YouTube Channel: @dothethingformula

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. So it's so cool when people know what you're doing and what gets you excited, and then they get to tell you about people that are doing things that are truly unbelievable. And actually, that's how I met my next guest. The guy that created the platform that my podcast was based on had heard my next guest on another podcast and had told me about her story. So she wrote a book. And I'm really excited to dive into the book and how it came about and really just her story in general, because I also ended up having her on the do the Thing expert panel for the Start a book challenge. And just the wisdom and the depth that she's able to go when she's connecting to something that's true for her and that is a lived experience is really amazing for others to be able to hear. And I know I really connected to her story, and it's just so incredible to get a chance to talk to her directly about this as well. So I'm so excited to welcome Laura to the show. Hi, Laura.

Hi, Stacy. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Thanks so much for coming on. I really. I really appreciate it. I would love to start off and just have you share your story and all about you.

Sure. So I wrote a book about finishing my dad's bucket list. It was 54 items in almost six years. But I did that over the past six years. I just finished in December, just finished the book in January. And the catalyst for my writing the book was my getting married in 2016. And the bucket list was written by my father, who had died 13 years prior in 2003, because of a distracted driver.

I can't even imagine what happened. So you, in terms of you reading the book, this bucket list, and then it basically, what happened from there. So you. You got to see the bucket list, and then what was your next step?

It's so interesting. Everyone always wants to know about that moment. How do you. How do you decide to take on something that seems impossible or seems ridiculous, maybe even. Or, you know, maybe even exorbitantly expensive? It actually wasn't, in the end, that expensive. I just, for the hell of it, I looked through it last night to figure out how much did this thing cost me. We can get into that later. But I had this feeling come over me that wasn't unlike when I said yes, when my husband proposed and wasn't unlike when I made the decision to move to New York City as a young girl for a Magazine internship. Neither of those choices are things that have certainty attached to them. And yet I felt this calling. Sometimes you hear about the idea of the hero's journey. And if the hero gets a call and either they have the choice to answer it or not, that's really what it was like for me. It was that I have now come across a moment in my life where I can choose to do this or choose not to. But regardless of the odds of finishing this thing, something is compelling me to do it.

Yeah.

And I'd love to talk about then. How did you get started? Because a lot of times we feel compelled to do something and then we might do it, or we might wait. What was your first step from there?

Yeah, I couldn't wait at all. I think, you know, the other thing that that was happening around the same time that we found the list was we were going through a lot of political change in our country. And so a lot of things sort of felt in flux anyway. And so that was one of the reasons that I got started right away. Because the first item I wanted to do was run 10 miles straight. And I had already signed up to train for the LA marathon. And the reason I was doing that was because I was disappointed with the results of the 2016 election. And I chose to channel that disappointment into doing something good for people just because I was excited about being a woman, quite honestly. And so, yeah, I was running for Girls on the Run. It was an organization I really cared about. And. And to me, it felt like this was what my father would have wanted me to do, is to try to. Girls on the Run is a group that raises awareness and confidence and encourages young girls through running. So I just felt like it was something he would have really believed in. So that's really. I mean, when you're training for a race, you kind of have to get started right away. Cause there's a limited time frame of when you're going to be ready for it. So I think that was a big part of why I truly did get started right away. But I would say as well that like anything, there was a lot of beginner's luck with it. So where you just have a lot of success early on and then you start encountering some obstacles maybe a little bit later. So doors started opening for me that I might not have been prepared for that or that might not have been open in the past as soon as I made the choice to say yes to this.

I love that you said that because I think there's so many people that don't realize once you say yes to one thing, it just opens up all these other things for you and you can't even imagine it until it happens. Can you kind of go a little bit more into that?

