FCSI THE AMERICAS CONFERENCE 2026 KEYNOTE SPEAKER


GROWING THROUGH PURPOSE


Play basketball with Barack Obama at the White House, write a Te New York Times bestseller and be interviewed by Oprah. Author and motivational speaker Ben Nemtin will share how he achieved these seemingly impossible feats – and many more – as he brings the conference to a close


W


hat began as a spontaneous road trip for Ben Nemtin has evolved into


a 20-year journey exploring meaning and fulfilment. As he will tell conference


delegates, his turning point came during college when he experienced depression for the first time. “I'd put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed in school and sport; but I dropped out of school, got dropped from the national rugby team,


and shut myself in my parents’ house,” he recalls. He found that surrounding himself with people energized him and so, with a few friends, he decided to go on a journey that would change his life. Together, the group of friends “begged, borrowed and stole” to get their two-week roadtrip off the ground. Tey also compiled a wishlist of things that seemed impossible – resolving that for each one they pulled off they had to help a stranger achieve a seemingly impossible dream.


Te first challenge Nemtin


undertook was to spend a day living as a knight in a full suit of armor, walking around Victoria, BC. It led the group to the second item on the list, which was to make the front page of the newspaper. Tey were spotted by a photographer and, sure enough, the next day they were on the front page. Two decades on, he has


achieved many things for himself and others as part of what would become Te Buried Life movement, which he went


on to found with his friends. As word-of mouth made their list more public, they had strangers getting in touch offering to help them achieve their list and sharing their own dreams. “It was really a list of


experiments to discover what things brought us back to ourselves, what made us feel alive. It was a list of all the things that would bring us a sense of purpose and we moved towards that potential,” he says. Te philosophy behind this, he says, and everything that


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