Ben Nemtin

Ben Nemtin is the co-founder of The Buried Life and a #1 New York Times bestselling author. The story behind both is the reason he's one of the world's most in-demand motivational speakers.

In his first year of university in Canada, Ben sank into a crippling depression — severe enough that he dropped out of school and left his rugby team. He realized he'd been "living the life I wanted other people to see, not the life I wanted for myself." So, with three childhood friends — Duncan Penn, Jonnie Penn, and Dave Lingwood — he made a list: 100 things to do before we die. They bought a rickety bus and set out to cross them off. The twist that made it a movement: for every dream they completed, they helped a complete stranger accomplish one of theirs. They named it after a 150-year-old Matthew Arnold poem, The Buried Life, about dreams that feel buried.

The project became a hit MTV series, The Buried Life (2010), and the message reached millions through The Today Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show (Oprah called their mission "truly inspiring"), CNN, and the major networks. Along the way Ben crossed off more than 90 of his 100 dreams — including playing basketball with President Obama (who called Ben "an inspiration for a new generation"), writing a #1 New York Times bestseller, and helping strangers in ways that turned into hundreds of thousands of dollars in giving (including $100,000 to the World Food Programme and $300,000 to Keep America Beautiful).

Today Ben has delivered 500+ keynotes to brands and Fortune 500 companies worldwide — over half of the Fortune 100 among them — and is ranked among the world's top motivational speakers by Global Gurus, which has also named him one of the world's top organizational-culture thought leaders for five consecutive years. He is the author of What Do You Want To Do Before You Die? and The Bucket List Journal, and an outspoken mental-health advocate whose entire career is proof of a single idea: anyone can do anything — and believing it changes everything.