Hello and welcome back to Chasing Excellence.
Thank you so much for tuning in this week.
I'm Patrick.
I'm Ben.
We are joined by our friend Marcus Wilson.
Marcus, how are you doing?
Doing really well.
Excited to be here, guys.
Love talking with you.
Awesome to have you back, man.
Marcus, we had you on last year to talk about doing hard things.
And I wanted to have you back on for a while.
And I finally have a good excuse.
We lined up our schedules to make it happen.
We're going to talk about an idea that I stumbled across originally from Arthur Brooks.
The author Arthur Brooks called the reverse bucket list.
So we're going to dive into that.
We're going to listen to what Arthur Brooks says about the reverse bucket list.
I'm actually going to introduce some things that Simon Sinek, the author of Start With Why, also said about the idea of a reverse bucket list.
Before we get into that, Marcus, I think I skipped this last time and I apologize.
I would love to get a little bit more about like what you've been up to these days.
When we talked to you like years and years ago pre-pandemic, you were still heavy and sort of thick in the building of Noble, the apparel and footwear brand that folks certainly have heard about at this point.
But i'd love to just like catch us up.
What are you working on now?
I know noble has gone through a whole bunch of growth and a whole bunch of changes, so i'd love for you to just kind of catch us up and like let us know what.
What takes your time and attention these days?
Yeah well uh, still very much involved uh, executive leadership team at noble.
We had, you know, we have a new majority owner, mike rapoli, who and we did a uh transaction with him back in 2023.
And Mike is a co-founder of Vitamin Water, Smart Water, which he sold to Coke for 4 billion, and Body Armor, which he sold to Coke for 8 billion.
Mike had been, you know, not... Wait, is he going to sell Noble to Coke?
Is that the plan?
Because he's two for two so far.
He has a plan for growth, let me tell you that.
And it's a remarkable plan for growth, which we're really, really excited about.
And he's just a force of nature.
So it's really great be working with him and the rest of the executive leadership team, because he did bring in quite a few people that he's worked with in the past from Body Armor and Vitamin Water.
And they have experience really growing brands from where Noble was to the multiple billion dollar range, which is absolutely phenomenal.
It is not remotely an easy thing to do.
So having that kind of expertise involved in partners like micropoly, partners like tom brady, there's some really, really exciting things that are happening with all of that.
You know it's interesting because when these things happen it also creates all sorts of opportunities but also challenges.
You know, it's one of the things where michael, my co-founder, and i in these transactions go from being kind of it being absolutely every single thing that we're doing.
And when you start any business from zero and scale it, no matter kind of how big it grows, but it it can be something that happens, like with Noble
It happened so fast and grew so quickly that there was a lot of things and lessons learned along the way.
But when you go from that to then having mike rapoli involved in that team, it is something that it takes some you know getting used to in a really good way.
But it's just like i don't think i i fully appreciate it, and it's like we talked about doing hard things right.
It's like you don't fully appreciate something until you kind of go through it.
And so now i'm truly grateful for where we are with Mike Tom, the entire team and the way Noble is now really being set up for scaling into the future.
And so, just you know, being on the executive leadership team working with that has been really, really great.
It's also, you know, given me and Mike and I've had a lot of conversations around this where it's like giving me the space and the room to kind of take a deep breath and focus on some of the things that I wasn't really paying, that I couldn't focus on in those early days.
So it's like something that I've learned to become really kind of grateful for and has kind of helped me in kind of my overall growth around all of these things.
So it's been a pretty exciting time.
So I've had, you know, the last year and a half, a little bit more time to be reflective on some of the things that we're going to be talking about today.
Because one of the things if you think about Noble's kind of mentality in the early days it was all about if you want to get better at anything, it's up to you to stop making excuses and put in the work.
And that was truly a part of my identity and Michael's identity when we started the brand.
And now, with Mike involved, he's really kind of opened that aperture, expanded that perspective into being a brand that wants to inspire people to be better mentally, emotionally and physically, which for me is amazing because that is now that I just turned 54.
You know I'm super reflective on a lot of things.
Ben and I talk about this all the time, but that kind of mentality is still core to who I am.
I absolutely want to be a better version of myself mentally, emotionally, and physically.
And I've spent a lot of time really reflecting on what does that mean?
And that's why, when we started starting to talk about the reverse bucket list, it's something I think quite a bit about, not in that context, not as a reverse bucket list, but about identity and the role that it plays in all of these things.
And so I'm excited to get into it with you guys.
Cool.
Great.
Good segue into this.
So what I thought we'd do is I've got two clips.
They're both about two and a half minutes long.
We'll do Arthur Brooks first.
This is from an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast where he talks about the reverse bucket list.
And then after that, we're going to get into...
A similar two and a half minute clip of Simon Sinek talking about the reverse bucket list in a slightly different way, but in a way that I think is helpful in terms of a second perspective on this idea.
So let us first do Arthur Brooks.
Here he is on the Tim Ferriss podcast.
The reverse bucket list is something I do, and it took me too long to figure this one out.
When I was 50, I'm 59 years old.
When I was 50, I found my bucket list from when I was 40.
No, it was a classic thing.
And on my birthday I would make a list of my desires, my ambitions, and I would kind of imagine myself, visualize myself consuming or experiencing these things.
And it would fire me up and make me well kind of feel like a loser, quite frankly, because it was lowering my sense of satisfaction.
I subsequently found out
And I looked at that list when I was 40.
And I checked everything off that list, and I was less happy. at 50 than I was at 40.
I'm a social scientist, so I thought to myself, obviously I'm doing something wrong.
What am I doing wrong?
And basically, this is the problem.
This is a neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem all rolled into one handy package.
I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more.
And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn't wear off in like a minute, comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants.
Halves divided by wants.
You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more or permanently and securely by wanting less.
What does that mean?
Is I need a reverse bucket list.
Not that I'm not going to get nice things in my life, but I'm going to be consciously detached from them by going through the exercise of writing them down and crossing them out.
