 15, 16 times.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, great point. So I think that it's not selfish to pursue your personal goals because you can't take care of other people if you don't take care of yourself. You can't do your job if you don't take care of yourself. You can't be who you need to be if you're not fueling yourself. And one way you fuel yourself is by doing the things that you love.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there's this big tie between purpose and your mental health that I think a lot of people are missing. And when you are following the things that you love that are important to you, that means something to you, that gives you a greater sense of well-being, that contributes to your mental health, and it energizes you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think that we need to flip our thinking around this idea that it's selfish to do these things. And I get it. I used to think a bucket list was selfish, considering all my responsibilities, everything that I had to do every day. But then I started to notice that people around the world were going after their bucket list just because we were going after ours.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thousands, tens of thousands of people through the show, millions of people. And to this day, they come up and say, oh, I saw the show. I was going to school and I decided that I wanted to travel. I met my husband when I was traveling. Now we have... four kids and we live in Italy. Or I started a restaurant.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And instead of being a doctor, because when you do what you love, you inspire other people to do what they love. Just like you starting this podcast, you probably can't even count the number of people that you have inspired. So it's not selfish, it's service because you are giving other people permission to do the same and you also fuel yourself.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think it's the same idea around taking vacation. We sometimes feel guilty when we take vacation because we're taking time off work. Well, you're not taking time off work, you're taking time off for work so that you can come back recharged and you also come back maybe with a bigger idea because you've taken space, you have perspective.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there are so many reasons why it's important to pursue these personal passions. And so the first thing is give yourself permission by understanding that it's not selfish. Because one, you're going to inspire other people by doing those things, but you're also going to fuel yourself. Then you look at what are these goals that are important to you? And sometimes it's hard to think about.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's their favorite place to go. So when I was two years old, they brought me to Greece for the first time and they still would do that thing where they would play music in the taverna and travel around like that. And so they would just bring me with them and they would sit me on the bar as a two-year-old and then they would
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You know, you look at a blank piece of paper and like, what's your list? And it's overwhelming. And that's why I think it's important to separate your list into categories. And so I talked about the 10 categories of life. That's basically what my new book is based on, The Bucket List Journal. It just came out last week.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And effectively, you write your list in those 10 categories, mental health goals, physical health goals. relationship? How do you want to give back intellectual, financial, material goals? And then you start to move through the barriers that stop you from achieving your goals. So I mentioned there was fear. That's number one.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The other big barrier is when these personal goals, you think about them, there's no deadlines and that's a huge problem. That's why we push them. So you need to create accountability around the personal goals. That's why writing your list is important. That creates a small bit of accountability because you take an idea that doesn't exist, you make it real. That's why we share our goals.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You share your goals so you can give other people the opportunity to help, but you also share them because then you feel accountable to the people you share them with. If I say on this podcast, this year, I'm writing a book. That's my number one goal. I'm writing a book this year. And you say, great. And then I run into you six months later and you say, hey, how's the book coming?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think, oh, I better start writing that book, right? Yeah. When you share your goals, you feel accountable. When you share them with your community, and then they can help you. And then the third barrier, and I think we've all felt this, is that usually with these personal goals, you're waiting to feel inspired to go after them. Or you're kind of waiting for the perfect time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that inspiration just rarely hits. So you have to create your own inspiration through action. Like there was never a perfect time for you to start this podcast. You were never going to have all your ducks in a row. You know, you were never going to feel completely inspired to do it because the fear dampens that inspiration. So you have to just do it and create your own inspiration.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And as soon as you started the podcast, you saw the reaction and then you started to feel more and more energy and more and more inspiration. So you're the architect of your own inspiration through action. And sometimes we just plan too much and we forget that action is a plan. You don't need to know the plan. You'll figure out the plan after you start. You do the first step.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You don't need to know the second step. You'll figure out the second step after the first. It's a momentum. And so the journal is designed to create inspiration through action, to create accountability, and then to identify real fear and imagine fear.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
leave and play music in the corner and they would just leave me on the bar and I would hang out. And then at the end of the night, they kind of picked me up and off we'd go. And they put me in between them on their Vespa with a little hockey helmet and kind of travel around Greece. So I think from them, I learned that there really wasn't any rules around how you had to live your life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Absolutely. That's what most people don't because the fear stops you from that first step.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
No, it's great because I met you at a speaking engagement. So you were able to see the talk. And so some of the, you should know my story, which is cool. So Brent was the very first person that we ever helped back in 2006. So take you back. We're leaving Vancouver Island in Canada. We're heading to the mainland and we start to get in this RV and travel.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now there's some news starting to talk about, we would just camp out at radio stations and we wouldn't leave until they put us on the air. So emails started coming in. And we got this email from this guy named Brent. And Brent says, hey guys, I'm 24. Before I die, I want to bring pizzas down to the homeless shelter. And so we're thinking, finally, someone we can help.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Like we don't have much money, but we can buy pizzas. So let's go interview Brent. And so we talk with him and we find out the reason why he wants to bring pizzas down to the homeless shelters because he had lived in that homeless shelter for a couple of years.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But he said when people came in with food to the homeless shelter, it felt like the best day because it felt like someone actually cared about him in a world where nobody really cared about him. And we found that he'd actually pulled himself out of this homeless shelter by starting his own landscaping business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And his landscaping business relied on his truck and his truck had recently broken down. And so the four of us thought we got to figure out a way to get this guy a truck because when we asked him, is there anything we can do to help? He wouldn't ask for help around the truck. He would just ask for help to get the pizzas.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we thought that's pretty cool that this guy's in a tough spot and he's not even asking for anything for himself. And we didn't have much money at the time. We had $480 between the four of us. Canadian, so it's less. So that's like not much cash. So we went to an RV, no, sorry, a used car salesman. And we said, this is the story of this guy in your community.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the cheapest truck on the lot was $2,100. And he sold the truck to us for 480. And then he paid for the insurance and out of his own pocket. Like we're at the age, we didn't even know that you needed insurance. This is all our money. And so anyways, he was, so this idea of, you know, we gave him a chance to be a hero and he took it. Like they saw that so many times.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Drive up to Brent, throw him the keys. And he just sort of started to cry and he bear hugged me and didn't let go for a long time. And we hung out with him and his girlfriend that day. And we sort of all felt like, OK, this is what this is about. And we have to keep doing this. And that was the catalyst to continue to do this again the next summer.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think subconsciously, we either absorb that There's this expected route that we have to go on and we feel like that's what we should do. It doesn't need to be pressure from our parents. It's sort of pressure from society. I think at an early age, subconsciously, I learned from then there really were no rules and you could create your own life