Sure. I mean, I was. I've been a writer my whole life, but I wasn't employed as a writer. I was a copy editor for a national magazine for women, for Good Housekeeping. And I had been working in national magazines for, I think about seven years at that point. Any time I wrote, it was sort of like on the sly, you know, oh, here's we need a TV recapper. You know, that would be what I did. And I loved it. I would have so much fun doing it. But nobody was paying me to do it, and it wasn't part of my job description. So at that time, I had been working as an activist for about a year in distracted driving. And that was purely because at work, a Good Housekeeping. An article had come across my desk one day about distracted driving. And I thought, oh, my gosh, all these alarm bells went off in my head, like, oh, that's what it was with my dad's car crash. I never even knew until I saw this story. So I really think that story was almost faded to appear when it did. And I called the man who was in the story. I started speaking with him in high schools and I started training for marathons. I raised money for him through the marathons. And then I actually was called to attend a conference in Chicago. And then when I came back from the conference, I was telling the editor at Good Housekeeping who worked in the features department, all about everything I learned. And she actually agreed to publish a story about distracted driving. But she and all of her superior editors, they all kept saying, you can't write it. It's too. It's too close to home. You have too much experience with this. And they wanted it to be a very straightforward story. So that story was sort of already in the works. And then all of a sudden, the second. The managing editor, the second editor to the editor in chief, she said, we need a more personal touch. And they asked me, they said, can you write a personal essay of some kind? I had a couple tries that didn't really work out. And then she saw my blog that I had just started for doing my dad's bucket list. So she said, that's the story. And then a couple weeks later, that was now the entire story. Wow. Like a three page feature in a magazine. So it was like these things were just happening very Rapidly that I had not experienced before. And then I was called to do a talk at a press conference in Washington, D.C. for the National Safety Council, which is a group that works on safe driving. And they said, oh, we're going to get you on the Today Show. And now I have my magazine saying, oh, no, we're going to get you on the Today Show. So it's like my head started to explode a little bit, like, what's going on here? But that. Yeah, you're right. I mean, that is typical of if you say yes to doing something big that you're meant to do. What I've learned about is that things like that do happen very, very quickly. That's not to say it's going to be like that the whole time.

But that is what happened early on. Yeah.

It's amazing too, though. Through you doing your dad's bucket list, now you're creating awareness for distracted driving. So it's like you're now able to do both things.

Well, that is how it started. I had this feeling when I was learning about advocacy. I just had this feeling there could be other avenues of doing it. I think it was just the writer in me. I wanted to see a movie. I don't know. I kept thinking about the movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and what a difference that made in understanding aids. And people don't know about this or remember it, but during that time in our country, that was something that was very misunderstood and there were a lot of misconceptions about it. But you put someone like Tom Hanks in that movie, and suddenly everybody cares about it because he's a very lovable person, a very relatable human being. And I just kept thinking, that's what this needs. This needs something like that. And so that was in the back of my head because I just felt like there was something about the way I was going about my activism that maybe wasn't putting my story in other people's minds as though it was their story enough. So when you're a writer and you're thinking about those things, you're wondering, well, how as a writer, could I repair that? So that was really what this was helping me with. A lot of it, too, was that I felt like it was going to check off certain boxes. Forgive me for using a bucket list term. I felt like it would just. Just because it's such a fun idea, it's such a fun story to be talking about my dad's dreams. I'm not talking about what was interesting about his life, but Rather what made him feel alive. And I think that that's something that people really connect with because everybody has those things in their lives that they really care about and they don't always necessarily do so to be a person who is actually doing them. I thought that would be an interesting idea. What I really didn't comprehend at all when I started out doing this was that I actually had several different parts of my life that were keeping me feeling stuck and not very alive in the way that I was going about things for a variety of reasons. One of them being that I was still somewhat traumatized from my dad's death. So I really had no idea that I was the main person who was going to be helped by doing this. But that is absolutely what happened. And that actually somewhere along the way ended up becoming the thing that mattered more than anything else. And, I mean, that's one thing I would recommend to your listeners. If doing the thing. If the thing that you're yearning to do is something that's actually going to help you more than it helps anyone, that's not a selfish thing because you're actually sort of a microcosm of everything else. So whatever you're doing to help you translates into however else anyone is consuming what you've done.

Well, yeah. And now look how much you being able to take the risk and taking this on is now inspiring other people to be able to go after their dreams.

It does seem that way. It's nice. I. I really appreciate it. To me, that's sort of a bonus because the journey for me really was just doing the whole list and being able to write about it. Because when I got to a point where I was starting to write about it, which, by the way, is a list item, he wanted to write and have a few novels published. So that's how I excused all the time. I said, it's a bonus to me that it's helping so many other people. But the moment of success for me was the day that I put down the computer and had finished writing the book. Because that was almost like the end of my journey with it, in a way, which was really what mattered the most. And I think it's important. If you're going after something that other people are calling impossible or that feels really out of reach to you, that's a really important thing to keep track of. Because there's going to be moments during it where people are really cheering you on and are saying, oh, I want to do this and you're so great, and blah, blah, blah, and there's also going to be times where they're like, you're crazy. You know, what are you thinking? And you have to sort of develop this. This ability to really just listen to your own inner voice in those moments. So, yeah, it is. It is wonderful that it's having the effect of inspiring people, but the greatest gift for me really was just that it helped me heal myself.

And I'd love to talk about something you mentioned in the expert panel for the Start A Book challenge was that it was easier for you to do these things on the bucket list because it was for your dad, and that's what gave you the courage to be able to go after them. And I'm just. I'd love to just explore that more with you.

