Stop Wasting Time: A New Way to Plan Your Night

Today on Ultimize Discover, you're getting a short practical sample from the Ultimize universe. Use this on its own, take one idea and apply it today, or go deeper at ultimize.com. Ultimize is the world's largest personal development podcast, audiobook, and online learning network. Ultimize. Tonight when you're deciding what to do with your evening, replace the question you always ask, What do I feel like doing? With 5 different words, what have I never done? Say it out loud. Name the first realistic answer within reach of your home and go do that instead. That one swapped question takes 5 seconds, costs nothing, and turns an ordinary Tuesday into a story because your brain already holds dozens of nearby firsts and it hands them over the moment you finally ask for them. Hi, I'm your instructor, TJ Walker, and this is my course, The Adventure Habit: How to Live a More Exciting, Memorable Life. And it's from Ultimize, the world's largest personal development podcast, audiobook, and online learning network. I've been lucky enough to travel to 45 countries, and here's the honest truth this course is built on. Some of the best adventures of my life have cost less than $5. Adventure isn't a budget item. It isn't a personality trait. It's a practice. In these sessions, I'll hand you the complete toolkit: the Never List, the Zero Dollar Adventure, the Local Question, the Performance Leap, and a plan for an entire year first. Enroll now and make this the year you stop repeating and start remembering. The biggest obstacle to a more adventurous life isn't courage. And it isn't necessarily money. It's a blank mind at the exact moment of opportunity. Friday afternoon arrives, you genuinely want to do something different, and your brain serves up nothing. So you default. You do what you did last Friday. The problem was never willingness. The problem is that novelty requires an idea, and ideas never show up on demand. They show up in the shower, on On the commute, in the middle of a meeting, and then they evaporate because you had nowhere to put them. But before I give you the tool that fixes this, we need one honest minute about where the time went. Because most people believe they have no room for adventure, and it's not quite true. The time exists. It's just already being claimed. Do a real analysis, not a guess, of your screen time for one week. And count all of it, the phone scrolling and the television, because the couch counts too. We've convinced ourselves that an evening of scrolling and streaming is relaxing, that it's doing nothing, but it's not really relaxing. Most people don't stand up from 3 hours of it feeling restored, and it's not doing nothing. It's giving your eyeballs by the hour to some of the largest companies on earth. whose entire business is making sure you never get bored enough to go do something. Here's the actual Saturday of tens of millions of people: wake up, stare at the phone for 2.5 hours, lunch, an errand, back to the couch to scroll, then streaming movies or video games until bed. You know, that's not a rest day, that's a donated day. Now, I'm not asking you to throw your television out the window. I'm asking you to know the real number because every adventure in this series will be built out of hours you currently can't find. Once you've found the hours, the tool that fills them is what I call the never list. It's a running list of things you've never done that are within realistic reach of your actual life. Not necessarily a bucket list. A bucket list is a fantasy document. Climb Kilimanjaro, see the Northern Lights, swim with the whales, a beautiful museum of things you'll do someday, which is a polite word for, let's face it, never. The never list is the opposite. Every item must be something you could genuinely do within, say, an hour of your home on a normal weekday with the money that restaurant with a style of food you can't pronounce. The neighborhood 2 train stops past where you always get off. The open mic night. The climbing gym. The community theater audition. The karaoke bar where your friends go and you always find a reason to just watch. I want to be direct about why this works, because the mechanism matters more than the format. The never list works Because it separates the 2 hardest parts of adventure: deciding what to do and actually doing it. So you never have to do both at once. When inspiration strikes on a Tuesday morning, you're not free to act necessarily, but you can capture the idea in 10 seconds. When freedom arrives on Friday night, inspiration is nowhere to be found, but you don't need it. You have them in you. You've turned spontaneity, which feels like a personality trait, into a system, which is something anyone can run. The least spontaneous person you know can be spontaneous off a list. Nobody at the karaoke bar checks how you got there. Keep it wherever you'll actually keep it— your phone, a note on the fridge, the back page of a planner. What matters is that it exists outside your head And that it keeps growing. Once you start one, your perception changes. You start noticing nevers everywhere. You drive past the trampoline park you passed 400 times and see it for the first time. The world stops being scenery and becomes inventory. Here's the kind of situation this creates. Imagine someone who's had singing karaoke sitting on their list for a month, and a birthday gathering lands at a karaoke place. Normally they'd hold a drink, cheer politely, and go home having just