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You know, this this feeling that we had never felt before, which was helping a stranger, helping someone we didn't know. And we hadn't done that before in our lives. We didn't have had volunteered in high school or experienced that. And so, yeah. That was very impactful.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There's a lot of crazy stories. I'll tell the President Obama story quickly. And then I'll tell another one after that as well, very quickly. President Obama, we had no connections to the White House. So we just drove there and started asking people on the street if they knew anyone in the White House, which didn't get us very far. But we started to send emails to people that we found.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We just contacted politicians' offices, basically. And we met with a couple lower level officials and then we could convince them to meet with their boss. And then we met with their boss and we got all the way up to the secretary of transportation and he put in the call to the White House and we were stoked. And then we got an official rejection letter from the White House.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then we were like, okay, well, that's too bad. I guess we're going to have to change our tact. And so we decided instead of going after the president, we'd go after the president's personal aid. Because the personal aid of the president, he set up the basketball games with President Obama.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And there was these secret basketball games that everyone was trying to kind of figure out a way to get involved with. And so- We found what we thought was the president's personal email. And we started sending him emails every day with a challenge to a basketball game. So we said, you and the president versus us tonight, 7.30 at the YMCA, be there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we show up at the Y at 7.30 and no president. We did the next day, no president. So we did this for a week. We picked it outside the White House with signs. We sent letters. And at this point, like no one is meeting with us anymore. So we just accept defeat and we leave. Then I get a block call a couple days later and I pick it up. And it's the personality of the president.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And he's like, what's this I hear about you wanting to play basketball against the president and I? And I explained what we're doing. And he's like, you know what? I can make this happen. I feel good about this. Give me two weeks. I just need to run it by the press team. They got to sign off on everything. I'll get back to you in two weeks. Calls me in two weeks.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
He's like, it's not going to happen. And we're like, oh, Jesus. OK, so now he's like, listen, I'm sorry. I don't know if you're back in D.C. Let me know. Maybe I can give a tour of the White House. Cut to three months later, we're back in D.C.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Personal letter to the president, true to his word, gives us a personal tour of the White House, walks us through the West Wing, shows us his office next to the Oval Office, down the back steps of the White House. By the way, we didn't know what to wear, so we rented suits from a prom rental store, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we're like on the White House basketball courts, manicured hedges, presidential seal on each hoop, one presidential basketball. We're shooting around. And then all of a sudden I hear my friend go, oh my God, oh my God, it's the president. And President Obama walked on the court and he totally surprised us. And we were totally awestruck. And so we met the president.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
based on what made you happy and they never really made very much money we didn't have a lot of money growing up it's not like we were scraping by but we he was a performer and my mom was kind of an independent business coach for women and then did this and that so but what they their life was so rich and they still to this day live like that and they have we had a west valia van where we travel around and camp and to this day they drive down to mexico every year in the van and play music
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We shot around with him for 15, 20 minutes. Immediately forgot he's the president because he's the coolest man on earth. We were trying to hit shots he wasn't hitting. We were trash talking. It was really, really incredible. And that was amazing because it was- What a great memory. Yeah, it was definitely the most impossible thing I remember writing down.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I remember when we came up with that idea for the list, it was, I laughed because it was so impossible, right? I was like, this is hilarious that this is so impossible. Let's put it on the list. It was definitely, and then to see him stroll on the court, I was like, wow, I guess I have no choice but to believe that anything's possible because I just proved to myself that this was possible.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I thought this was impossible and now it happened. And so now I have, no choice but to believe that these things can come to fruition. And I think that that's a very common feeling is that you don't know what's possible until you're doing it. And that's really important. You don't know what's possible until you're actually doing it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can't even imagine yourself achieving some of these things until you've achieved it. And then you prove to yourself and everyone has the ability to prove to themselves that these things are possible.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and meet people. And they had this very rich life. And so it's, yeah, that's definitely what I learned from them growing up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay. One quick story is we tried to streak a field and get away. We didn't get away. We ended up spending the night in jail, but spend a night in jail is on the list. So that was, at least we crossed off one.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
One of the things on the list was ask out the girl of your dreams. At the time, the girl of my dreams was Megan Fox. This was back in the Transformer movie days. I snuck onto the red carpet at the premiere of the Transformers film, pretending that I was working for Us Weekly. So I had a spot on the red carpet. I had a microphone and the cord of the microphone was just going into my pocket.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I had a camera guy with me because we were filming. And I snuck onto the red carpet in the press line. Megan Fox coming up. She comes up right up to me. I start interviewing her with this microphone. By the way, it's not connected to anything. And I'm like, hey, how you doing? My name's Ben. And she's like, oh, my first boyfriend's name is Ben. And I'm like, uh.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I start to get super nervous. Yeah. And I started talking about something. And then her publicist pulled her away and I completely blew it. I failed. I didn't ask her out. And we did that on the show, by the way. And it was a complete, it was an embarrassment. I didn't ask her out. But then the next season, Duncan was like, okay, I'm going to redeem you, which didn't work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
good i guess because he was like i'm gonna ask out taylor swift that was his girl of his dreams at the time so we dressed up duncan like a fake country music star named boone mccaw because we knew that she was going to be at the cmt awards country music television awards so we dressed him in all white handlebar mustache, cowboy hat, Boone McCaw.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Dave was his guitar playing partner named Patagonia. He had a big jacket with tassels, another mustache, a wig. I was the publicist. So I was wearing like an earpiece and I was like, I was running alongside them because then we rented a big horse and chariot and we were going to just bum rush the music awards to try and get in. And we had at that point, it was season two.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so we tweeted out and we had probably like one or 200 fans come out and we made fake country music. I forget what the magazine is, but like basically Duncan's face on as Boone McCaw on the cover of this magazine. We had I heart Boone t-shirts. We had all these. So like country music tells rewards that they're happening.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
All of a sudden this white chariot in a horse with horses starts to just run towards the entrance of the awards. There's cops everywhere. And as soon as it happens, all the fans are around. the entrance and they start going crazy. And I'm running along with my earpiece on and my walkie talkie and cops let us through.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We go to the front of the red carpet, publicists, everyone's letting us through the producers. And then someone recognized us and they're like, no way buried life. You're out of here. because the Viacom owns MTV and the awards. And so they knew about us and someone tipped them off that we were coming or something. And that's why we had to wear fake mustaches and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Anyways, we didn't give up. I snuck in the back. By the way, if you ever want to sneak in anywhere, just wear all black and hold a walkie talkie. You basically look like a roadie. If you have a clipboard, that's even better. And you can pretty much walk in everywhere. So I walked in the back and I ended up nagging and having two passes. I said I was part of Kid Rock's crew. I got two passes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I came out. I gave one to Duncan. He got in all black. He went in the back. He walked right up. to Taylor Swift, who was sitting in her seat, passed her a note. The note was asking her out. And then he ended up actually going out on a date with her. So that was a success.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Go to space, make a movie, right? I'd like to finish the Buried Life documentary that we started. We've been filming for all those years on the road, through the show and everything. So it's a really cool story to tell there. Tell a judge you want the truth, you can't handle the truth, but it has to be real. We've got invited to do it to judges, but I think that we got to be in a real courtroom.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then I think Host Saturday Night Live is the last one, which would be probably the hardest. Yeah, go to space is going to be tough, but I think I'm going to do that in 2024. I'm talking with this company called Worldview, which is sending these capsules up to space and a big air balloon. And it's like eight people can go in it. That'll be probably 2024.