So on my birthday now my fifth birthday, a couple of months ago I wrote down all my ridiculous ambitions and desires of money or whatever power ambition admiration, all these things that I want from other people, that we all want, because we're human and mother nature wires us to accumulate the rewards that will help us survive and pass on our genes.
I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals, but I do not want to be owned by them.
I want to manage them.
I don't want them to be like phantasms in my limbic system managing me.
I want to move the experience of these ambitions to my prefrontal cortex, which is my executive manager, the bumper of tissue right behind my forehead.
And the way that you do that is by looking at each one of these ambitions and saying maybe I get it and maybe I don't, but I'm going to cross it out as an attachment.
You've made the decision to have it not be a rootless desire, a ghost in your head.
You've made it into something that you will consciously manage by literally experiencing that ambition in a different part of your brain.
All right, let's just jump right into Simon Sinek with his take on the reverse bucket list.
I recently had the magical opportunity to go on safari in Kenya.
And our first day out I said to the guide we're going to do this a little differently than you're probably used to doing it.
I said if you hear over the radio that somebody saw a rhino, I want you to drive in the opposite direction.
I said, the experience I want, I have no agenda.
I said, I know everybody's supposed to see the big five.
The problem with if you come in with an agenda, you come in with a checklist that if I saw four out of the five and I just didn't see a lion, I would feel that this was a failure.
I would feel like I missed something, that I didn't see, something even though I saw four out of the five big five.
I said, I don't want that feeling.
I said so.
My mindset is I would rather be by myself, alone in the vastness of the Masai Mara than rushing with a pair of binoculars, with 30 other trucks, trying to see something in the distant, to say I saw it.
This is the experience I choose to have.
Just please drive in the opposite direction every single time.
And we were, I was at peace.
We were all at peace.
We made the decision together that we just wanted to hang out and Whatever we saw, we saw.
And the experience we're going to have is magical no matter what.
We ended up seeing a leopard up close, two cheetahs up close, a lion that walked right in front of our Range Rover, walked literally right in front of us, by ourselves.
We tracked it by ourselves.
Ended up seeing a herd of over 100 elephants walk right past us with 20 babies.
There's only 35 rhino in the whole Maasai Mara.
We saw three of them and one of them had a baby and walked right in front of our car.
And we planned to see nothing.
And we kept joking that the only reason we saw everything is because we were happy seeing nothing.
I wasn't looking for it directly.
I think there is a sense of letting go and accepting that my life is good and I love my life, even if I don't get everything on the checklist.
But if I live my life with a checklist, I'll always be disappointed.
Like I don't believe in bucket lists.
Like I live my life with a reverse bucket list.
Like people have a bucket list of all the things they want to do in a life.
And if you check off 70% of that list, you will only see the last 30% of the things you didn't do.
A reverse bucket list is there is no list.
I just keep adding to the insane stuff that I've got to do, that people have got to meet.
I just keep adding to it.
And every day I just feel richer and richer and richer.
I feel like I'm missing nothing.
And are there things I want to do that I'll probably never get to do?
Of course.
Of course.
But are there things that I've done that I never even dreamed of doing that happened?
Yes!
All right.
So I loved that those two were very similar, but also looking at it slightly differently.
And before I mentioned that Simon Sinek one was from a podcast called Live Well, Be Well, for folks who want to check out the full conversation.
But I liked that.
It was almost like you know, we think about the bucket list, the normal bucket list, and it's something that we sort of project forward right.
It's something that we want to do in the future.
And especially with Simon Sinek.
What I really liked about what I think he was saying was it's actually better.
The reverse part of it is actually to look backwards and to say what have I already done?
What can I check off?
That maybe I never put on a list, but that if my past self was creating a list for the future Today, now I can say wow, look at all of these things that I would have put on that list that I've already got to do.
So kind of why I like this idea of the reverse bucket list.
I like two different angles from it.
To begin this conversation with you guys, though I'd love to just like we haven't talked about this yet.
So I'd love to just, Marcus, I'll let you go first.
Just kind of initial reaction to the idea of a reverse bucket list, the idea of a bucket list in general.
Well, I've got so many thoughts on this.
The first one though, is like when I first was watching, that was arthur brooks has some guns on him, so he's definitely someone who takes his fitness seriously, which is also, i think, a key component to happiness.
Right like it is, you know, as ben talks about the five factors and all those things, but for me it was really interesting, because arthur talks about you know, the haves and wants and, and simon talks about kind of the agenda or a checklist I've kind of always viewed and it may have been from one of these guys, I don't know exactly where I first heard this, but for me, happiness is basically your reality minus your expectations.
And if your expectations are lower than your reality, that creates more happiness.
If your expectations are higher than your reality.
That's like negative happiness or sadness or frustration.
And so in both of their examples I felt like that, especially with Simon and we'll talk more about him next but it's like seeing four out of the big five.
If your expectation was five and you only saw four.
That's kind of a negative unit of happiness, if you will, versus going in with zero and seeing four.
That's like four units of happiness.
And so the thing that I really took away from arthur's was i've never really had this kind of view of the reverse bucket list.
For me, it's more.
It's been more about who do i want to be, and we've talked about this in the past quite a bit about that kind of future identity, and what i really took away from arthur's was dissociating yes, you can have these once, of course, but just like, don't turn them into needs and recognizing that they don't define who you are.
So for me, focusing on who i want to become and i want to become somebody who has amazing experiences, that doesn't mean that i've got to go on safari and see all five of the of the big four, because for me, going back to what i was talking about in terms of what it means to be better mentally, emotionally and physically, Some of these things are really about the emotional state.
And that for me, as I've defined it for myself, involves relationships, and it involves, it certainly has some level of accomplishment in it, but it's not about the creating the checklist of accomplishments.
It's about the types of things that I want to do.
And so when I think about kind of this version of my future self looking back, I want that version to be proud of the things that I've done, and that version will have the perspective of what's been accomplished throughout my life.