Yeah, it's sort of a thing I'd never heard about before of someone doing, with the exception maybe of. You hear these stories about how a mother develops superhuman strength to lift a car up off her baby or something like that. I think it's akin to that feeling. My dad, if you're lucky. I know not everyone has a father like this, but if you're lucky, your father just thinks you can do anything, thinks nothing is out of reach for you, and encourages you to just go after your heart's desire in life. And that's the kind of father that I had. So. So when I was doing his dreams for a greater purpose, I was trying to have this expression. I think now what it really was the whole time was I needed to have this outlet of my love for him while at the same time being reminded of how to live my life. Because when you're starting out as a newlywed, you kind of would like to have your. Your dad's advice, you know, you would like to have his guidance. And I really didn't have that in the way that I thought I was going to. And I needed it to balance out what everybody else was telling me, because sometimes what other people were telling me wasn't quite what was right for me. So to get back in touch with that was the gift to me. And my gift to him was just my way of saying, look, it was actually an amazing thing that you had all these dreams and that you wanted to go after them. I'm so sorry that as an angsty teenager, I was so embarrassed of you. Like, that's really what I was doing. And because I was trying to really repair this bond in a way, which when someone dies suddenly, we don't always have the chance to. And my love for him was so overpowering. For me. And I knew that he would never let me fail at any of the items that I tried. That really, it just created this new confidence and sureness in me. I was already a pretty determined person. I mean, I had already. I mean, I worked eight years to get a job in national magazines. And that meant not always doing work I wanted to do to get there, Recognizing that everything was sort of a rung on the ladder to the next step. So, you know, and I had started running marathons. You have to be a pretty determined person to do those things. But this was a different kind of determination. Because I think what this was was not just having the stamina and the endurance to keep after something, but rather developing the faith I needed to keep going even when it seemed impossible or to keep going even when I encountered obstacles that in the past, I might have personalized or I might have just could not see any way around. But with this, it was like, there's gotta be a way around this. And not only that, but this is happening for a reason. I injured myself on one of the list items pretty badly. I tore a tendon in my foot, and I actually had to get foot surgery. And I got to a point where I couldn't even walk. That was definitely the lowest point of the journey. And to recognize in that moment that even though. And also I'd lost my job that year. So to recognize, okay, my career, what I identified with as a magazine editor seems gone. My running career also seems gone. My money was definitely dwindling at that point. Everything that I thought maybe who I was and a successful adult had basically gone out the window. I was having to defend, depend on my husband to help me walk to the bathroom. And even at that moment, I still said, I'm gonna finish this. I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna keep doing this. I'm gonna see it through just for the sake of doing it. It doesn't really matter if this becomes a book. It doesn't matter what it takes from me. Cause it's already taken what feels like everything. This is something that's important that I have to keep doing. That probably was one of the most important lessons I've had my entire life. To understand that clearly who I was and what I was about. And sometimes you need to have things stripped away from you to that level to get there.

And I'm wondering, is that where the title came from? The. Because it's my father's list. And then How Living My dad's Dreams Set Me free. Is that where that stemmed from that identity, I guess.

So it's honestly, it did take a long time to me to come to a subtitle. Didn't just show up one day. As you know, writers understand that it set me free in so many ways. It was setting me free from this trauma and grief that I was, that was unresolved in me that I was still carrying A lot. A lot of it was anger, you know, you get. I think it's natural for a person to become angry if their father should die at the hands of a 16 year old girl or 17 year old girl because she made a mistake, because she was lost and she called someone for help. That's really what it was. So there was that part that needed to be set free. But then the other part that was being set free I think was the real me. I think as each list item was requiring that I strip away these parts of my previous life, which really sometimes were just constructs. They were just things I created to become who I thought I needed to be in the world. They weren't necessarily true expressions of who I was. And the list itself was so demanding sometimes that those things had to break away. And at first I would panic because I would feel like, okay, well where am I going? This is who I was. But I don't know who, like at that moment on the couch when I was like, why am I doing this when I couldn't walk? So there was that element of it. But I think also beyond letting go of my trauma, I mean, grief isn't a thing you necessarily let go of. I think people have that their whole lives in some degree, but it's certainly lessened. But I was letting go of trauma. I was letting go of a false self. But I think even bigger than that, I was letting go of ideas of what my life was supposed to be and recognizing for the first time that a lot of times I think we come up with these beliefs about ourselves that aren't necessarily real, that aren't necessarily truth. And we don't even really think to question them because that's how ingrained they are. And I don't want people to go lame their parents for this because sure, some of it can be passed down because our parents aren't perfect people either. I happen to have wonderful parents, but they're not perfect people. And sometimes they're just coming from the world around you. They're coming from your society, they're coming from tv, they're coming from things that maybe don't always have your best interest at Heart. And when we're little kids we don't know that, so we just sort of absorb it. And because I'm doing these 54 sometimes very unusual challenges, it's having the effect of over those six years, first of all, of breaking me away from a traditional path that I had been on. So that already is making me think for myself a little bit more and maybe think a little bit differently. But it's also having the effect of forcing me to accept that I'm doing that. Which before that would have been anathema to me. I was the person who would come home from cousins weddings just raging and crying because I wasn't married yet. That's the person I was. I was so like I'm being left behind. When is my adult life going to start? And not just for that, for multiple reasons. If I didn't get the job that I wanted and somebody else did. A lot of people live that way. I think maybe slightly more so because of the social media world that we're living in. It's having a really deleterious effect on teenagers, girls particularly. And the truth is that that's a bit of a prison. And until you can break free from it, it becomes very difficult to understand what it really is that's going to bring you fulfillment and a sense of purpose in your life because that's something that's unique to you. So I was set free in a sense that I embrace that now. So it's sort of like in the last year of the list I got really good at doing stuff by myself, which is not something I ever did before. I remember friends teasing me when I was 18 cause I wouldn't even go to the mall by myself, you know, like, like that's ridiculous. But that was a baby step for me. I did go to the mall by myself in college, but now I went to Europe by myself for two weeks. I trained for triathlons and half ironmans by my. That's a lot of time by yourself. Sometimes you're doing 10 hour training weeks for that. I got really good at that. And, and that really I think is an essential ingredient to doing the thing because you're creating environments where you're only really listening to you and you're better able to filter out what's coming in that maybe doesn't match what you're trying to do or who you are.