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, write down your goals. It seems simple, but it's a very big step to write down your goals. It makes them real. They're not ideas anymore. Then they're a reminder that they exist. It also forces you to slow down to think about what's important to you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I put so much pressure on myself to succeed in school, in athletics. I really wanted people to like me. Like I just kind of, for whatever reason, I put, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself. I was on the under 19 national rugby team and we were training for the World Cup and I was worried about missing a kick because I played fly half.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And in a world where 76% of the population, their biggest regret on their deathbed is, I wish I would have lived for me, not what others expected of me or what I thought I should do. It's important that we slow down to think about what's important to us. Again, it's all coming back to being true to yourself.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that's one step to being true to yourself is reflecting to understand what you really want and make sure that you're not subconsciously doing things because you think it's what's expected of you, right? So 76% of people on their deathbed, their number one regret in their entire life. And this comes out of research from Cornell.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Their number one regret, I wish I would have lived my ideal self, the life I wanted, not what others wanted for me. So no one should have that regret on their deathbed. And basically, the Bucket List Journal is hopefully designed to solve that problem for you so that you identify what your goals are.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then you start to build accountability, build inspiration through action, and move through the fear so that you don't end up on your deathbed regretting the things that you didn't do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
thinking about your death and it sounds weird, but if you think about what's important in your life, you look at the top five regrets of the dying. Okay. And they don't have much to do with money. The top five regrets of the dying are, I wish I would have lived for me. I wish I would have told people how I really felt. I wish I would have worked less. I wish I would have let myself be happier.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I wish I would have stayed in touch with my friends. Okay, so those are the top five regrets that people have at the end of their life. So you need to remember that your time is finite to put things in perspective. So yes, you want to make money. Yes, you want to be successful. But When you do a eulogy for a friend, you don't usually talk about how much money they had.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You don't usually talk about how successful they are. You talk about they were a good friend. They embodied these values. And so these types of things, and if you just look at the five regrets, You want to make sure that you can keep death close to you so it reminds you that your time is limited so that you live with intention. And you hear this all the time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I had a near-death experience and everything changed. My dad died and everything changed. Why does it take a traumatic experience to wake us up? How can you keep that perspective without going through that trauma or without it being too late? And that is, I think, the big goal is to remind yourself every day that this could be your last. I mean, it sounds cliche, but that's the truth.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Best case scenario, you have another 50 years. But it's just interesting that if you see... A 90-year-old person with a cane hunched over shuffling down the street, you never think that that's going to be me. You don't even think about it. Well, the only thing you can count on is that will be you. Best case scenario, you might die in a week. And we just don't think about it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So that's like a field goal kicker and you're the quarterback kind of, so there's a lot of pressure on that position. And so I started worrying about, oh, crap, what if I miss an easy kick at the World Cup? And what if I blow this opportunity? And I had missed a kick in the end of our championship game in high school. And so I really didn't want that to happen again.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We think we have all this time. don't have the time because when you look at the research, that's the biggest regret that people have in their life is they wish they would have done the things they didn't do. So start now. A year from now, you'll wish you started today. That's the truth.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can get it on Amazon. If you search the Bucket List Journal, it should be the first thing that pops up. Or you can go to my Instagram, which is at Ben Nempton. And the link in the bio will send you to the Bucket List Journal website.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you so much for having me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And, you know, at that age, everything is so black and white and so life or death, you know, whether your friends like you or you don't, you're living in this little bubble of high school. So you really don't know that there's so much more out there and that they're
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
these things that you think are such a big deal when you're younger in your high school years or early college years you realize well i'm not even going to remember that this happened on my deathbed like there's just no way i'm going to remember that this was something that i worried about but at that point i was so worried about doing well on this team and so i would worry about it at night and i felt this anxiety and this anxiety caused me to have trouble sleeping and so
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
this lack of sleep, this anxiety, this constant pressure, it all built up. And I started to not be able to go to school. And I started to not be able to go to rugby practice. And then I couldn't leave the house. And so it just compounded. I never experienced anything like this where all of a sudden I was crippled by this anxiety and depression. And I was a very happy-go-lucky guy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I was at a really, I was A-type. I had a lot of friends that were also very supportive and high energy. But I really wasn't talking about what was going on at all. So I was internalizing it and I just went down and down and down and it got really, really scary.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it ultimately, my friends actually kind of pulled me out of the house and convinced me and rallied me to come work with them in a new town for the summer. after I dropped out of school. And I was forced to get a job. I was forced to start to kind of do things on my own. I've sort of built a little bit of confidence. I started talking about what I was going through.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I started to find different types of people that were inspiring, right? Like, as I said, when you're in high school or even college, you have this Petri dish of friends, but you don't realize that if they're not your people, there are your people out there. It just takes time to find it. And so that was something that took a bit of time for me to realize.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I started finding these people that I realized gave me energy. These new groups of friends, they inspired me and they were doing all these cool things. They had already traveled. They had started businesses. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to try and only surround myself with people that inspire me. almost by necessity, because I needed that energy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that single decision completely changed my life. And it would lead me down this path that would ultimately bring me here, speaking to you. I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I am doing now if I hadn't consciously decided to try and only surround myself with people that inspire me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, and I think that that's a really empowering idea because it means that you can change your life at any time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think we all can think back to moments where there was this pivot and it could be something very small, like something a teacher said to us or the way a teacher showed up to us before us in high school or some way a friend supported us or just happenstance when you ran into someone and then that led to your job or there's any number of things, but these little moments.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think it's a combination of, you have to be aware and it kind of jump on those moments sometimes. And it takes a little bit of awareness and it takes a little bit of this being proactive. And you start to go down this path that you don't know will ultimately shift your whole life. So if you think about it, if you