So they'll be able to kind of look at it in a much more comprehensive way.
So I really like what Arthur's talking about of like recognizing and owning that you have these wants, but dissociating from them enough.
I've never thought about it, about putting it in the different part of the brain.
So it doesn't have the same effect on you, but I love that concept.
Hmm.
Ben, go ahead.
Just first initial response, reactions to those ideas or this idea.
Yeah, it's very similar to Marcus.
That's the first thing that came to my mind as well in terms of, well, not the guns on –
It was the framework of reality minus expectations, right?
And I think when people hear that they're like it becomes this truly, they try to think of it as like okay.
So the goal then is to lower expectations.
And it's not that.
It's not that like, I'm not going to expect as much of myself.
I really like the way that Marcus just laid that out.
It's in terms of, It's not the way that Arthur Brooks said it.
It's not about power, admiration, possessions.
It's truly about what markets say.
What I think the expectation should be is who am I becoming?
That is 100% inside of our control.
And we don't look at, we have this loss aversion as human beings.
It's just a part of us in our biology where, yeah, you're going to see the four of the five.
You're going to be obsessed with the one you missed.
That goes not just for the animals on safari.
That goes for any sort of ambitions we put ourselves towards, because we continue to look at oh, but that's the –.
My wife jokes all the time that when she used to come home from school and share with her mother that she – the grade she got on a test she's like I got a 97.
And her Asian mother, the tiger mom, she was like, what happened to the other three?
It's like –
It's always about that.
It's like, wait a minute, we're looking at the things that we missed.
And that is obviously not a recipe for happiness or fulfillment.
So I like this idea of who am I becoming, the character I am building physically mentally, emotionally great.
But if we are able to not lower expectations, but let go of circumstances, right?
It's more of a matter of that.
Can we let go of, and Marcus and I joke about this all the time.
I was just on, James has been on the podcast recently as well.
He was just flying back and spent a night in the airport because the flight was canceled.
It's such the great rep.
To me, this is like the ultimate test, right?
Somebody is completely 100% outside of your control.
And he's liking the people that have a really hard time handling hard.
Go after the person at the counter, at the desk.
When she doesn't have control over this, she's having just about a day as you are.
Maybe worse because she's dealing with 300 people's problems, not just yours.
And to me, it's that.
That's the gold standard that we're shooting for.
And I really like that idea of It's not about I want to see these places travel here, get that car, get that boat, get promoted, earn this, get these accolades, awards along the way to identity, feed my ego, play the status games, self judgments, which leads to insecurity.
It's all about this kind of like hacking the system to say yes to obligations that you don't want to say yes to, which ultimately quietly drain you.
This is the drift that we talk about all the time.
This is the pull that our biology and society puts on us.
And an anti-bucket list is one tool that we can sort of like pop ourselves out of that default state.
You know it's interesting, Ben.
I don't know if you and I've talked about I went to Costa Rica recently, but I missed my connecting flight and was dealing with customer service in the line and It was watching people get so upset.
And the thing that I was recognizing was well, even if I have to sit here for the night, like I have a million things I can do to make the best of the situation.
And I was stuck in New York and turns out, my best friend and the world roommate for college was in New York.
And so I just like turned it into this really exciting, fun experience.
Quite frankly, like trying to make the best of it.
And it was something that I just felt really good about, because I ultimately still got to where I was going, but I was also at peace with not being able to do that.
And so there are certain situations where those things are easier than others, but I feel like it's like it is absolutely my goal in these types of things to be a person that, like the customer service person, had nothing to do with the di scene on my plane in boston, that took too long right, and they're the only person who could potentially help me, and they tried to get me on another flight, had me run to the gate and i watched that door close, you know, and then i was like okay well, at least now, what do i do?
We'll figure it out.
I just think it's a really important, really important point you're making.
Yeah, it's so easy right like, just kind of like from afar, it's really easy.
You're on a return trip from a week in Costa Rica.
Yeah.
And people and we're going to get so rattled by the fact that we need to spend an extra few hours, maybe even a night, like outside of your desired state, your expectations right.
This is a matter of not lowering the expectations.
We want a high standard for ourselves in terms of the way we respond to to our circumstances.
It's not lowering expectations on ourselves.
It's the opposite.
It's lowering the expectations of the outside to raise the inside.
It's almost like rising the expectations of ourselves while at the same time reducing our expectations that everything else happened exactly in the order and the degree that we would like it to.
You know what?
It is exactly that.
This is the warrior mindset, right?
The victims and the pessimists look at external circumstances outside of me.
It's because of that.
They have no internal locus of control and no kind of like thermostat of the way that their being, their temperature, is changing by the outside environment.
It's like a reverse thermostat.
It's the reverse show, as opposed to the warrior mindset which is they're controlling the internal regardless of the outside.
So it's very, very much that.
But I just want to kind of say as well, like while we can keep those high expectations of ourselves, this can also eat us up.
It's at the most highest extreme of this.
It's the perfection mindset. right?
This is what perfectionists do.
It is the fixed mindset, which is like, I need to put myself in situations where I can thrive.
And we are human.
We're only going to be able to handle what we have trained for.
So the idea is, can we handle the small things better?
If we can handle the small things, then we can handle the medium things like a flight, right?
But when we get a big thing like an illness in the family, a divorce unemployment, a bankruptcy, like we're not, like don't expect to be able to handle the big things if we haven't practiced the small.
And with Again, for me, it's about identity, right?
Do you have that warrior mindset?
Do you identify as that?
Do you want to be?
Are you a person who's not going to get rattled by a delayed flight or a missed flight?
And the only way one.
You have to decide if that's who you want to be, and then you've got to practice.
You've got to take the opportunities when this discomfort comes in to lean into it and recognize it.
And also like the thing that I've learned along the way is you're absolutely going to make mistakes, absolutely going to get upset.
You know, fly off the hand whatever it may be, but recognize that's a part of it.
It's like batting practice.
