Trav Bell expounds on the crucial role of documenting one's bucket list as an integral step towards realizing and achieving personal goals.
Only worry about the ‘what’ and ‘why’
Trav: I want to add just quickly, something to that, Nick, too. People watching and listening to this right now, you might think, ‘I've already got a bucket list’, but it's actually in your head, what you've got to do is to actually write it down, separate it from your daily to-do lists, because your daily to-do list is the one that gets done first priority. That's the one we're all worried about. So I want you to separate the two and actually write it down, put pen to paper, it's a conscious process.
So what happens when you put pen to paper writing goals down the bucket list items. What you're basically doing is typing them into Google. Google is your reticular activating system, what that does is sought and distill the search engine to give you the answers for those search terms.
Now, if you put Everest base camp, I can guarantee and you write that down as part of your bucket list, if you want to do that, guaranteed that the universe, the search engine of the world, your reticular activating system, or sought generalize, you'll start noticing different conversations, you start following different people online, you'll be starting to search more yourself, obviously, you start paying attention.
And before you know it, the universe will provide the how. So when you're writing, a lot of people don't write goals down in the first place, because of fear of failure, fear of disappointment. If I write this down, I don't want to disappoint myself and make a promise that I can't keep, so I'm not going to write it down.
So my advice around that, and a lot of people literally said to me, I don't write goals down because of that. Wow. So someone in their ecosystem has imprinted into them why they cannot cannot do something—their own psychology is getting the better off them.
But hear me when I say this: when you're writing goals down, it's so important to only worry about the what and the why not about how. What and the why: What is it? Why you want to do it? What's your personal reason for wanting to do it? And not worrying about the how—the how over complicates, it just complicates the goal.
So if I want to climb Mount Everest, for instance, using that analogy, if I start thinking about the how, I'm going to be thinking about every little step, every little, you know, rope pull, or where the crampons are gonna get every little micro step in that process. And it's just going to overcomplicate it, I'm just gonna go not too hard, I know you're gonna write it down.
Or running a marathon, you want to run a marathon, or write a book—that’s a big task, but if you actually think about every little process, in the writing, every little bit of the how, in the writing of the book, it will overwhelm you and you won't even write it down in the first place.
So just write what the item is, why you personally want to do it, because you'll have a personal reason for doing it. And I always say give it a rating out of 10. So 10 is like super inspired, super motivated to, you know, this will be a big regret if I don't do this.
One to five, you couldn't really care—take it or leave it, whatever. So the key is to identify your sevens, eights, nines and tens in terms of inspiration level, and then definitely write, you know, because you'll have a big personal why for that. And then just let it go. Write it down and just let it go. See what the universe provides, before we know it.
And by the way, you get to tell enough people, too. Because those people could be the resources for you to collapse the timeframe between where you are and where you want to be. So it's good to tell people you got one of the best ways to lose weight, is to actually to publicly announce it on Facebook because people want to support you, they don't want to pull you down. So I genuinely feel the world's pretty good, and they want to support each other.