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If anyway, as a golfer, you hit a golf ball one or two degrees off, it doesn't seem like much, but by the time that it lands could be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 feet off center. And so this little change can be a big change over time. And that's how I look at these small little shifts that you make that you don't see them in the moment, but they can actually create this huge impact.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think it's an empowering idea because it means that you can also make a huge impact in someone else's life. So just by being there for someone in a moment when they need it, or by small gesture of kindness, or helping hand, or even a compliment to a stranger, all these things create ripple effects that are hard to measure, but it's very real. So it goes both ways.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Everyone has the power to create this immense change through the ripple effect, through your daily micro-interactions. But then it also means that you have the ability to change your life in any moment because really a small change can lead to a huge change. And so I think we get overwhelmed sometimes by thinking about, oh, I have to make this huge, massive shift to change my life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I don't think that's true. I think that you can change your life just by doing a very small thing that over time will compound and you'll ultimately make a huge shift.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, well, I'm happy you said that because I still do get depressed. And I think that that is something that is like really just a great thing to talk about that the people that you don't think struggle, struggle. You know, everybody struggles. Every human will go through some mental health crisis. crisis in their life. And that's just through the research, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It doesn't need to be from a mental health illness or mental illness. It can be from a divorce, stress from losing a job, bereavement from losing someone that you love. You will go through the crapper, like it's going to happen. And so I think that that's almost an empowering idea because it means that No one is alone in their struggle.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If someone is not struggling, they've been there before, they will go through it. I really believe when you speak things, they lose their power. They're much scarier when they're in your head. And so that's what I found is by talking about it, I'm able to also process it. Like I can talk about it, I can break it down when I'm talking about it in therapy or talking about it with friends.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So it's so important to talk about. So I would say if you are struggling right now, If you take anything away from this podcast, it's find someone that you trust to talk about what is going on. Ideally, it's a professional. And we can talk about therapy and we talk about the challenges with finding a good therapist and the stigma around therapy because all that is there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But just outside of that, if you can find someone to talk to, I think it's the most important thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So I came back from that summer away. You know, I was starting to feel back to myself, you know, lifting out of this depression. I was like, OK, I met these cool kids in this new town. I want to continue to surround myself with more people like that. So there's one kid that came to mind and he was a filmmaker from my neighborhood and his name was Johnny.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I secretly had always wanted to make a movie. So I called up Johnny and I was like, let's make a movie. If you know, I didn't know him too well. I was sort of going out on a limb, reaching out to him. And we gathered two other friends. One of them was Johnny's older brother, Duncan, another friend, Dave. And we started talking about making this documentary.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We didn't know what it was going to be about though at this point. And then serendipitously, Johnny gets assigned a poem in English class at McGill University in his first year English class. The poem is called The Buried Life. So it's an old poem written in 1852, over 150 years ago. And this poem strikes a chord in Johnny. And he sends it back to us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
He says, guys, this poet is talking about the same thing we're talking about right now, which basically was this idea that we felt like we had all these dreams, but we never even tried to go after them because the day-to-day buries them. Like we knew we had things that we want to do, but why hadn't we ever done them? It's because life got in the way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we have these moments when we're inspired, but then we get less inspired because, the day-to-day pushes them. So we thought, okay, we're not the first people to feel like this. If this guy wrote this poem in 1852, let's take this name, let's call our film The Buried Life. And our next task was to uncover these buried dreams.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the way we did that was through this question, what do you want to do before you die? Because for us, thinking about death actually made us think about life. And I'm a huge fan of thinking about death. I think the more we can think about death, the better. And we can talk about that, but just we stumbled into this. This was by accident. But we asked ourselves this question.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We realized, okay, we're going to die one day. So if we're going to die, which is probably the only thing we can count on in life, what do we want to do with the time left? And that's where the bucket list came from. It was our answers to the question, what do you want to do before you die? And we pretended we had all the money in the world. We pretended that we had the ability to do anything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So our list was ambitious. It was like, make a TV show, play basketball with Obama, write a number one New York Times bestseller, sit with Oprah, have a beer with Prince Harry, pay off our parents' mortgage, go to space. streak a field and get away, ask out the girl your dreams. It was a very audacious list.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then we thought every time we cross something off our list, let's help someone else do something on their list. And so that was the mission. We bought an RV, we bought a secondhand camera, and we planned a two-week road trip in the summer of 2006 in Victoria, BC, where we grew up in Canada. And we hit the road. And as soon as we hit the road, unexpectedly, people heard about our road trip.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then they started to email us and they looked at our list and they said, hey, I can help you cross off, ride a boat. I can help you cross off, get up on a hot air balloon. I can help you cross off, make a toast to a stranger's wedding. And then they would send us their dreams asking for our help.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and so we struck this nerve and we just thought let's keep doing this and so this two-week road trip ended up lasting over 10 years and then the list items that we had written down in the beginning that we were convinced were completely unattainable over time they ended up falling off the list and so
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
we also realized that helping other people achieve their dreams meant even more than doing the big things on our list. And then along the way, like built this passion for like figuring out why do some people achieve their goals and go after them? But most people don't like,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Why are 76% of the people on the planet reaching their deathbed and regretting the things they didn't do, not the things they did? And so that's why I started to speak because I was like, okay, we need to get more people in that minority of the population that actually go after the things and be true to yourself. And really a bucket list is just a reflection of your true self.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's the way I look at it. It's just a list of all the things that are going to bring you joy and happiness. So it's not just skydive and go to Europe. That's one of 10 categories of your life. So you want to think about your adventure travel goals, but you also want to think about your mental health goals, your physical health goals.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You want to think about how do you want to give back, your relationship goals, intellectual, what do you want to learn, financial, professional. And so that's what a full bucket list is. But When we were on that road trip, we had no idea of any of that. We were just going out to tackle our dreams and help other people. And it sparked this lifelong learning journey.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The only way that we cross things off our list is through the help of other people. I just want to be very clear on that. We had no business or no ability to achieve any of the things that we have achieved, but people always stepped up to help us in unexpected ways because we shared our goals. And I think that you had the idea for this podcast. 99% of people will have the idea.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They'll want to do it, but they won't take that first step because of fear, right? They're afraid of failure. They're afraid of what other people think. And that's ultimately what stops people. And that's through research. And we can talk about like where that comes from, but that's the number one barrier when it comes to stopping people from achieving their personal goals.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But when you don't put it out there, no one can help you. You're on your own. And if you think about it, when you hit a challenge at work, typically, what do you do? You go to your leader, you ask for help, go to a mentor. Hey, have you ever been through this? I don't know what to do. You ask a friend. But with these personal goals, we don't ask for help because of the fear.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're afraid of failure, afraid of what other people think. And then we just have a lower chances of succeeding because we're trying to do it in our head on our own. So I always say when you give someone a chance to be a hero, they usually take it. And so you experienced this when you started to put this, it's how you took the leap.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You move through that discomfort of like, oh shit, like what are people, is this going to be good? What if it's bad and it fails? And- Then you started to see that people were gravitating towards it because you were doing it from your true, it came out of what you truly wanted to do. This is a reflection of your true self.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think that at the end of the day, that is the big goal is to be true to yourself in a world that is so hard to stay true to yourself because everything pulls you away from that. Social media pulls you away from that. You know, being disconnected pulls you away from that. The fear pulls you away from that. But when you are true to yourself, I think you're unstoppable.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You are the only person that can be you. And we spend most of our life trying to be other people. And anything you could do to remind yourself of who you are. And that's why I think a list is a great device to remind you. friends that keep you accountable to these things are great reminders.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So my dad was actually a clown and he was like a theatrical clown. So he played music and he wasn't necessarily the clown that like does balloons and parties and stuff. He would do theater shows.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