You're not going to hit a home run every single time.
You know, what does it 30% of the time you hit the ball, is amazing.
So recognize you're going to swing and miss.
You're going to hit foul balls.
You're going to have things not go the, you're getting hit by a pitch.
Like some of these things are going to happen.
And if you can kind of frame it in that way and recognize this is who I want to be, the type of person I want to be, then each one of these opportunities that come up are seen as an opportunity and they're seen as practice.
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If we go back to both those clips with Arthur Brooks and Simon Sinek, I'm curious which of the two slight variants of the reverse bucket list resonate more with you guys.
On one hand with Arthur Brooks.
He says write it all down, have the desires, make them big, make them hairy on audacious goals, but then cross them off in the sense of I'm going to be okay if those five things never happen.
I'm not going to attach my happiness, my fulfillment, my satisfaction to those five things happening.
Where on the other hand, Simon Sinek says, I've got no list.
The list doesn't exist.
I look backwards instead of forwards.
Either one of you have a sense of like, that one resonates more with me than that one?
Well, for me, Simon's approach is easier to understand and appreciate.
Hard to implement in certain situations, for sure.
Arthur's, for me, is something that involves making this list.
But then when you talk about sitting with it and moving where it's stored in your brain, that's going to take work.
That's going to take For me when I hear that what I think about is identifying the discomfort I feel in some of those things and literally breathing and meditating into it and just sitting with it and observing it as a way to kind of understand it and detach from it.
So that is, I think, a really great process.
But that's something that takes some time and takes some work to do.
But both of them connect with me in pretty powerful ways.
And Marcus, when you say it takes some work, are you talking about?
I need to figure out why I am originally either attracted to that or attached to that idea.
And then the work is like, can I unwind it?
Can I unwind my own attachment to it?
Or is it something else?
Well, for me, the way I would think about it is what does, falling short of whatever it may be, feels like?
And what does that discomfort feel like?
And then it's literally sitting in that discomfort and observing it, to understand it and to let it go.
Not to remove it from a desire, but to make sure that it's something that you understand and are in control of.
And so one of the things that I've learned to do over time is, in those moments, sitting with the things and feeling it and understanding it, And then just mentally asking myself some questions around it and seeing how that feeling or emotion shifts.
And it's something that Ben Heather and I joke about a lot of times, where I talk about wanting things to be kind of directionally correct, meaning that, like I can sense if I'm facing in the right direction when it comes to a challenge.
And that comes from sitting with it and observing kind of that feeling and The more I understand it and the more I think about different ways to address it or directions to face.
It's almost like instinctively it starts to connect.
And we can certainly talk a lot more about where that comes from.
Ben and I talk about Aristotle and his concept of higher self quite a bit.
There's a lot of similarities in that that we could talk about too.
I would love to do that.
But before we do, Ben, same question to you.
Is either one of those versions of the no list or the list that you work to decouple your desires from your attachment to those desires.
Either one of those versions resonate with you more than the other.
I think it's actually the cross-section between the two.
That is kind of the practice that I try to do.
And neither one of them are exact.
So I don't literally write them down and cross them out.
But I constantly try to challenge myself.
And I've told this story before.
Heather and I were skiing with the family and we're out on a deck waiting for you know it's lunchtime and we're waiting for our table to be ready.
And it's one of those beautiful days that we're, you know, skiing in t-shirts, we're outside.
And she goes, one to 10, rank how happy you are with your life.
And like everything you just kind of like, immediately default to like what everyone does when they hear that.
It's like a seven or eight.
And then, but before I answered and we, I said, standby processing.
And then I was like, why am I saying a seven or an eight versus a nine or even a 10?
And really quickly.
It's kind of this practice where it's both this forward and backward thinking where I'm like well, what would get me to a 10?
And I was like, well, I'd really like, and bucket list things come up, right?
I like a little bit more financial security.
I'd really love to have a boat.
I really like to spend more time skiing, less responsibility in my job, like more freedom.
It's like, you just get all these like bucket list things.
And then you go like, but wait a minute.
The things I have right now are so far exceeding anything that I would have set myself up for when I was 20 and dot, dot dot.
Had I set up a bucket list and sort of like an order of operations, I wouldn't have any of these things.
I never would have written.
I never would be an author.
I wouldn't own gyms.
I never would have trained personally.
Six people that won the games and dozens of people that gone through our program have won a.
I wouldn't have this podcast.
I wouldn't have like there's I would be.
I wouldn't have married a woman that already had two kids.
Like there's so many different things that I never would have set out as my thing.
But yet, if I don't constantly move the goalposts and don't sort of like go, this is the path that I think is to happiness.
So it's kind of this backwards and forwards things in real time.
The big thing is letting go of the external, because all we always do and we all know this, you know the saying is like how many goals have you already accomplished that you said would make you happy?
Like Marcus, like you started a multi hundred million dollar company.
Like do we need?
But yet when you get there, you're like Yeah, but billions.
Like you know, it's like it's just what happens.
And it kind of sounds ridiculous to maybe or maybe not to somebody that you're either your younger self or something like dude.
You're there.
So I think it's just both like forward and backward thinking.
It's certainly not the exact of write it down, cross it out.
But it is think it, challenge it.
And it also is not like just go the opposite direction, right?
If the cool thing is this way, send me the opposite way.
But it is a little bit of like the let go of the need to direct everything and just allow the flow of life.
Marcus was down visiting us on the Cape.
We just recently bought it. house on the Cape, which is also amazing.
Like never thought that.
And we're going, like he's down to visit us and we're expecting like I'm sure he is expecting this like cool, amazing Cape day right.
Like beach, water, all that.
And we're like at our house with someone trying to figure out where the septic tank is.
And we're like with tape measures and Heather kind of sees him and she's like sorry about this, Marcus.
And he's like, I love this.
I'm just, I'm just here.
I'm here right now.
And not being like coy and not being facetious like truly, you could say like he was.
He's already used this word multiple times.