Yeah, and you're really making me think about how important it is for people to understand that you're flexing the muscle each time you're doing Something So your comfort edge is getting bigger and bigger with what you can do because you're getting to see, okay, I got through that really uncomfortable and hard thing. So now I can go a little bit more and then go a little bit more. And each time it's still hard, but it gets easier and easier.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. That is what was happening. I mean, it was fear exposure over and over and over again, or training of some kind, like psychological cognitive training, which is so what my dad would have been about.

So that's part of how I know is fear is the person is what's helping me here. He just, he loved that kind of thing. He loved the idea of self actualizing. And they talked about it. I don't know if it was his whole life, but the whole time I knew him. But I mean, a perfect example of that is I'm about to turn 45. And what I would really love to do to celebrate that is spend a night in the woods by myself. And I told one of my good friends about that last night and she was like, that's crazy. I'll go with you. I said, no, you're not. You're missing the point. I want to see if I can do it. It's just one night. It's going to be in a. At a camping area where there's other people, where my husband and I always go. We've gone multiple times now, just the two of us. And I want to feel like I can do it because there's a sense of accomplishment there for me in a sense of. I know that if I have survived something like that, which really isn't that hard to survive, but I know that if I have now, I'm going to have this mental toolbox going forward because last year I tried hiking the John Muir trail with my cousin. It was supposed to be a 10 day trip and I bowed out on the first night because I thought I was getting hypothermia. Whether or not I was remains to be determined, but it sure felt like I was. And I think I, I just, my fear trigger went off as soon as it started happening. And it had already been kind of a rough night filled with disappointments anyway. But I, I think at the same time of my being afraid that I might die on the top of that mountain, I also. There was something in me saying, you're not ready for this. What happens if you get separated? What happens if you have to fend for yourself? And I knew that I couldn't or it would be Extremely hard. It probably was not a good idea for me to read that backpacking magazine on the plane on the way. Or someone got. So I got stranded in the woods for four days. Cause I know I'm thinking that's gonna be me. Of course I read it thinking I was being practical. But my feeling is that you, you do have to sort of prove to yourself you can do something before you do something like that with somebody else. So that's part another reason why I'm doing it. But you're right, if. If I had not gone through this list, if I had not finished this book, if I had not done so many things over the last six years where I'm challenging myself over and over and over again, that would definitely not be the way I was celebrating my 45th birthday. That like, that would sound like a nightmare to me.

I'd love to hear also just how you even attacked it. So once you got started, you saw the list, you had this immediate pull to want to do it. And then you saw the one that was the 10 mile one, which I think you said was the first one that you thought would be easy to knock off since you were already running. How did you then attack all the other ones? Did you have a plan for the whole thing or was it one by one?