What you saw is that when you were true to yourself and then you started to do this thing, it was like this gravitational pull. And then you start to see this thing happening and then you follow that momentum. And I think that sometimes we feel like we have this plan and we got to stick to it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I've done that a lot, but I've realized that you need to follow the energy and you need to follow what's easy and what was easy for you. Not that it is easy as in
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
it didn't take a lot of work easy and is as in you saw there was momentum and that's what you followed and so for me that's been speaking i didn't mean to be a speaker but i did a tedx talk and then some people asked me to speak and i love doing it and i feel like it's easy for me to do and i work really hard but i see that it's working and so i thought okay i'm going to leave the pro i started a production company with the three buddies that we started the buried life with after the show and i left that production company
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
which is very hard to do speaking because I could see that it was, that was more true to me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we would travel around to different kids festivals or different cities and he would do a show and it would either be in some sort of exotic location like in Africa or somewhere like Sweden or it would be on a ski mountain. So we had this really interesting relationship upbringing where we would kind of travel with him to these cool locations. He played music.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So what he would also do is like when my mom and my dad met, they would travel Greece and they would play music in the tavernas for a free room upstairs. So in Greece, you have the bar and then you have a couple of rooms above it. So they would play music, pass around the hat and their payment would be free room and board. And so my parents have been to Greece 15, 16 times.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, great point. So I think that it's not selfish to pursue your personal goals because you can't take care of other people if you don't take care of yourself. You can't do your job if you don't take care of yourself. You can't be who you need to be if you're not fueling yourself. And one way you fuel yourself is by doing the things that you love.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there's this big tie between purpose and your mental health that I think a lot of people are missing. And when you are following the things that you love that are important to you, that means something to you, that gives you a greater sense of well-being, that contributes to your mental health, and it energizes you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think that we need to flip our thinking around this idea that it's selfish to do these things. And I get it. I used to think a bucket list was selfish, considering all my responsibilities, everything that I had to do every day. But then I started to notice that people around the world were going after their bucket list just because we were going after ours.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thousands, tens of thousands of people through the show, millions of people. And to this day, they come up and say, oh, I saw the show. I was going to school and I decided that I wanted to travel. I met my husband when I was traveling. Now we have... four kids and we live in Italy. Or I started a restaurant.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And instead of being a doctor, because when you do what you love, you inspire other people to do what they love. Just like you starting this podcast, you probably can't even count the number of people that you have inspired. So it's not selfish, it's service because you are giving other people permission to do the same and you also fuel yourself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I think it's the same idea around taking vacation. We sometimes feel guilty when we take vacation because we're taking time off work. Well, you're not taking time off work, you're taking time off for work so that you can come back recharged and you also come back maybe with a bigger idea because you've taken space, you have perspective.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there are so many reasons why it's important to pursue these personal passions. And so the first thing is give yourself permission by understanding that it's not selfish. Because one, you're going to inspire other people by doing those things, but you're also going to fuel yourself. Then you look at what are these goals that are important to you? And sometimes it's hard to think about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's their favorite place to go. So when I was two years old, they brought me to Greece for the first time and they still would do that thing where they would play music in the taverna and travel around like that. And so they would just bring me with them and they would sit me on the bar as a two-year-old and then they would
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You know, you look at a blank piece of paper and like, what's your list? And it's overwhelming. And that's why I think it's important to separate your list into categories. And so I talked about the 10 categories of life. That's basically what my new book is based on, The Bucket List Journal. It just came out last week.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And effectively, you write your list in those 10 categories, mental health goals, physical health goals. relationship? How do you want to give back intellectual, financial, material goals? And then you start to move through the barriers that stop you from achieving your goals. So I mentioned there was fear. That's number one.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The other big barrier is when these personal goals, you think about them, there's no deadlines and that's a huge problem. That's why we push them. So you need to create accountability around the personal goals. That's why writing your list is important. That creates a small bit of accountability because you take an idea that doesn't exist, you make it real. That's why we share our goals.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You share your goals so you can give other people the opportunity to help, but you also share them because then you feel accountable to the people you share them with. If I say on this podcast, this year, I'm writing a book. That's my number one goal. I'm writing a book this year. And you say, great. And then I run into you six months later and you say, hey, how's the book coming?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think, oh, I better start writing that book, right? Yeah. When you share your goals, you feel accountable. When you share them with your community, and then they can help you. And then the third barrier, and I think we've all felt this, is that usually with these personal goals, you're waiting to feel inspired to go after them. Or you're kind of waiting for the perfect time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that inspiration just rarely hits. So you have to create your own inspiration through action. Like there was never a perfect time for you to start this podcast. You were never going to have all your ducks in a row. You know, you were never going to feel completely inspired to do it because the fear dampens that inspiration. So you have to just do it and create your own inspiration.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And as soon as you started the podcast, you saw the reaction and then you started to feel more and more energy and more and more inspiration. So you're the architect of your own inspiration through action. And sometimes we just plan too much and we forget that action is a plan. You don't need to know the plan. You'll figure out the plan after you start. You do the first step.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You don't need to know the second step. You'll figure out the second step after the first. It's a momentum. And so the journal is designed to create inspiration through action, to create accountability, and then to identify real fear and imagine fear.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
leave and play music in the corner and they would just leave me on the bar and I would hang out. And then at the end of the night, they kind of picked me up and off we'd go. And they put me in between them on their Vespa with a little hockey helmet and kind of travel around Greece. So I think from them, I learned that there really wasn't any rules around how you had to live your life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Absolutely. That's what most people don't because the fear stops you from that first step.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