He was truly at peace.
Like we don't need to try to force ourselves into different situations to be at peace.
You know, it's really interesting about that because it immediately connected the dots with some of the things that Simon was saying, right.
So In that, Simon's saying he wants to go the opposite direction.
I would argue in that situation, a way to think about it was.
He also said he was there with some really good friends and that they wanted to focus on connecting with each other and being in the Serengeti.
How cool is that?
For me, when I go down to the Cape to visit you and Heather, it's like I go down for two things.
One is to hang with you and Heather and to work out with you and Heather. that literally is it.
And so what?
Typically when I get there, we we hit the barn and get in a workout and then, like we'll go grab a bite to eat or whatever it is.
And so like, whether it was going to see inspect the septic tank or not.
You know, whatever it was, it was, I was just hanging with the two of you and we're laughing about it and and all of those things.
And it was just I was fully present in those moments, because building relationships that matter is, are a part of kind of the better version of myself emotionally, quite frankly.
And we talk about surrounding yourself with people who are additive to your life.
That's an example of it.
And so I had an absolutely amazing day inspecting septic tanks with Ben and Heather.
I love that you pulled that out, Marcus, in terms of the relationship and the connected part.
If you're here to kind of take both of these.
What they're both essentially saying is what we're looking for is calm and connected.
When you are trying to go and do and accomplish and achieve and just for the sake of the next thing to check off, it creates a level of anxiety.
It creates a level of anxiousness.
It creates a level of a gap between where you are and where you're supposed to be.
That's not a calm environment.
When you're at peace with where you are, that's calm.
And the next part of it is connected.
Like When Simon Sinek is able to do, let's go the opposite direction, as the frenzy, the herd is rushing that way the traffic, the cars, all that.
Let's go the opposite way so that I can be with the people I want to connect with.
It's this frenetic versus connected.
It's this calm versus anxious connection.
That, in terms of the anti-bucket list, is what we're trying to really do is again pull back.
Separate from what everyone else is going to say, is the thing right.
And kind of go, no, this is the path to fulfillment.
This is the path to meaning.
This is the path to true fill in the blank for what a meaningful life looks like.
You know, it's interesting.
One other thing that Simon said that really kind of connected with me is he's like something about people doing things to say they saw it.
Right.
And it made me think about when people go to concerts or big events or whatever, everybody's on their phone taking photos, even though, like you, most of the time these events are being recorded or photos are being taken.
And it's something about people wanting to show or say that they were there.
You know, anytime I've done this, going back and looking at those things is like how often do people actually go back and look at those photos?
Are you doing it because you want to share it on social media versus being there and being fully present with the experience?
I think it's just such an important point around presence and appreciating where you are in any given moment, as opposed to thinking about what will other people think.
What will, how will this be perceived and trying to share, Hey, I see I was there.
This is exactly what it looked like from my perspective.
I've had this.
It's so cool.
You said that Marcus, I've had that conversation quite a bit recently.
There's videos of kind of like concerts from like 30 or 40 rows back from the mid nineties.
And everyone is like, Just you can see it is like... Hands.
Yeah, hands.
Like they're feeling it.
Like they're actually feeling and experiencing the music and the performance.
They're essentially like a part of it, right?
The crowd is actually a part of the show.
And then there's videos of concerts in 2025.
And it's literally just like 4,000 cell phone screens up in the air.
No movement whatsoever.
Just recording what's going on.
And you know this is again like old guy complaining type thing, but I just, you see this, a lot of people, even simple things of like going for a run and they're recording themselves talking to the screen on the run to kind of like share that later instead of actually just truly experiencing fully the run.
They're doing it for another purpose, instead of the actual purpose of what it's supposed to deliver, which is you connecting with your breath and your body and the feelings.
And if we want the physiological, emotional, and mental, you have to be there fully.
Otherwise, yeah, you get the physical.
Like if you run for 20 minutes at a nine minute mile at a 155 heart rate, your body doesn't know whether your mind's somewhere else or not.
You get the physical.
But if we want the mental and the emotional from that experience, You need to be where your feet are.
You have to be experiencing that thing, not distracted, not detached and thinking about something else at the moment.
That's a good segue into something, a third idea that I wanted to insert into this.
And it's from a book called Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy, which we're going to have Jim on the show shortly.
So I'm in the midst of reading it.
Marcus, have you read this book yet, Inner Excellence?
I have not.
It's so good.
And his next book is equally as good.
I haven't gotten to the next one yet.
Okay.
So tease for that episode.
I'm reading them both at the same time and it's wild.
I literally am reading like this to my kids at night.
Oh, really cool.
Marcus, you would love it.
I haven't gotten to the second one yet.
You will certainly love it.
What's Jim's last name?
Murphy, M-U-R-P-H-Y.
So I'm trying to read a little bit that I highlighted and I wrote a note to bring this up in this conversation.
And I think, Ben, what you're saying, what we've said so far is relevant to it.
So he says, to gain maximum freedom you must be willing to fail and not be attached to your desires.
With no expectations of how things need to unfold, you're free to handle any obstacles.
In the pursuit of mastery, these eight attachments, in no particular order, affect you the most.
And here are the eight.
One, how you see others.
Two, your money and possessions.
Three, what you want or your goals.
Four, comfort.
Five, your past.
Six, how things are or the status quo.
Seven, expectations. or eight yourself and all the parts that you associate with you.
And again, those are the eight attachments that stand in the way of our pursuit of mastery.
I just think that's a great list, especially in light of this idea of the reverse bucket list and some of the ideas that you guys have been talking about.
It goes to the same thing as elite performance.
This is the inner game of tennis, Tim Galloway.
This is flow.
This is peak performance.
When you have these expectations, judgments, the outcomes, what is on the other side of this?
What are my parents going to think?
Society, the rewards.
And that is the thing that you know.
The saying is your performance is equal to your highest potential, minus distractions.
And all those things, those eight things you just listed are the distractions.