It sort of happened organically at first. So what I noticed that one of the items said visit la and we were going to LA anyway for the marathon I had already signed up for. And so that was going to be both visit LA and run 10 miles straight. Because I thought, well, I'll just run half of it and then the rest of it I'll run and walk. And I told my friend who had kind of just started dabbling in running, she really hadn't done it. She had just done her first 5k. I told her about that idea and she's like, oh, no, that's crazy. By the time you do the last 16 miles, you're gonna be so tired. And then I found out because I was raising funds for girls on the run, I could do it relay. I said, well, don't worry, I'll get a partner to help me. And she just really blew me away because she's like, no, I'll help you. So she took that on herself and we did it together. And it was just such a beautiful thing because it was her accomplishing a dream she didn't think she could. And really it set the stage because every list item ended up being like that to some capacity. They're very. I Can't think of one quite honestly. Even, even type 40 words a minute correctly was one I had. My brother helped me with and he beat me and he did it faster than I did. But I'm really hard pressed to think of even one that I did alone. And it was always somebody else getting out of their comfort zone too. So that was a big part of it. I was sort of made to feel not alone almost every single time. And it was a beautiful thing because it's like here I'm maybe inspiring someone else to do that just out of charity and generosity and a shared sense of purpose that we both had and whatever it was. So, I mean, I think that was probably the main thing that helped me cope with my grief too, because I remember the main thing that I struggled with when my father died was this feeling of aloneness. Being 25 and feeling like no one around me quite related to what I was going through. But beyond that, beyond people coming to me sometimes because people were very excited when I first started the list. Like I said, beginner's luck. Beyond people coming to me and wanting to talk about it and saying, well, what can I do? I want to contribute. I knew I did need some kind of a structure going through it. So one day, I guess about eight months in, I just sat down on my Google calendar and I mapped it out. And I knew it was like a very rough map, but I was okay with that because I had just gotten through training for marathons, which as everyone who runs knows, that's a rough map. There's going to be days where it just doesn't happen. It's not the end of the world if that happens. And beyond that, I had just gotten through planning my own wedding, which was a very rough map, except for when people need to get paid. That's usually pretty, pretty, pretty definite. And it was interesting, I think, those two experiences of planning a marathon and planning my wedding, which happened simultaneously. I finished the New York marathon. I guess it was about eight months before I got married. I don't know why I felt compelled to do them at the same time. I think I thought it was, it would be great stress relief or something. But because I had already done that and I understood that if you're training to get somewhere, you have to have a schedule, but that schedule doesn't have to be set in stone. And because I myself, I don't ever have any kind of self belief that I'm going to be really good at a schedule. And that humility for me just comes from the Fact that I was diagnosed with ADD when I was a teenager. And so here I've already been told most of my life, you're terrible at following schedules, you know, and you're your own worst enemy and you're not going to be on time. And I had people telling me I was going to be late to my own wedding. So I had to just take it as a joke because it's like, well, yeah, they might be right about that. So for me, it was like I wasn't a person who ever felt like she was at liberty to control the agenda anyway, because my worst enemy was my own self when it came to time. So I think that actually helped me a lot with this because I knew I was up against a lot with scheduling and I had gotten accustomed at that point for at least, I don't know, 20 years of my life, needing to change things all the time anyway because I struggled with my concept of time. So I'm already a person who has an extremely optimistic concept of time going into this, maybe too optimistic most of the time. So that was helping me a great deal too. I think if maybe you don't have that issue of ADD and you're not a person who's always having to change things anyway, it could become something that works against you because it could become like a rigidity or a need to know what's going to happen. And with something like this, you really, you just, I just, you have to let that go.

Yeah, there's something really powerful about that idea of just being flexible and open to what happens next.

Yeah, I think I just was already like that. I suppose the only thing I wasn't like that with was just this trauma induced belief I had adopted that maybe I would die in a car crash too, before I turned 54, which was what happened to my dad. So, I mean, it's taken a lot for me to let go of that belief, but I think there are elements of that belief that made me kind of insistent on living right now and living in the moment. My uncle actually died very young. My dad's younger brother, he died at 38 and he was an extra just because he worked at the school in that movie, Dead Poet Society. If you watch that movie, you can see him in a background scene. And he loved Robin Williams. He met him a couple times. He has a picture with him and he loved the message of that movie, which was carpe diem. So when he passed away, all of his kids, they all say carpe diem all the time. That's part of his legacy. And I really think that is a thing that is a shared experience among anyone who's lost a parent at a young age. So even though sometimes that's a life philosophy that affects me negatively, in this case, it was. It was a benefit.

What was the hardest thing you had to do on the bucket list?