No, it's great because I met you at a speaking engagement. So you were able to see the talk. And so some of the, you should know my story, which is cool. So Brent was the very first person that we ever helped back in 2006. So take you back. We're leaving Vancouver Island in Canada. We're heading to the mainland and we start to get in this RV and travel.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now there's some news starting to talk about, we would just camp out at radio stations and we wouldn't leave until they put us on the air. So emails started coming in. And we got this email from this guy named Brent. And Brent says, hey guys, I'm 24. Before I die, I want to bring pizzas down to the homeless shelter. And so we're thinking, finally, someone we can help.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Like we don't have much money, but we can buy pizzas. So let's go interview Brent. And so we talk with him and we find out the reason why he wants to bring pizzas down to the homeless shelters because he had lived in that homeless shelter for a couple of years.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But he said when people came in with food to the homeless shelter, it felt like the best day because it felt like someone actually cared about him in a world where nobody really cared about him. And we found that he'd actually pulled himself out of this homeless shelter by starting his own landscaping business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And his landscaping business relied on his truck and his truck had recently broken down. And so the four of us thought we got to figure out a way to get this guy a truck because when we asked him, is there anything we can do to help? He wouldn't ask for help around the truck. He would just ask for help to get the pizzas.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we thought that's pretty cool that this guy's in a tough spot and he's not even asking for anything for himself. And we didn't have much money at the time. We had $480 between the four of us. Canadian, so it's less. So that's like not much cash. So we went to an RV, no, sorry, a used car salesman. And we said, this is the story of this guy in your community.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the cheapest truck on the lot was $2,100. And he sold the truck to us for 480. And then he paid for the insurance and out of his own pocket. Like we're at the age, we didn't even know that you needed insurance. This is all our money. And so anyways, he was, so this idea of, you know, we gave him a chance to be a hero and he took it. Like they saw that so many times.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Drive up to Brent, throw him the keys. And he just sort of started to cry and he bear hugged me and didn't let go for a long time. And we hung out with him and his girlfriend that day. And we sort of all felt like, OK, this is what this is about. And we have to keep doing this. And that was the catalyst to continue to do this again the next summer.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I think subconsciously, we either absorb that There's this expected route that we have to go on and we feel like that's what we should do. It doesn't need to be pressure from our parents. It's sort of pressure from society. I think at an early age, subconsciously, I learned from then there really were no rules and you could create your own life
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You know, this this feeling that we had never felt before, which was helping a stranger, helping someone we didn't know. And we hadn't done that before in our lives. We didn't have had volunteered in high school or experienced that. And so, yeah. That was very impactful.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There's a lot of crazy stories. I'll tell the President Obama story quickly. And then I'll tell another one after that as well, very quickly. President Obama, we had no connections to the White House. So we just drove there and started asking people on the street if they knew anyone in the White House, which didn't get us very far. But we started to send emails to people that we found.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We just contacted politicians' offices, basically. And we met with a couple lower level officials and then we could convince them to meet with their boss. And then we met with their boss and we got all the way up to the secretary of transportation and he put in the call to the White House and we were stoked. And then we got an official rejection letter from the White House.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then we were like, okay, well, that's too bad. I guess we're going to have to change our tact. And so we decided instead of going after the president, we'd go after the president's personal aid. Because the personal aid of the president, he set up the basketball games with President Obama.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And there was these secret basketball games that everyone was trying to kind of figure out a way to get involved with. And so- We found what we thought was the president's personal email. And we started sending him emails every day with a challenge to a basketball game. So we said, you and the president versus us tonight, 7.30 at the YMCA, be there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we show up at the Y at 7.30 and no president. We did the next day, no president. So we did this for a week. We picked it outside the White House with signs. We sent letters. And at this point, like no one is meeting with us anymore. So we just accept defeat and we leave. Then I get a block call a couple days later and I pick it up. And it's the personality of the president.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And he's like, what's this I hear about you wanting to play basketball against the president and I? And I explained what we're doing. And he's like, you know what? I can make this happen. I feel good about this. Give me two weeks. I just need to run it by the press team. They got to sign off on everything. I'll get back to you in two weeks. Calls me in two weeks.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
He's like, it's not going to happen. And we're like, oh, Jesus. OK, so now he's like, listen, I'm sorry. I don't know if you're back in D.C. Let me know. Maybe I can give a tour of the White House. Cut to three months later, we're back in D.C.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Personal letter to the president, true to his word, gives us a personal tour of the White House, walks us through the West Wing, shows us his office next to the Oval Office, down the back steps of the White House. By the way, we didn't know what to wear, so we rented suits from a prom rental store, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we're like on the White House basketball courts, manicured hedges, presidential seal on each hoop, one presidential basketball. We're shooting around. And then all of a sudden I hear my friend go, oh my God, oh my God, it's the president. And President Obama walked on the court and he totally surprised us. And we were totally awestruck. And so we met the president.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
based on what made you happy and they never really made very much money we didn't have a lot of money growing up it's not like we were scraping by but we he was a performer and my mom was kind of an independent business coach for women and then did this and that so but what they their life was so rich and they still to this day live like that and they have we had a west valia van where we travel around and camp and to this day they drive down to mexico every year in the van and play music
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We shot around with him for 15, 20 minutes. Immediately forgot he's the president because he's the coolest man on earth. We were trying to hit shots he wasn't hitting. We were trash talking. It was really, really incredible. And that was amazing because it was- What a great memory. Yeah, it was definitely the most impossible thing I remember writing down.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I remember when we came up with that idea for the list, it was, I laughed because it was so impossible, right? I was like, this is hilarious that this is so impossible. Let's put it on the list. It was definitely, and then to see him stroll on the court, I was like, wow, I guess I have no choice but to believe that anything's possible because I just proved to myself that this was possible.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I thought this was impossible and now it happened. And so now I have, no choice but to believe that these things can come to fruition. And I think that that's a very common feeling is that you don't know what's possible until you're doing it. And that's really important. You don't know what's possible until you're actually doing it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can't even imagine yourself achieving some of these things until you've achieved it. And then you prove to yourself and everyone has the ability to prove to themselves that these things are possible.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and meet people. And they had this very rich life. And so it's, yeah, that's definitely what I learned from them growing up.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Okay. One quick story is we tried to streak a field and get away. We didn't get away. We ended up spending the night in jail, but spend a night in jail is on the list. So that was, at least we crossed off one.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
One of the things on the list was ask out the girl of your dreams. At the time, the girl of my dreams was Megan Fox. This was back in the Transformer movie days. I snuck onto the red carpet at the premiere of the Transformers film, pretending that I was working for Us Weekly. So I had a spot on the red carpet. I had a microphone and the cord of the microphone was just going into my pocket.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I had a camera guy with me because we were filming. And I snuck onto the red carpet in the press line. Megan Fox coming up. She comes up right up to me. I start interviewing her with this microphone. By the way, it's not connected to anything. And I'm like, hey, how you doing? My name's Ben. And she's like, oh, my first boyfriend's name is Ben. And I'm like, uh.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I start to get super nervous. Yeah. And I started talking about something. And then her publicist pulled her away and I completely blew it. I failed. I didn't ask her out. And we did that on the show, by the way. And it was a complete, it was an embarrassment. I didn't ask her out. But then the next season, Duncan was like, okay, I'm going to redeem you, which didn't work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
good i guess because he was like i'm gonna ask out taylor swift that was his girl of his dreams at the time so we dressed up duncan like a fake country music star named boone mccaw because we knew that she was going to be at the cmt awards country music television awards so we dressed him in all white handlebar mustache, cowboy hat, Boone McCaw.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Dave was his guitar playing partner named Patagonia. He had a big jacket with tassels, another mustache, a wig. I was the publicist. So I was wearing like an earpiece and I was like, I was running alongside them because then we rented a big horse and chariot and we were going to just bum rush the music awards to try and get in. And we had at that point, it was season two.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so we tweeted out and we had probably like one or 200 fans come out and we made fake country music. I forget what the magazine is, but like basically Duncan's face on as Boone McCaw on the cover of this magazine. We had I heart Boone t-shirts. We had all these. So like country music tells rewards that they're happening.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
