The Anti Bucket List: Stop Chasing What You Already Have (w/ Marcus Wilson)
5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Takeaway
We explore the concept of the reverse bucket list — a powerful reframe that shifts our focus from chasing future achievements to appreciating the extraordinary life we’ve already built. You’ll learn why crossing things off your ambition list (rather than adding to it) might be the fastest path to lasting satisfaction, what Arthur Brooks and Simon Sinek’s different approaches to the reverse bucket list have in common, and how the traditional bucket list may actually be one of the greatest distractions standing between you and your best self.
Marcus Wilson — co-founder of NOBULL and a longtime friend of the show — joins us for a rich conversation about identity, detachment, and what it really means to become the person you want to be.
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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS
1. Satisfaction Is Haves Divided by Wants
Arthur Brooks offers a simple but devastating equation: satisfaction = haves ÷ wants. You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more — or permanently and securely by wanting less.
Brooks found his bucket list from age 40 when he turned 50. He had checked everything off — and was less happy. The problem wasn’t the goals. It was the attachment. He wasn’t managing his desires; they were managing him.
The reverse bucket list is his solution: write down your ambitions, desires, and attachments — money, power, admiration — and consciously cross them out. Not to eliminate the desires, but to move them from the limbic system (where they act as compulsive drives) to the prefrontal cortex, where you can manage them intentionally. You’re not saying “I won’t pursue this.” You’re saying, “I refuse to be owned by it.”
2. The Bucket List Is a Distraction in Disguise
In Inner Excellence, Jim Murphy identifies eight attachments that interfere most with peak performance and peak living: how you see others, your money and possessions, what you want or your goals, comfort, your past, how things are (the status quo), expectations, and yourself. Sound familiar? That’s essentially a traditional bucket list.
Your performance — in sports, in business, in life — equals your potential minus your distractions. Most mental toughness training focuses on the external distractions: noise, pain, weather, discomfort. But the internal distractions are far more powerful and far harder to face. The bucket list feeds them.
When we chase achievements, accolades, possessions, and status, we’re not just setting goals — we’re creating a running gap between where we are and where we think we’re “supposed” to be. That gap produces anxiety, not ambition. Letting go of it isn’t lowering your standards. It’s raising them — but for the right things.
3. Be Calm and Connected, Not Anxious and Frenetic
Simon Sinek’s version of the reverse bucket list looks different from Brooks’s, but the destination is the same. On safari in Kenya, he told his guide: if you hear someone spotted a rhino, drive the opposite direction. No agenda. No checklist. Just presence.
He ended up seeing a leopard, two cheetahs, a lion walking in front of his Range Rover, a herd of over a hundred elephants with 20 babies, and three of the 35 rhinos in the entire Masai Mara — including one with a baby. As he put it: the only reason they saw everything is because they were happy seeing nothing.
What both Sinek and Brooks are really pointing toward is the same two-word destination: calm and connected. The bucket list creates frenzy. It creates a herd mentality — rush to the rhino, record the concert, chase the next milestone. The reverse bucket list lets you drive in the other direction. It makes room for presence, for relationships, for the kind of experiences you never would’ve put on a list in the first place.
4. Identity First, Goals Second
Marcus spent years building NOBULL from zero — a multi-hundred-million-dollar brand. And yet, arriving at those milestones didn’t deliver the satisfaction he expected. What he’s learned: the goalpost always moves. The achievement never lands the way you think it will.
What has worked is a shift from “what do I want to have?” to “who do I want to become?” He draws on Aristotle’s concept of the higher self — the idea that when you’re walking the path toward your best self, your body and nervous system know it. There’s a felt sense of being directionally correct. And when something feels off, it’s often because you’ve drifted from that path.
As Epictetus put it: first decide who you will be, then do what you must. Start with the identity. Let the goals serve the person, not the other way around.
5. The Ideal Day Is the North Star
Ben’s practice isn’t to write down bucket list items and cross them out. And it’s not to have no list at all. It’s to constantly return to one question: What does my ideal regular day look like?
Not the vacation. Not the safari. Not the win. The Tuesday. The moment you walk through your front door after a day of work. The workout, the conversation, the dinner. As Jordan Peterson puts it: your life isn’t the seven days in Jamaica — it’s what happens every ordinary day.
When that’s the North Star, the big goals reorder themselves naturally. Financial resources matter — not for status, but because they create more access to what actually brings joy: skiing with your kids, visiting your friends, doing meaningful work. Everything becomes a means to the ideal day, not an end in itself. And once you frame it that way, anything above zero compounds — and you end up somewhere better than you ever could have planned.
🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS
1. What’s on your mental bucket list that, if you actually got it, probably wouldn’t make you as happy as you think?
Think about the specific achievement, possession, or milestone you’re most attached to right now. What story are you telling yourself about how you’ll feel once you have it? Arthur Brooks checked off his entire bucket list by age 50 — and was less happy than at 40. Where in your own life has this already been true?
2. The last time something outside your control disrupted your plans — how did you respond, and what does that tell you?
Marcus missed a connecting flight to Costa Rica and ended up having one of his best days. Ben’s friend spent a night in an airport after a cancellation and watched people rage at gate agents who had no control over the situation. Think about a recent disruption in your own life: a cancelled plan, a missed goal, an unexpected setback. Were you the person storming the counter — or the one already texting your best friend?
3. What does your ideal ordinary day actually look like — and how close are you to living it?
Not the highlight reel. Not the bucket list moment. The regular Tuesday. What would you be doing, who would you be with, and how would you feel walking through your front door at the end of it? Where does your current daily life match that picture — and where is the gap? What’s one thing pulling you away from that vision that you could let go of?
🔑 1 KEY TAKEAWAY
Stop chasing what you already have.
The bucket list is built on a lie — that happiness lives somewhere out in front of us, waiting to be achieved. But as both Arthur Brooks and Simon Sinek discovered, the relentless pursuit of the next thing doesn’t deliver lasting satisfaction. It delivers a moving goalpost and a quiet, persistent sense of not-enoughness.
The reverse bucket list isn’t about lowering your ambitions. It’s about reorienting them. It’s about asking: am I chasing this because it will genuinely make my life richer — or because I’ve inherited it from my biology, from society, from the status games we all play without realizing it? It’s about building the kind of awareness that can separate desire from attachment, and goals from identity.
Marcus put it simply: I want that future version of myself to be proud. Not because other people will be proud — he can’t control that. But because he can control how he shows up, how he responds, how he walks the path. And if he does that well, the people who matter will notice. And if they don’t, there was nothing more he could have done anyway.
That’s the shift. From chasing what you might one day have, to becoming the person you want to be. From anxious and frenetic, to calm and connected. From bucket list to reverse bucket list — not a list of everything you still need, but a growing record of everything you’ve already been lucky enough to do, experience, and become.
The life you’re looking for might already be yours. The work is learning to see it.