Well, writing about it, for sure. And that's still happening. The book will be out in June. I'm done with the edits. We're pretty much. We're now. We're at the layout stage, but, yeah, having enough patience and confidence to be able to do that. I was an essay writer and a TV recapper, like I said, but I'd never done something of this length, so. So, yeah, that by far was the hardest. But I would say probably the second hardest was own a large house in our own land, which, you know, we both work in publishing, and we weren't at a place yet where we were ready to do that. And I really wasn't sure. And so I remember someone being like, oh, maybe it's going to be a birdhouse. Like an exceptionally large birdhouse. And it was interesting because I got accustomed at some point doing the list to recognizing, I think, like I was touching on earlier, that even when an obstacle came, even that was for my greatest good. I mean, if you can think that way about, like, oh, I can't walk for three months because I'm sitting on a couch because of a stupid tennis injury. You can kind of think that way about anything, I think. And when the pandemic started that it very clearly created a huge obstacle because I had thought I'd be done by December 2020. I set a deadline for myself right away. I just. At that point, I knew I wasn't going to be. And I had to figure out, what am I going to do? How am I going to make this happen? Anyway, so I just started focusing on things that I could do at home, like plant an apple tree. That's something I could do on my balcony. Make money in the stock market. That's something I can do from home. So many things that could happen here didn't have to be out. I mean, obviously, go to Vienna was something that had to wait because we weren't allowed to travel. But. But it's interesting, though, because even the idea that I was headed to Vienna eventually sort of helped me get through the pandemic because I thought, well, that someday that's happening. And I just kept thinking about the Billy Joel song, right, Vienna, because there's a lyric in it that goes, vienna waits for you. So I just kept reminding myself of, Sunday, we'll be out of this lockdown. But there were elements of the lifestyle we had to create because of the pandemic that now we're actually helping with the list. So, for example, one of the list items that seemed the most impossible was, own my own tennis court. And I had no idea. Someone's like, oh, maybe you can donate money to a charity and they can put a little plaque on a public court. What ended up happening was in March, my husband bought me a portable ping pong kit. And, you know, that's table tennis. That's technically tennis. So that's how I checked, because we at that point in March 2020, nobody knew if they were ever going to leave their house again. So that made sense. By that summer, we were starting to get kind of restless. We were one of those families that locked down a little more severely because my husband was considered high risk because of his asthma. So we really just didn't see anyone we knew at all for 15 months. And we needed to get out. We needed to find a way. And I had never been a person who went camping, maybe like, one time in my life, but that was what we adopted. I bought a backpack, I bought all the gear, and we just started going out. And my husband bought this tent. And he. I don't know why, but he bought one for three people instead of two. And I'll never forget just sitting there watching him set up this tent and him talking about how large it is. And it was, in that moment, very poetically, it occurred to me, this is our large house. You know, own a large house and our own land. For. For that entire summer of the first year of the pandemic, we started running every single street in our town just because we were restless. And I had already checked off on a black tux by being photographed in one. So I. So, I mean, I did technically own it. I bought it, but also I'm now temperamentally owning it. Like, oh, she really owned that. That's sort of what it was like. So I already have that idea in my head. And now we've run every street in our town. So we've owned our town in that way. So to me, that meant we were owning our own land. I thought, well, this works poetically because before this lockdown, we were in New York all the time for work. Montclair, New Jersey, is a place where we just slept. It wasn't a place where I had a sense of home necessarily. And I really, I think, needed that for my healing, and that's really what the lockdown was giving me. So I thought it was important that we checked it off that way. So even the things that seemed the most daunting, that seemed the hardest, if I just kind of gave into the process, if I went with the flow of what was happening, they. They found a way of working out. Maybe not in. In a way that seemed the way it would from the beginning or the way someone else might define it, but it worked out in a way that made sense for me.

Yeah. And that's the whole reason why you were doing this, was to get to know yourself better and be able to heal through this experience.

Yeah, I didn't. I mean, I didn't know that. I didn't know that at the time, but. But in a lot. And to get to know my dad better, too, to. To understand him from a different angle, from a different light. I mean, I'm sure people would find it ironic that when he died, I viewed him as a person who couldn't finish things. He was really good at starting things. He was a big ideas guy, and he was a salesman. So he always had a new product he was pitching. And it's sort of like at a certain point, maybe around the time I was 16 or so, I realized, okay, well, he's really excited about water bottles right now, but in a couple months, it's going to be something else. Of course he was prophetic, because at some point later, everyone will be drinking out of water bottles. And at that time, they didn't yet. It was all. There were water fountains everywhere. But sometimes I think he was just almost too ahead of his time. He would have a great idea and it wouldn't catch on because people couldn't grasp it yet. And the person I saw was just someone who's jumping from idea to idea to idea and is never creating a legacy, is never finishing anything. Because I had a very limited view of what that meant, and I started adopting this fear. What if I'm a person who can't finish things? And I think sometimes, even though we love our parents, there are elements of who they are that we're afraid of or we're afraid of becoming. And when people get that way, they. They resist it and they think they're making choices that make them the opposite. And sometimes, even though you think you're making the opposite choices, you still become that. I think usually people experience that with parenting more than anything else, but the way I was experiencing it was in my chosen Career path, I thought, okay, well, I have to stay at a steady job no matter what. And that meant, even though I love copy editing, I'm restricting my writing opportunities because I'm choosing to do that. And it's very time consuming. The work it required from me was just all hours. If I had stayed at my full time job. I can't see a world where I finished this list and I can't see a world where I finished the book. So even though it appeared to be a thing that was practical and someone who finishes things and someone who is steady and stable, I wouldn't have been seeing my own dreams through. And that's a problem. So it's sort of like as hard as I was trying to not be him, I was becoming him. So I mean, so that's an important element of it too. Beyond. You said I got to understand myself better and that was the whole reason I was doing it. Like, yes, it was. And I didn't know that. But I could only get there. I could only get to a point where I was understanding myself better. Once I had acceptance of him, once I had a better chance to understand. And this is why he thought the way he did. This is why he did what he did. And I forgive him. And he was just a human being. I had to get there first to get there for myself. And I think, quite honestly, I do think that that limits a lot of people. When you can't do that, when you re. When you truly think you're that different from the people who raised you, how.