All of a sudden this white chariot in a horse with horses starts to just run towards the entrance of the awards. There's cops everywhere. And as soon as it happens, all the fans are around. the entrance and they start going crazy. And I'm running along with my earpiece on and my walkie talkie and cops let us through.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We go to the front of the red carpet, publicists, everyone's letting us through the producers. And then someone recognized us and they're like, no way buried life. You're out of here. because the Viacom owns MTV and the awards. And so they knew about us and someone tipped them off that we were coming or something. And that's why we had to wear fake mustaches and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Anyways, we didn't give up. I snuck in the back. By the way, if you ever want to sneak in anywhere, just wear all black and hold a walkie talkie. You basically look like a roadie. If you have a clipboard, that's even better. And you can pretty much walk in everywhere. So I walked in the back and I ended up nagging and having two passes. I said I was part of Kid Rock's crew. I got two passes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I came out. I gave one to Duncan. He got in all black. He went in the back. He walked right up. to Taylor Swift, who was sitting in her seat, passed her a note. The note was asking her out. And then he ended up actually going out on a date with her. So that was a success.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Go to space, make a movie, right? I'd like to finish the Buried Life documentary that we started. We've been filming for all those years on the road, through the show and everything. So it's a really cool story to tell there. Tell a judge you want the truth, you can't handle the truth, but it has to be real. We've got invited to do it to judges, but I think that we got to be in a real courtroom.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then I think Host Saturday Night Live is the last one, which would be probably the hardest. Yeah, go to space is going to be tough, but I think I'm going to do that in 2024. I'm talking with this company called Worldview, which is sending these capsules up to space and a big air balloon. And it's like eight people can go in it. That'll be probably 2024.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, write down your goals. It seems simple, but it's a very big step to write down your goals. It makes them real. They're not ideas anymore. Then they're a reminder that they exist. It also forces you to slow down to think about what's important to you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I put so much pressure on myself to succeed in school, in athletics. I really wanted people to like me. Like I just kind of, for whatever reason, I put, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself. I was on the under 19 national rugby team and we were training for the World Cup and I was worried about missing a kick because I played fly half.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And in a world where 76% of the population, their biggest regret on their deathbed is, I wish I would have lived for me, not what others expected of me or what I thought I should do. It's important that we slow down to think about what's important to us. Again, it's all coming back to being true to yourself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that's one step to being true to yourself is reflecting to understand what you really want and make sure that you're not subconsciously doing things because you think it's what's expected of you, right? So 76% of people on their deathbed, their number one regret in their entire life. And this comes out of research from Cornell.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Their number one regret, I wish I would have lived my ideal self, the life I wanted, not what others wanted for me. So no one should have that regret on their deathbed. And basically, the Bucket List Journal is hopefully designed to solve that problem for you so that you identify what your goals are.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then you start to build accountability, build inspiration through action, and move through the fear so that you don't end up on your deathbed regretting the things that you didn't do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
thinking about your death and it sounds weird, but if you think about what's important in your life, you look at the top five regrets of the dying. Okay. And they don't have much to do with money. The top five regrets of the dying are, I wish I would have lived for me. I wish I would have told people how I really felt. I wish I would have worked less. I wish I would have let myself be happier.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I wish I would have stayed in touch with my friends. Okay, so those are the top five regrets that people have at the end of their life. So you need to remember that your time is finite to put things in perspective. So yes, you want to make money. Yes, you want to be successful. But When you do a eulogy for a friend, you don't usually talk about how much money they had.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You don't usually talk about how successful they are. You talk about they were a good friend. They embodied these values. And so these types of things, and if you just look at the five regrets, You want to make sure that you can keep death close to you so it reminds you that your time is limited so that you live with intention. And you hear this all the time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I had a near-death experience and everything changed. My dad died and everything changed. Why does it take a traumatic experience to wake us up? How can you keep that perspective without going through that trauma or without it being too late? And that is, I think, the big goal is to remind yourself every day that this could be your last. I mean, it sounds cliche, but that's the truth.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Best case scenario, you have another 50 years. But it's just interesting that if you see... A 90-year-old person with a cane hunched over shuffling down the street, you never think that that's going to be me. You don't even think about it. Well, the only thing you can count on is that will be you. Best case scenario, you might die in a week. And we just don't think about it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So that's like a field goal kicker and you're the quarterback kind of, so there's a lot of pressure on that position. And so I started worrying about, oh, crap, what if I miss an easy kick at the World Cup? And what if I blow this opportunity? And I had missed a kick in the end of our championship game in high school. And so I really didn't want that to happen again.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We think we have all this time. don't have the time because when you look at the research, that's the biggest regret that people have in their life is they wish they would have done the things they didn't do. So start now. A year from now, you'll wish you started today. That's the truth.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can get it on Amazon. If you search the Bucket List Journal, it should be the first thing that pops up. Or you can go to my Instagram, which is at Ben Nempton. And the link in the bio will send you to the Bucket List Journal website.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you so much for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And, you know, at that age, everything is so black and white and so life or death, you know, whether your friends like you or you don't, you're living in this little bubble of high school. So you really don't know that there's so much more out there and that they're
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
these things that you think are such a big deal when you're younger in your high school years or early college years you realize well i'm not even going to remember that this happened on my deathbed like there's just no way i'm going to remember that this was something that i worried about but at that point i was so worried about doing well on this team and so i would worry about it at night and i felt this anxiety and this anxiety caused me to have trouble sleeping and so
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
this lack of sleep, this anxiety, this constant pressure, it all built up. And I started to not be able to go to school. And I started to not be able to go to rugby practice. And then I couldn't leave the house. And so it just compounded. I never experienced anything like this where all of a sudden I was crippled by this anxiety and depression. And I was a very happy-go-lucky guy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I was at a really, I was A-type. I had a lot of friends that were also very supportive and high energy. But I really wasn't talking about what was going on at all. So I was internalizing it and I just went down and down and down and it got really, really scary.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it ultimately, my friends actually kind of pulled me out of the house and convinced me and rallied me to come work with them in a new town for the summer. after I dropped out of school. And I was forced to get a job. I was forced to start to kind of do things on my own. I've sort of built a little bit of confidence. I started talking about what I was going through.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I started to find different types of people that were inspiring, right? Like, as I said, when you're in high school or even college, you have this Petri dish of friends, but you don't realize that if they're not your people, there are your people out there. It just takes time to find it. And so that was something that took a bit of time for me to realize.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I started finding these people that I realized gave me energy. These new groups of friends, they inspired me and they were doing all these cool things. They had already traveled. They had started businesses. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to try and only surround myself with people that inspire me. almost by necessity, because I needed that energy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And that single decision completely changed my life. And it would lead me down this path that would ultimately bring me here, speaking to you. I mean, I wouldn't be doing the things I am doing now if I hadn't consciously decided to try and only surround myself with people that inspire me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, and I think that that's a really empowering idea because it means that you can change your life at any time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think we all can think back to moments where there was this pivot and it could be something very small, like something a teacher said to us or the way a teacher showed up to us before us in high school or some way a friend supported us or just happenstance when you ran into someone and then that led to your job or there's any number of things, but these little moments.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think it's a combination of, you have to be aware and it kind of jump on those moments sometimes. And it takes a little bit of awareness and it takes a little bit of this being proactive. And you start to go down this path that you don't know will ultimately shift your whole life. So if you think about it, if you