So if you're able to, Simon Sinek's words, like let go of those, Arthur Brooks, cross them off.
It's not about winning.
It's not about the medal.
It's not about the next contract.
It's not about how many points I score.
It's not about whether I win this point.
It's not about what my parents think.
It's not about am I good enough or not. you remove all those distractions.
People think distractions are loud noises, right?
I'm trying to concentrate.
I'm distracted by the loud noises, the pings of Slack or email or notifications, or the weather could be a distraction.
I'm so damn hot.
I'm so damn cold.
Those are all distractions, but people get distracted.
That's what normal mental toughness training is.
Can you put out the physical distractions?
Can you deal with the pain of burning leg muscles, lactic acid?
Can you deal with it being so hot?
Can you deal with your heart trying to rip through your chest?
That's where normal mental toughness training goes to.
That's actually toughness.
That's dealing with physical discomforts.
The mental aspect is can you let go of the internal distractions, which are so much more challenging to face but so much more powerful?
Again your peak performance and you can sub that out for sports, business relationships or peak life right.
Your potential in life is your potential.
If you were born with a certain IQ and athletic ability and size and you had certain upbringings and opportunities to certain coaches that's potential minus distractions.
That's really good.
I like that.
And I like connecting it to what you just said and Jim's list, connecting it to what I think we often think of when we think about the actual bucket list right,
When people create a bucket list, what tends to be on it?
It tends to be things around money and possessions, things you want, about being comfortable, about how things are.
Certainly about expectations, right?
And so I love this idea of distractions and the bucket list, recognizing how often the things we put up on a bucket list are, in fact, distractions.
Distractions from what our ability to, right here, right now, show up as our best for whomever we are showing up for.
I think there's a hierarchy to this.
So in the beginning, in order to get people started off the couch, A goal can create inspiration.
That's what goals are there for.
Like Marcus said, I want to be going in this direction.
What Marcus has realized is a specific goal can be massively distracting.
And I don't need to be there.
I know I want to get closer to my best self.
I don't have a perfect path or definition of what that is, but I know if I'm going the wrong direction.
So anything above zero compounds, I'm going to go in this direction.
So in the beginning, a goal, if you're a couch potato, a goal of let's lose 15 pounds.
Let's exercise three days a week.
Let's take 10,000 steps.
Those are good goals.
But eventually, there's sort of like a path to which the goal then becomes a distraction.
If you're working with super high-level athletes...
The goal of, I want to be MVP.
I want to win the championship.
I want to get the next contract.
That actually becomes incredibly distracting as they follow through the process of trying to become that type of person that would have an MVP-like season.
The next contract.
And all we have to work on is the process in the person and let go of the goals at a certain level.
So that's where goals kind of like come into play.
But then they come sort of like the anti thing as well.
Right.
Yep.
Yeah.
And it's also kind of the size of it, right?
Like if it's somebody wants to lose 15 pounds but they identify they don't identify with that, that version of themselves.
It may become overwhelming around the 15 pounds.
But if the goal is smaller, that it's like I haven't ever gone for a run or I don't run but you want to run a mile.
It's not starting with a mile.
It may just literally be getting up off the couch and going for a walk around the block and then doing that consistently and then expanding that.
So if your goal is something that's kind of easier to achieve, that may be helpful.
But for me, I keep coming back to this.
I feel like I'm a bit of a broken record with this, but it's about Like, how do you?
Who do you want to be?
And this is a part where Aristotle talks about this higher version of a higher self.
And when we're walking that path or we're on that journey because for me it's all of these things are more about the journey than the goal.
And that's one of the things, even at Noble, like we in the early days, like we didn't celebrate the wins or the medals, we celebrated the work and the effort.
And if you want to get better at anything, you know, it's discipline, effort, and consistency.
And so once you start doing that thing, that's where mental toughness comes into play.
It's like, do you show up for yourself every day and put in some level of effort?
You know, Ben, you've used the analogy of like walking through the door at the gym and showing up.
You don't have to give 100 effort every single day, but you do need to show up regularly and consistently.
And so this concept with Aristotle is if you're walking that path, you know, your body knows it, your nervous system knows it and it creates positive feelings.
So that's why I always talk about like directionally correct is when I'm feeling that way.
But when I'm feeling off, It's often because I am off that path.
I've deviated.
I'm not walking.
I'm no longer on the journey or I need to kind of self-correct.
And so this is a thing that's been discussed a lot from a philosophical perspective around the journey and the power of the journey and the power of kind of identity and the higher self and what that pursuit is.
So as long as you're taking steps on the path, you don't have to be on it all the time.
But if you keep moving on it, it helps really build who you are going to become.
Ben, you and I have talked about this a lot.
And I just realized I was talking with him a good friend of mine, Jay Heinrichs, who you both need to meet, and I'll introduce you.
I was talking to him yesterday and I realized I had not introduced the two of you to him yet.
But he's the one who's really introduced me to Aristotle and this whole concept.
Some of these things I kind of stumbled upon on my own, just kind of my own self-reflection and work.
And then he gave me kind of the language to express these things more clearly.
But if you guys want to go on a deep dive around any of that stuff with anyone, Jay is your man.
Here's the question and a big reason why I wanted Marcus, you to join us for this conversation about bucket lists and reverse bucket lists.
And you already alluded to it, right?
With Noble, the success of Noble, the scale of Noble, the growth of Noble and the fact that you guys are trying to sell a sneaker company to Coca-Cola.
I mean, that's just, that's a really big goal.
So talk to us a little bit about how do you balance those?
And Ben, it's a question to you too, because I know you're as ambitious as anybody.
How do you guys balance and think about these big, even if they're just sort of loosely defined big projects goals, things that like okay, I'm trying to get myself in that direction whether it's just to sell Noble for 2 billion, whether it's to buy a boat.
How do you balance the big and the right now, right here?
How am I going to be, or how am I going to show up as that higher, better self?
It's interesting when Arthur talked about when he was 40 versus when he was 50, around all those things.