watched. But the item is on the list, so they put their name in, butcher a song they've loved for 20 years, and sit down to actual applause with their heart pounding. Ask them a year later what they remember from that entire month, and it's 3 minutes of terrible singing. That's the trade the never list makes over and over. Mild embarrassment now and then in exchange for a memory that outlives everything comfortable you did that season. And by the way, maybe everyone thinks your singing is great. Maybe you're a better stand-up comedian than I am. You're not necessarily going to be embarrassed, but it's a possibility. One rule as you build yours: the list only counts if it contains real nevers. Restaurants you've been meaning to return to don't qualify. Repeats are comfort. Nevers are adventure. In the next session, I'll show you how to take one item off that list and turn it into a completed adventure tonight before you go to sleep for zero expense. At some point in adulthood, most of us sign an invisible contract with ourselves. I will only do things I'm already good at in public. Now, we don't read the fine print. But the terms, oh, they're brutal. No new instruments because we'd squeak. No new languages because we'd stumble. No dance classes, no pottery wheels, no improv, no chess clubs, because somewhere in the room someone would see us being bad at something. And so one by one, we quietly resigned from the entire category of experiences that made childhood feel enormous. The experience of learning something from zero. I want to be direct with you. Being bad at something is not the price of adventure. It is the adventure. Think back to the definition we established at the start of this series. Adventure requires the risk of disappointment, of embarrassment, of not being good at something. A class in a skill you've never touched delivers all 3 risks reliably. On a schedule for a modest fee, typically with parking. It's the most conveniently packaged adventure that exists. The awkwardness you're avoiding isn't a bug in the experience, it's the active ingredient. There's also something happening in a beginner class that you can't get almost anywhere else in adult life: total permission to be terrible. Consider what it's like for a competent professional someone who runs meetings, manages budgets, gets deferred to at work, to sit down at a beginner watercolor class and produce a painting that looks like, well, weather. Around them, a retired dentist, a college student, and a woman celebrating her 70th birthday are producing equally questionable art, and nobody cares because everybody signed up to be bad together. For 90 minutes, this person who spent 20 years being the expert gets to be the student. No reputation to protect, no performance review, no stakes beyond the paper. People consistently describe this as feeling 10 years younger, and here's the reason: the last time their brain worked this hard at something this new, they were probably 10 years younger. The menu is bigger than you think, and most of it is cheap or free. Community colleges and parks departments run classes in everything from welding to salsa, to beekeeping for a fraction of what private studios charge. Libraries host free workshops constantly. Language exchange meetups cost nothing. Climbing gyms, fencing clubs, improv theaters, and community choirs all run beginner sessions specifically designed for people who've never done it once. You would never be the only novice in the room, even though that's the exact fear that keeps most people home. And the unusual choices carry extra adventure voltage precisely because they're unusual. Anyone can join a gym. It takes a different kind of Tuesday to come home from your first trapeze class. So while we're together in this session, do one small thing with me. Don't sign up for anything yet. Just answer a question honestly in your own head. What's one skill you've always been curious about but never touched, specifically because you knew you'd be bad at it at first? Not the practical skill you think you should learn for work, the one that tugs at you. The guitar in the corner? Oh, I've tried that, didn't work out well, but I'm glad I tried. The language of your grandparents? The dance style you watch other people do? Hold on to that answer because that answer is almost certainly an item for your never list, and it may be the richest item on it. One honest warning as you consider it: the first session of anything is generally the worst session of anything. You'll be clumsy and you'll compare yourself to people in their 50th class, and a voice will suggest this was a mistake. That voice is not information. It's just the sound of the invisible contract objecting as you tear it up. In the next session, I'll show you the single question I've used in 45 countries to turn ordinary trips into unforgettable ones, and it works just as well in your own hometown. By the way, quick question for you: have you ever noticed how easy it is to consume content and how hard it is to actually do anything with it? I mean, you can listen to 100 episodes, read 10 books, and your habits are exactly the same. That's the gap most people never close. So if you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I want to actually improve, go to ultimize.com. We've got free courses there for you, either on communication skills or building better habits. And it's designed to get you to actually use what you're learning, not just hear it once. No cost. No catch, just go to ultimize.com and start. Ultimize.