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If anyway, as a golfer, you hit a golf ball one or two degrees off, it doesn't seem like much, but by the time that it lands could be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 feet off center. And so this little change can be a big change over time. And that's how I look at these small little shifts that you make that you don't see them in the moment, but they can actually create this huge impact.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I think it's an empowering idea because it means that you can also make a huge impact in someone else's life. So just by being there for someone in a moment when they need it, or by small gesture of kindness, or helping hand, or even a compliment to a stranger, all these things create ripple effects that are hard to measure, but it's very real. So it goes both ways.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Everyone has the power to create this immense change through the ripple effect, through your daily micro-interactions. But then it also means that you have the ability to change your life in any moment because really a small change can lead to a huge change. And so I think we get overwhelmed sometimes by thinking about, oh, I have to make this huge, massive shift to change my life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I don't think that's true. I think that you can change your life just by doing a very small thing that over time will compound and you'll ultimately make a huge shift.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah, well, I'm happy you said that because I still do get depressed. And I think that that is something that is like really just a great thing to talk about that the people that you don't think struggle, struggle. You know, everybody struggles. Every human will go through some mental health crisis. crisis in their life. And that's just through the research, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It doesn't need to be from a mental health illness or mental illness. It can be from a divorce, stress from losing a job, bereavement from losing someone that you love. You will go through the crapper, like it's going to happen. And so I think that that's almost an empowering idea because it means that No one is alone in their struggle.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If someone is not struggling, they've been there before, they will go through it. I really believe when you speak things, they lose their power. They're much scarier when they're in your head. And so that's what I found is by talking about it, I'm able to also process it. Like I can talk about it, I can break it down when I'm talking about it in therapy or talking about it with friends.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So it's so important to talk about. So I would say if you are struggling right now, If you take anything away from this podcast, it's find someone that you trust to talk about what is going on. Ideally, it's a professional. And we can talk about therapy and we talk about the challenges with finding a good therapist and the stigma around therapy because all that is there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But just outside of that, if you can find someone to talk to, I think it's the most important thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. So I came back from that summer away. You know, I was starting to feel back to myself, you know, lifting out of this depression. I was like, OK, I met these cool kids in this new town. I want to continue to surround myself with more people like that. So there's one kid that came to mind and he was a filmmaker from my neighborhood and his name was Johnny.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I secretly had always wanted to make a movie. So I called up Johnny and I was like, let's make a movie. If you know, I didn't know him too well. I was sort of going out on a limb, reaching out to him. And we gathered two other friends. One of them was Johnny's older brother, Duncan, another friend, Dave. And we started talking about making this documentary.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We didn't know what it was going to be about though at this point. And then serendipitously, Johnny gets assigned a poem in English class at McGill University in his first year English class. The poem is called The Buried Life. So it's an old poem written in 1852, over 150 years ago. And this poem strikes a chord in Johnny. And he sends it back to us.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
He says, guys, this poet is talking about the same thing we're talking about right now, which basically was this idea that we felt like we had all these dreams, but we never even tried to go after them because the day-to-day buries them. Like we knew we had things that we want to do, but why hadn't we ever done them? It's because life got in the way.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we have these moments when we're inspired, but then we get less inspired because, the day-to-day pushes them. So we thought, okay, we're not the first people to feel like this. If this guy wrote this poem in 1852, let's take this name, let's call our film The Buried Life. And our next task was to uncover these buried dreams.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the way we did that was through this question, what do you want to do before you die? Because for us, thinking about death actually made us think about life. And I'm a huge fan of thinking about death. I think the more we can think about death, the better. And we can talk about that, but just we stumbled into this. This was by accident. But we asked ourselves this question.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We realized, okay, we're going to die one day. So if we're going to die, which is probably the only thing we can count on in life, what do we want to do with the time left? And that's where the bucket list came from. It was our answers to the question, what do you want to do before you die? And we pretended we had all the money in the world. We pretended that we had the ability to do anything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So our list was ambitious. It was like, make a TV show, play basketball with Obama, write a number one New York Times bestseller, sit with Oprah, have a beer with Prince Harry, pay off our parents' mortgage, go to space. streak a field and get away, ask out the girl your dreams. It was a very audacious list.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then we thought every time we cross something off our list, let's help someone else do something on their list. And so that was the mission. We bought an RV, we bought a secondhand camera, and we planned a two-week road trip in the summer of 2006 in Victoria, BC, where we grew up in Canada. And we hit the road. And as soon as we hit the road, unexpectedly, people heard about our road trip.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then they started to email us and they looked at our list and they said, hey, I can help you cross off, ride a boat. I can help you cross off, get up on a hot air balloon. I can help you cross off, make a toast to a stranger's wedding. And then they would send us their dreams asking for our help.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and so we struck this nerve and we just thought let's keep doing this and so this two-week road trip ended up lasting over 10 years and then the list items that we had written down in the beginning that we were convinced were completely unattainable over time they ended up falling off the list and so
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
we also realized that helping other people achieve their dreams meant even more than doing the big things on our list. And then along the way, like built this passion for like figuring out why do some people achieve their goals and go after them? But most people don't like,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Why are 76% of the people on the planet reaching their deathbed and regretting the things they didn't do, not the things they did? And so that's why I started to speak because I was like, okay, we need to get more people in that minority of the population that actually go after the things and be true to yourself. And really a bucket list is just a reflection of your true self.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's the way I look at it. It's just a list of all the things that are going to bring you joy and happiness. So it's not just skydive and go to Europe. That's one of 10 categories of your life. So you want to think about your adventure travel goals, but you also want to think about your mental health goals, your physical health goals.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Ben Nemtin: Building a Badass Bucket List for Your Life and Business | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You want to think about how do you want to give back, your relationship goals, intellectual, what do you want to learn, financial, professional. And so that's what a full bucket list is. But When we were on that road trip, we had no idea of any of that. We were just going out to tackle our dreams and help other people. And it sparked this lifelong learning journey.