Going On A Quest

Originally, I thought this next step of getting on the Highway to Yeah was about finding and building your tribe, so to speak.

Find your people, build your team, invest in your community, and things like that.

All good, and certainly worth taking those steps if that is where your energy is.

Personally, I absolutely believe that relationships are the most important treasures in our lives.

However, I keep feeling resistance to this idea of making that the next step to getting on a Highway to Yeah.

Why?

I think it is two things, primarily.

First, when I look back over the course of my life, I have always been a bit of a loner.

Perhaps I need therapy for this, but that has not seemed to change as I’ve gotten older.

And it’s weird.

On the one hand, I love being with people and doing fun things together.

But on the other hand, I often feel I must conserve my energy and focus to attend to other things in my life.

I can’t seem to find the right balance.

Am I defective in some way?

i might be. It’s entirely possible.

but, I think it is has more to do with how I find meaning in the world.

Second, I think it is because I am someone who seems to need a quest to motivate me.

For example, if I had an idea to connect with one additional person every day, I would need that to be in the form of a quest.

As in, for the next 30, 90, or 365 days, I will reach out to one person I don’t normally talk to, and do this every day during that period.

That just seems to be the way my body and mind show up on this planet.

Thus, why fight it?

Go with where your energy wants to take you.

My energy seems to be taking me, and has been for a long time, toward defining quests and going for them.

I think this is one of my unique takes on lifestyle design after one has achieved FIRE.

It’s how I have accomplished the big things in my life.

Sometimes, or even usually, these started with “playing” around with an idea.

I’d come across something that captured my interest, and end up getting very amped up about it.

Next thing I know, I am spending a good chunk of my time every day and week focused on it.

For example, I brought up The Hobbit yesterday. I’m a huge fan of it and The Lord of The Rings. It started when I saw the Rankin-Bass cartoon movie version.

“What the heck is this?”

It captivated me. It took me to a place I had never been before.

Buying books at a bookstore.

I spent the entire summer vacation that year reading through The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings (between 8th and 9th grade).

Up until that point, I rarely ever read a book unless it was required for school.

My brother got into Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins and his dog Rigsby-type books, so I did read many of those for a while in grade school, but it was pretty spotty reading on my part.

Like a lot of people from my generation, I was more interested in watching TV.

It has to have gotten worse since then, given the internet, social media, YouTube, and now AI.

Why read when you can get the Cliff Notes?

Or take my journey to graduate school, which helped me find and have a lucrative career that eventually took me to FIRE.

I remember finding a book called something like The 100 Best Companies To Work For In The USA.

Now I believe it is an annual “contest” sponsored and published by Fortune magazine (online).

But this was pre-internet.

Anyway, I bought the book and read about the many companies in there, one of which I ended up working for later!

One common thread about who they hired was that they were interested in recruiting MBAs from top-tier schools.

That got me going.

I spent the next three years focused on doing my best to get into a good school and complete an MBA program.

Yeah, it was that book. That was about all it took.

Oh, and when I was an exchange student, on a fluke, I was upgraded and flew first class sitting next to a guy who was a “Chief” something-or-other executive at a company called Trammell Crow.

Three years later I found this book. They were in the book, and were one of the highest-paying companies listed.

That was the thread.

Random meeting on a plane ride.

Random book discovered at a bookstore.

Connecting some dots.

Then my obsession ensued.

I ended up at a second-tier school, which had very little recruiting activity on campus

so, it didn’t turn out like I had hoped.

However, that was where my next two obsessions that became quests ensued.

Both of them shaped my life outcomes for the better.

And I would have never predicted them, either.

Now I am in the middle of three other obsessive quests.

One is getting 15,000 steps per day for a year.

That was started by a random YouTube video I watched during the pandemic.

A good way to burn fat, she said.

My obsession began not long after watching that video, and now I am just taking it up a notch in terms of accountability.

In the past five years, I have never gotten above an average of 11,000 steps per day.

Now I am just holding myself more accountable to get to 15,000 consistently.

Why?

It’s all about staying in shape and being healthy.

I burn over an extra 600 calories a day getting these steps in. I think it helps me.

Do I want to do this forever?

I don’t think so. It’s become a chore.

I wake up in the morning thinking, “How the heck am I going to find the time to get in 15,000 steps today?”

It’s a bit like a low-level anxiety I have created for myself.

My real goal is to stay at my target weight.

I feel good at that weight. I look better at that weight. My clothes fit better at that weight.

Everything is better at that weight.

Nevertheless, I am committed to seeing the year-long goal through of 15,000 steps per day.

Quitting is not an option when you are on a quest.

Posting an article every day for a year to this blog is one of them, too.

When we designed this website, for some reason I wanted there to be a blog page.

At the time, I was thinking it would link to the YouTube show we had discussed starting.

Then I began to think, “How about writing a blog article every week, and then the best ones, turn those into YouTube videos?”

That seemed like a good idea.

I also thought it would work well in conjunction with my plan that year (2023) to go “full nomad” for a year.

Nope. Failed on both counts. But it kept eating at me.

The trigger that got this one going was listening to a guy earlier this year on a YouTube show called The Minimalists.

He claimed that writing a daily blog for a year changed his life.

Within a few days of that, in March, I heard an interview with Seth Godin.

Godin claims he has posted to his blog every day for 15 years straight.

Those two random listens were all I needed.

Here I am, less than 10 days away from hitting seven months of a daily post.

Unfortunately, this has become a bit of a chore, too.

With both of these, 15,000 steps and a daily blog post, I feel I need a new motivation, or a new quest to accompany them and make them “fresh.”

But I am not sure what that would be.

I have some ideas, but I am reluctant to add more to my plate.

another big Quest I have going on is Escaping the Algorithm.

This was meant to reduce crap in my life.

I think it has done this, but my goodness, it is everywhere (slop).

Yesterday, I added a podcast I thought would be helpful.

It had a video capability within the podcast app on my iPhone.

Curious, I turned on the video capability.

OMG!! You’ve got to be kidding me?! It was like watching YouTube again!!

Show deleted. Not going back there again!!!

I am also committed to this quest, even more so now.

But I don’t think it has freed me up the way I wanted it to.

Do you see the dilemma?

You start a quest and you are never sure what will happen or turn out as a result.

You have to stay committed, see it through, and simply trust the process.