Life’s Way Too Short Not to Live Your Bucket List: Travis Bell (Transcript)

Full text of Travis Bell’s talk: Life’s way too short not to live your Bucket List at TEDxMelbourne conference.

TRANSCRIPT:

In the spirit of adventurous minds, grab the zip at the front of your forehead right now. All right. And make the noise with me. Ready?….zzzzzz

Make the noise under your head. Whatever noise you feel is appropriate. Scoop out your brain. Look at your brain and just go… (make sound)

Nice. It’s got nothing to do with his talk whatsoever.

All right, close your head back up and zip it back up….

Now with that brain, because in there is your ‘to-do list’ swimming around with your bucket list, isn’t it? But guess which one takes priority on a day to day basis until something dramatic, traumatic happens to you or someone close to you.

Time to wake up. It’s time to live your bucket list before it’s way too late. So over the next whatever minutes, I’m going to help you separate you to do lists from your bucket list. Okay. And we’re going to shift priorities just for a second.

So let’s grab that Brain, you’re still got it. All right. And now you’re going to screw it. You’re going to crunch that little brain battle; Big brain. Good on you champ.

So we’re going to mush it down to a piece of chewy and we’ve got a pop it under a seat and hopefully the Melbourne convention center is cleaned up all the other brains.

We want to have an adventurous mind. See, a bucket list is a tangible life plan, where career plan or a business plan should fit into our life plan. Not be the other way around.

What is it: Work to live or live to work?

Sometimes. Get it confused, aren’t we? We’re so busy being busy. It’s like these weird badge of honor that we, “you know how I am! Busy as the one-armed drummer, you know me.”

What are you bragging or complaining? 

Who’s ever suffered from mondayitis?  Thanks for your honesty.

Who’s ever experienced hump day and not the hunt day that you wish it was.

Note to self: can’t believe, I just did that on a TED stage.

Who’s ever experienced or said, thank God it’s Friday, the Vivian franchise chain after. And who’s ever had that sinking feeling at about three or four in the afternoon on a Sunday?

Ouch. It’s all part of our urban vernacular, isn’t it? Part of the matrix, sign to reprogram these guys. And we’re going to give you a formula blueprint for how to write a personally meaningful bucket list.

It’s a 12 step formula. Yes, it sounds a little bit like… You might need a couple of drinks afterwards, but let’s get into it.

The average age of death in Australia is 83 for you girls and 79 for us blokes. So right now we’re going to represent that by 80. 80 squares, that’s all we’ve got time for.

Now, once you mentally cross off the ones that you’ve been alive, each square represents a box from the top down and left to right. So if you’re 40 something like me, 43 year old man with a Mohawk. Thanks.

But half of them and a few more gone. How does it make you feel?

Wow. We bought the motivation speaker. Look, thanks took a day off for this chain, Thanks champ.

Serious question: How many people in here know people have been diagnosed or died from cancer? Show of hands. Thank you. Have a look around the room. Keep your hands up.

Alright now on your fingers, count how many people do you know have been diagnosed or died from cancer? You know, just like the movie, ‘The Bucket List’. Show of fingers, let’s see them nice and tall.

Now have a look around the room.

Thank you.

Now how many of them made their 80 squares. Life’s way too short not to live your bucket list. True.

So what we’re going to do is separate our to- do lists from our bucket list and start to maybe reprioritize the importance of why we’re all here. So your bucket list is a tangible life plan where our business plan or career plan needs to fit into it.

Like I said, but it’s also about the journey on the growth of you. On the journey of a ticking all this stuff off your bucket list. But more importantly, it’s about that you that exists on the other side that you that you don’t even know yet. And that’s our potential.

And when we see our potential, when we feel our potential, that brings a smile to our face. And the Dalai Lama said, ‘happiness is the meaning and purpose of life.’

So let’s get into it. First of all, we’re going to write a reverse bucket list.

What is a reverse bucket list?

I invite you to think about a funeral. Wow, this gets better Trev. Who’s been to a funeral lately?

The funerals are pretty web 2.0 and it’s your highlights reel of your life. You know all the pictures, the videos, all to your favorite song and then see you later.

If that was to play right now, would you be stoked? Would you be happy or would you be, you know what, I could have done some more?

See my mission whether on a stage like this, or even one-on-one… My mission is to help people live a regret free life rather than a regretful life. Life’s way too short, isn’t it?

So reverse bucket list. So here’s how it works. You put stuff on your bucket list, you take it off, you put it on reverse bucket list. You put a nice little folder. Let everyone who’s close to you know where that folder is. When it’s funeral time, let’s drag out that folder and put your… and here’s my favorite song. So that’s what a reverse bucket list is.

Really the key is guys, it defines something cool. Something, you know, our businesses or our careers should spit out two things and two things only, and that’s to spit out the cash flow and also the time flow for you to do the things that you want to do in life, yeah.

Double bonus though, if you love what you do and you find flow in that, and it hits your internal rulebook your values, and that’s the Holy Grail, isn’t it?

There’s so many people out there right now that are just sleepwalking through their life. They’re living by default rather than design.

So I invite you to start designing, stop living by default. Stop buying into the matrix. And start building out this reverse bucket list because a reversed bucket list is basically a big gratitude list and it’s so good. I’ve worked and been through depression. This alone is a massive gratitude exercise.

When you can reflect on all the cool stuff that you’ve done in your life, it really seems to your heart. It really gives you that, that feeling of thankfulness.

So I invite you to start building out your bucket list. And this is not just for you, this is for the people that around you. Pay it forward. Please pay these messages forward, but be a living, breathing example of what a leader, a Bucket Lister in our lives look like.

So I’m going to give you a blueprint, the my bucket list blueprint. Here we go. It’s a 12 step formula. As I said before, it’s a little like AI. Are you ready? All right.