I think we all evolve over time and you learn through successes and failures and challenges and gain wisdom through at least for me kind of through experience.
And so where I've kind of landed with these things now is really starting kind of in the future.
And I don't necessarily outline exactly where that is going to be, but what do I want it to feel like?
And then I break that down into bite-sized chunks.
Like literally.
I can tell you what an ideal day feels like for me and what I would be doing in that ideal day.
I can tell you what an ideal week looks like, an ideal month, an ideal year, an ideal life.
And so it's start with this end in mind and really how you want it to feel, not about I want to see five of the big five, but I want to have amazing experiences with friends and then work backwards on those things all the way back to then.
How do you get it?
Like okay, so what do I need to do today to walk that path and recognize that it's not always going to happen?
You're not going to have 365 perfect days.
You know, you may have only a few perfect days.
But if you're, you know, was it Heather with the 97 versus 100?
Like, you don't even need to be like that.
But if you're doing well and you're doing it consistently, you're going to improve or achieve some of these goals, if you will over time.
But it starts with showing up and it starts, for me, with breaking it down into easily understandable and chunks that you can show up for on a daily basis.
And one of the things when I kind of outline my ideal week, I recognize because historically I would say okay, here are the things I need to do every day here, the thing like and I've given myself some grace now where it's like I am not, It's not realistic for me to be 100 compliant with anything.
So I build in slack into the system because I recognize I'm going to need that.
So it starts with some big, amazing things that you want to feel related to your future self and then work backwards.
Is it also, though, Marcus, for you, is it also a recognition that...
A certain amount of money that I make isn't going to make me happy.
Certain status of being the guy who built the thing isn't going to make me happy.
Buying a bigger house isn't the thing I'm in.
Did part of your journey towards where you are today go through a stage where you were maybe chasing things that don't matter and you've learned oh, those things.
Even as I get closer to them, I recognize that that's, that's not the thing.
That's not what actually ultimately is going to make me happy, fulfilled, or satisfied.
Absolutely.
It was at Mike Tyson says, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
So you can have some really big, audacious goals and reality.
Sometimes, will you know, hit you like with a billy club.
And then it's just like, wait a minute.
And so there's been a lot of that that's happened in my life, where I get too caught up in kind of what's happening and losing sight of what truly matters.
And so it's only with like deeper reflection.
Ben and I've talked a lot about this.
There's certain kind of this perspective that can only be gained by going through hard things that really make you kind of step back and evaluate.
And it's also, you know, when I think about mental, emotional and physical strength.
Physical, there's protocols for all that stuff, right?
It's just like, that just comes down to showing up and, and doing the work.
Mental and emotional are things that require much more reflection at least for me around those to understand.
And it requires a deeper understanding of yourself and a ability to really self-reflect and really kind of think through what has worked, what hasn't worked why, what can you learn from it.
And that's a lifelong journey, quite frankly, at least for me.
And it's like I've learned.
I know a lot more now than I did two years ago, than I did when I was 40.
And I hope I know a lot less now than I'm going to know in two years or when I'm 60.
So for me that's just kind of the way I really am thinking about these things and recognizing the lessons that I've learned and appreciating those as lessons, even the painful ones.
And sometimes it's the hardest ones that you learn the most from.
Mm-hmm.
Ben same question to you about setting big goals but not attaching your identity or your definition of success to achieving those goals.
How have you over the years, how have you moved through that to a place now where it feels like you are still obviously aiming for big things, but not attached to those things happening and certainly in any timeline?
I really where Marcus went with it in terms of you know, I have a really strong understanding of what my ideal day, my ideal week, month and year looks like.
That as the North Star, I think is incredibly directionally correct.
Yeah.
It's the Jordan Peterson has had.
The quote is like your life is not perfect.
The seven days you spent in Jamaica sipping margaritas on the beach.
Your life is the feeling you have when you walk through your front door after a day of work and your wife greets you.
That's the North Star that I've continued to try to move myself towards is what does the ideal every day look like?
And once you go towards that, the bucket list falls apart, because that's the antithesis of a bucket list.
A bucket list is like, yeah, but I also want to do a safari.
And I would also love to get that other possession.
And I would love to create that achievement.
The way I think of these things is yes, I still have those big things, but they are all in service of getting me closer to my perfect, ideal regular state.
It's not to go and detach from this thing.
It's that thing on repeat.
And then, all of a sudden, the resources that we are shooting for become beneficial to creating the meaningful things, like a better relationship with my wife and kids.
I want to go and be able to ski with them whenever we can.
If I don't have the financial resource to be able to do that, that becomes limited.
It's not financial resources so that I'm as successful as my father was, or so that the neighbor goes wow, they got a new car.
They must be doing really well.
It's so that it can service this connection and experience that we find so much joy in and joy in terms of the thing that we get closer because of it.
So I think that if you were able to kind of create that framework of it's the same thing for the business,
I want the business to grow so that we can do even more impactful things, so we can do even cooler things with cooler people, right?
It's not about so that the bank account gets another zero behind it.
I think that is kind of the differentiator between a traditional bucket list and this anti-bucket list.
It always comes back to our saying of like, are we chasing what truly matters?
Or are we chasing what we've sort of inherited, what other people chase or what even like, our biology says?
And this is what Marcus, like I love what he said is.
It's that deep, deep understanding of self and challenging the normal thoughts, beliefs and desires that we have.
Because you have those thoughts, beliefs, and desires doesn't mean that they're true.
We all see life through a artificial lens that colors it based off of so many different factors that we are so unaware of.
And only once we challenge ourselves in terms of those thoughts beliefs, do we get to kind of get to a truer version.
And what actually brings me joy, not pleasure in the moment that's gone and we move the goalposts.
But true, like true joy.
Last question to both of you, which is, you know we talked about, let's imagine the guy who wants to run a mile or run a marathon, starting on the coach.