Do you think by doing his bucket list that helped you see him differently?

I understood that he planned. I understood that he was organized. If you had asked me that 20 years earlier, I wouldn't have said that. I would have said, he lives by the seat of his pants, you know, because it seemed that way to me. His bucket list was only the first item that I found of his that proved this. As I went through the mission, it just seemed like I was fated to discover just these little treasures along the way when I was ready to. So it's like at one point during year one, I found this notebook that he had dedicated to my brother and me. And it was beautiful. And he was gonna. He's like, this is dedicated to these. I can't get there without crying. Two shining lights in my less than brilliant life is what he called my brother and me. And he thanked us for permitting him to love us. And I thought, oh my God, that's how my parent felt about me and how he felt about himself. That was a real revelation. Then in that summer, when I started working on a book manuscript, I found outlines he had created for himself for his own book that he wrote in the 70s. And the way these things just kept showing up, I couldn't help thinking, okay, he knows his spirit is part of this for sure. Because otherwise, why, why is he letting me find these things exactly when I do and showing me, oh, this can be done. Here's how I did it. And when I finished the first 200 pages of manuscript, which, that actually ended up being cut down quite a bit, just a, you know, rough first draft. But I found his briefcase. And in the briefcase were articles about self publishing. So every step of the way, I'm learning. Oh, you know, maybe my dad wasn't this dreamer who didn't get anything done. Maybe he was working on a masterpiece the whole time. And maybe this is what it takes. This is the work it actually takes when you do those things. And I think until you approach doing something that feels unique to you and is a creative pursuit, you don't really know that. I'm sure there. Most people I talk to about my book probably think I just, it came out of me in one night. And we know that that's not. That's not really how it is.

Yeah, I'm so curious too. From the moment you found the list to now you're publishing the book, a lot of times when people are starting something, they think they have to know every step that's going to happen along the way. They don't realize it could be one step and then another step, and then things like you said, open up as you go. And I'm just curious, did you think you were going to do a book in the beginning or was it meant to be a blog? Or was it just meant to do the list? And then everything else sort of just followed suit.