The goal of running that mile, running that marathon can be enough of a magnet or gravitational pull to get them up and go for that first run and that second run and the third run.
It doesn't seem like either of you are particularly motivated by what we might call like a smart goal, right?
I think through this conversation, I think we've come to a really nice place of recognizing this idea of kind of being directionally accurate, which I love.
But for folks who are out there who their entire lives has been well, I'm motivated enough to do these hard things because of the finish line that I've articulated for myself, whether it's a bucket list or whether it's just like I want to make this much money.
I want to live in that neighborhood.
I want to drive that kind of car.
I want these kinds of people to think I'm impressive, et cetera, whatever those things might be.
What advice do you have for them to move perhaps, away from those kinds of goals and more towards kind of what Marcus was talking about at the beginning of this conversation, which was who am I becoming right?
So it's not what do I have or what will I have, but it's who will I become?
Who am I?
How do you start to move somebody or shift somebody from that more finite mindset to the more infinite mindset?
Marcus, any thoughts?
For me, the way that I've been focusing on that, you know, over the last couple of years is really starting with.
You know, as an Epictetus first decide who you you will be, then do what you must.
And so it's spending time thinking about that kind of future version of me.
And I use the framework you know that we talked about earlier related to like micropoly, which is about noble and and becoming a better version mentally, emotionally and physically.
So I've used this mental, emotional and physical framework and have gone deep in those things in terms of who I want to be mentally, emotionally and physically and then break it down into what does that actually look and feel like, where?
Physically again, it's super easy.
I can tell you what that kind of ideal you know, body comp, mile time, like all of those things are.
And then I've, and I follow comp train and that's kind of how I progress towards that.
That's kind of the easiest kind of piece of all that, but then also mentally and emotionally identifying what that looks like and feels like.
And this is where it was really a powerful unlock for me, because on the emotional side it really connects with relationships and the people that I spend time with.
And so then it's putting together kind of what that is, and then working backwards and And so for me it's been breaking that, identifying who that is, and then breaking it down into again kind of the daily actions, weekly actions, because it helps me become that version of myself.
And, as it relates to identity, I am someone who walks that path because I've been doing that consistently enough where it's starting to really shape who I am.
And then there's other things that really kind of kick into play there around pride and motivation and being someone who does, you know, hard things, you know, being someone who doesn't get rattled because a flight, you know, got canceled.
It's not something that I, in the moment, I'm like, oh, I want to be this way.
It's like, I've been thinking through a lot of these things ahead of time.
And I view them as opportunities when some of these kind of challenges come up.
Ben, any response to that or just any thoughts on the advice for?
It's right on, right?
Like it's, it's about being the type of person that, I think that's a big difference, right?
It's being the type of person that not I can run a mile, I can run a marathon.
I am the type of person that will dot, dot dot, follow the process to become and Marcus just said it comes down to the day-to-day.
I've been hugely influenced in terms of my coaching style in this way, where it's not about goals.
It's not about, as you said, like somebody has the goal of running a mile, running a marathon.
It is, okay, tell me that.
So I have some sort of like again.
Marcus is directionally no, but Nick Saban did this as well as anyone ever.
And then Kurt Zanetti, who is the coach of Indiana, who took his team from the worst losing program in the history of NCAA to The first year he got there he got them to the final four and the next year he got them to win the national championship only undefeated team by saying it's not about winning the championship.
It's not about the goals.
It's about what are we doing in practice today?
And take that to our lives.
How are we practicing our lives today?
There's a really high-level.
I think it's a coach of Purdue men's basketball and he His saying is when they ask him about goals, his saying is I'm just not really into goals.
What I'm looking for is just to have a really great practice today.
That's the goal, is how awesome can our practice be today?
So take that in the shape of our lives.
It's not about seeing the big five and you only get four and now you're disappointed.
It's not, I want to be able to make a million dollars.
You make 500K and you're disappointed.
It is, am I doing everything I can with what I got for where I am right now today?
Stack that on top of each other, everything above zero compounds, and you end up probably in a better place than you expected.
Nobody, probably including the coach, was expecting Indiana to win the national championship in two years.
So if they had set that goal, I think it would have been way more of a distraction than a benefit.
So it's not the goal.
Everyone that lines up for the 100-meter race at the Olympics has the goal of winning.
The goals aren't the differentiator.
What is?
It's who can give the most to the moment.
Can goals be a benefit to that?
Early, early, early, early on.
At that level, no, for sure.
Can they be a massive distraction?
Yup, hugely.
You know it's an interesting thing, because one of the things and I hear you talk about this all the time Ben, and it's controlling what you can control.
And one of the things with that, like when I had this really interesting conversation the other day when I was talking about kind of this concept of wanting my future self to be proud.
And that is, it's not because I don't want other people to be proud.
It's not because I don't want other people to think highly of is because I can't control what other people think of me.
The only thing I can control is what I do and how I show up and own mistakes that I've made and all of those things.
And my end goal with that is if that future self is proud of all of the things combined the successes, the failures, the wins, the losses, the stumbling and all of those things, then the people in my life who matter will be proud too.
And if they're not, there's nothing else I could have done about it.
And so I think that when it's the people showing up for the 100 and getting to that starting line did they put in the work.
Did they do every single thing they could to win the race?
And if so, they should feel proud about it.
And if they go in with the expectation starting to bring these things back together, they go in with the expectation of giving it their all and being proud of the effort they put in when they step to that starting line.
That's very different than going into it and saying, I'm going to go win this race.
They're going to have different emotions at the end of that race.
So I think that's just a very important point to keep in mind.
Love that.
Marcus, it's always good to talk to you.
Thank you so much for coming back on and talking to us about this idea.
Awesome, guys.
Thanks again for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
Two quick things before you go.
First, if you want even more from this episode, go check out the full five three, one breakdown.
We give you the five big ideas from the episode, three reflection questions to help you process it all.
And one key takeaway that you can put into action right now.
The link is in the show notes.
The second thing while you're there, check out the chase club.
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