As I mentioned, I did have this idea that there needed to be a movie about someone who had died this way. So I was sort of viewing my dad as this Tom Hanks character. I didn't know that it could be a book, but I knew that that was maybe more my forte. So maybe it could be a book. So that's sort of where that idea emerged from. I was writing articles and essays about my dad or about distracted Dr. And I have to say the beginner's luck thing applied to that too, because this is even way before I discovered the list. I'm suddenly getting these essays and articles about my father published very easily in big places. Like the Washington Post published me, Runner's World published me. That was kind of unheard of. If you looked at my career up to that point, because I had been working at OK magazine as a copy editor, recapping the TV show Lost, like, other than a very early job at the Associated Press, that really those were my credentials and the Washington Post said yes to me. So I would advise your listeners doing anything creative, if you notice that doors are opening in ways that they haven't before, that's a, that's a sign. That's an early sign that you need to stay on that path and the universe will give you breadcrumbs. So I think as those things were happening, whether it was about distracted driving or was about my relationship with my dad, I'm definitely getting a very clear sign from the universe that I should pursue writing about this. So that really was where the origin of the book came from. I just thought as I found the list, okay, here are my chapters. This is a structure of a book, these list items. So yeah, I did have that idea early on, but I wasn't doing the list so it could be a book. I was doing the list so I could do the list. They're kind of two separate entities, I think I didn't understand early on that my present day experiences doing the list, that that would be the book. I didn't get that. People would tell me that. I had a first agent who was telling me that. But when you're doing something, you don't think it's interesting. I think in general, people are like that. Even if I'm sure someone, if they heard me say that would be like, who are you crazy? You're doing your dad's bucket list. That is very interesting. But I didn't think of myself as an interesting person by any means. So why would I be writing a book about me? I thought it was about my past, I thought it was about my childhood or about my dad. But yeah, it really was gonna end up having to be. Most of the structure of it was gonna have to be present day. Me doing these list items, that was what really people loved. For some reason, they, they put themselves in my shoes, I think, in these situations. But yeah, I, I think you're right. I think it does. You know, you need to be a little open with what you think the thing is as it's developing. Because really, I think once you agree to embark on something like this in any creative endeavor, and I'm even learning from this conversation as we talk about the answering existential questions I already had. But I think once you agree to that, the flexibility is required because you're. I think you're channeling energy so much bigger than you. Right. So you have to work with them and. And accept that your limited human understanding can't always get there. And I don't mean, like human as opposed to alien. I mean, like human as opposed to divine human as opposed to the muse that is inspiring you. So. So, yeah, I think it is. You have to be open to that. And I mean, we touched on this a little bit before, but I think I had maybe a unique capacity for that because of my dad's death, because of the way that that happened. And even my parents divorce. That happened when I was 6. And that felt sort of. Because I was so young, that felt almost inexplicable. You explain to a young child the best you can, but it was still. Both were events in my life where all of a sudden there's this enormous loss and you don't understand why. So I think I already was a person who was extremely flexible with what could happen. So I. And that's. That's important too, because people can get stuck in that. They can feel like, well, why bother. Why bother doing anything if God is unforgiving and life is terrible and these horrible things happen to us, we're so vulnerable as human beings. And I think maybe that is an issue lots of people would be dealing with even more now because of the pandemic. But I heard an interview around that time with Stephen Colbert, with Anderson Cooper, that really touched me and changed the way I thought about that and what they said in it as grieving sons, and Stephen Colbert's case, it was, his father died in a plane crash, and so did a couple of his brothers. What they said in the interview was, once you realize that anything is possible, meaning the worst, you realize that anything is possible. So if the worst can happen to me, the best can, too. It just. People who go through something really tragic, whether or not they realize it, have almost an edge in that way because they get like, oh, okay, so if the floor is not the limit, the ceiling isn't either, if that makes sense. I can't think of a better way. That's great.

Yeah. I'm also curious. What are you hoping people will get when they read the book?

A feeling of empowerment, a feeling of motivation. I hope that that's a thing people get in general, that I think of myself as pretty regular, everyday person who was in an extraordinary circumstance. And when you read about someone who's like that. It's not a leap to think that it could be you. So I do hope that people get that from it. Almost like a, a charge to their lives that, okay, this thing I've been putting off that I really want to do, maybe I can give it a try and, and there might be problems along the way, but that's okay because I read about this other person and she had problems too. And the problems were all part of it, I think. My dad believed so strongly in living your own life. And regardless of whether he finished five items on his bucket list or he finished 54 items, he was still doing it and he still wrote it when he was 29, at a time when 1978 was when he wrote it. I can't imagine many people were writing bucket lists in 1978, but, but he was knowledgeable and well read enough to understand that this was a good idea to do this. So I think if people are even inspired to write their own bucket list because of reading this, that would be a huge benefit because for some people, even the idea of writing something down like that, that you desire to do is really challenging. But beyond all of this, what I really wanted to do, I think deep down was write the book I needed when I was 25, something that would make me feel less alone in this really terrifying event that happened in my life. And I do Hope it benefits 25 year olds, particularly 25 year old women who struggle to find a voice in really terrible circumstances. So I mean that, that really is my greatest goal.

I'd love to hear what your number one piece of advice for people is on doing the thing.

Let the thing find you. Don't pressure yourself. Create an environment in your life where you can trust your own word. Because I think that that's what I did. I think by becoming a runner, by committing to marrying my spouse, I'm conquering self doubt and fears that I had about myself. I didn't think I was an athlete anymore, not since I was a kid. I was unsure about marriage because of my parents divorce, but because I forced myself to make those commitments anyway, good things started happening. I don't know that everyone understands there's a first step before the thing comes along, but that really is it. Once you are in a stage where you're actually trusting yourself and holding true to your own commitments, things that are gonna require a bigger commitment from you that you actually really, really wanna do are gonna show up and just keep your eyes open and know when they're.

There and please share where people can learn more about you.

My website is bylauracarney.com and you can pre order my book from there. It'll be out June and in June you can go to bookstores and get it, which will be even easier. Yay. My father's list on social media. Sorry.

Oh perfect. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed getting to know you and I think you are onto something really great in terms of being able to help people go after their own dreams.

Oh thank you. I'm really honored to be here.

And for the listeners, thanks for joining the do the Thing podcast. Go out and do the Thing.