Planet Pick Axe: You Can Mine for Gold or Sell Pickaxes
Alaska · Ship Life · The Power of New
The Elixir · ResourcefulnessPlanet Pick Axe
You can mine for gold, or you can sell pickaxes. I went to sea to monetize my best asset—myself—and discovered that the richer currency was time, story, reinvention, and the people who made the voyage endure.
“My universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
Land, air, sea, and the power of now became my curriculum. The scenery painted itself. I was only the middleman—the witness who learned that some experiences cannot be created. They must be undergone.
Ordinary World · Planet Pick Axe
You can mine for gold or sell the tools.
America handed me ambition early. The real decision was what kind of wealth to pursue.
Being born in the United States can feel like being kidnapped and sold into entrepreneurship on Planet Pick Axe. Consumption and materialism become a shared hallucination—a mask that can eventually eat the face.
It can also feel like winning a lottery: citizenship as currency, mobility as leverage, and the freedom to spend that advantage well. Yet we often value material outcomes while ignoring emotional ones.
My blind spot was the disease of more: complexity in a world that already had plenty. The opposite of pleasure was not pain. It was boredom. I was willing to risk culture shock and uncertainty to make a predictable life interesting again.
Chase the visible reward.
Work harder, acquire more, and measure success by what can be counted.
Build leverage.
Use story, resourcefulness, and transferable capability to create opportunity.
Become time wealthy.
Use work to purchase autonomy, wonder, and a life large enough to remember.
The Call · Consecrated by the Ocean
Cities taught me language. The sea taught me silence.
New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo could shape a multinational soul. The ocean was where that identity became real.
If I wanted to monetize my best asset—me—I could not do it by teaching English in cities alone. I needed to be consecrated by sailing the oceans.
There is something clarifying about getting rid of nearly everything and going somewhere you do not know anyone. The noise falls away. As I kept reminding myself: God’s one and only voice is silence.
Travel had to become a verb, not a noun. You have to do it. I became a one-man National Geographic on an everywhere trip, not because I had unlimited resources, but because curiosity made resourcefulness unavoidable.
Ship’s Soundtrack · Rust Never Sleeps
Crossing the ocean for a heart of gold.
Neil Young returned as the soundtrack: Hollywood, Redwood, ocean crossings, flannel, boots, and the recognition that aging well means refusing to rust inside.
Answer the Call · Ship / Shift Happens
Success does not come to you. You swim out to it.
Ten ships, moving cities, shoe-string budgets, and the discovery that no resources can become radical resourcefulness.
It is not easy getting a shipboard gig. If your ship does not come in, swim out to it. The only easy day aboard was yesterday.
After ten ships—yes, ten—I had learned how a virtue, stubbornly maintained, can become a vice. A vague love for everyone and everything had its moments. Fidelity to actual people, places, and relationships required more courage.
As an art director and world-cruise coordinator, sea life turned my can’ts—no resources— into cans: resourcefulness. It leveraged “I have not been everywhere, but it is on my list” into serendipity and a thousand unseen helping hands.
Open Field Notes · Fire in the Belly
I had seen success become a drug of choice. Success without fulfillment is failure, although that failure often produces the best material.
Money may be life’s report card, but boredom is the deeper threat: a spiritual anorexia, the despairing refusal to become oneself. The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are—letting go of the life you planned so you can accept the one waiting for you.
I learned to love this new self not by becoming perfect, but by learning to see an imperfect person more clearly. The blog became the place where I constantly wrote and rewrote my autobiography. In a storytelling economy, I was paid more often in attention than cash.
My old YouTube bio reduced the operating system to a single boast: I could make impossible travel numbers work on shoe-string resources.
Foreign Land · The Big Alone
The scenery paints itself.
Alaska, Fiji, Tahiti, and the Maldives were extraordinary within their limits. Their limits were extraordinary too.
The cure for ennui was “any place but here” and “I want to be surprised every day.” Ship work paid in cash, ports, a room, meals, and a new passenger population every seven or fourteen days. Novelty kept interest alive.
I became a time millionaire. The equation depended on resourcefulness, not resources. At sea, life moved from mood to moment rather than hour to hour. The ocean healed the heart, mind, and soul—even while serving as the accomplice of my restlessness.
TV was an eraser. YouTube and Blogger became paintbrushes. Going to sea was recreation, re-creation, and reinvention: evidence that American lives could have second acts, third acts, and fourths.
Open Field Notes · The Multinational Soul
No man is an island, yet after forty, land could be seldom seen and the people who mattered could be counted on one hand. I was an expat, but not every country would do. Some filled the gaps. Others emphasized my expat-ness. The places that satisfied me allowed me to live with my idea of them.
“Life’s a beach in an ocean of ennui” became the takeaway from Fiji, Tahiti, the Maldives, and even Alaska—the Big Alone. These places were extraordinary within their limits, and their limits were extraordinary.
Emotional algebra said 1 + 1 = infinity. Yet a sheltered, delicate world can still become hibernation: formal nights, shore excursions, shopping, bottled water, and the painted line.
When you are perpetually cruising, you are what you are in that moment. People do not have your past to hold against you. I knew both sides: the tourist who did not know where he had been and the traveler who did not know where he was going.
The graduate-school “seamester” became study abroad in nomadic pursuits. I met, therefore I was: a multinational soul, part of and apart from American, European, and Asian culture. I became a transit lounger, always moving toward the six-o’clock gangway.
Home became a feeling rather than soil—a place inside yourself. I was one of the privileged homeless, asking whether a new kind of person was being created by a new kind of life.
Trials · Monotony Tinged with Hysteria
The moving life can become another painted line.
The ship escapes ordinary life, then risks becoming its own repetition.
Living on a ship might be summarized as monotony tinged with hysteria. It was not ordinary life but an alibi—going out of your mind each day in order to come to your senses.
The fool who persists in his folly may become wise. But repetition alone is not wisdom. A voyage needs friction, adjustment, and fidelity to concrete people and places or the open sea becomes another treadmill.
The disease of more
More ports and possessions cannot repair a life that has stopped paying attention.
Karaoke travel
Without adaptation, travel becomes an imitation of discovery rather than discovery.
The privilege of homelessness
Mobility expands identity, but it can also postpone belonging.
“Without risk, faith is impossible. My leap of faith was curiosity.” Field Note · The Power of New
Ship’s Library
Three voices beneath the voyage.
Silence, myth, and a heart of gold supplied the intellectual soundtrack.
Melville
The ocean and silence
Leaving the familiar made enough quiet for a different self to become audible.
Rumi
Unfold your own myth
Conscious living begins when inherited narratives stop being the only ones available.
Neil Young
Rust never sleeps
Aging gracefully means keeping curiosity, craft, and the willingness to move.
The Elixir · The Enduring Voyage
Resourcefulness found a reason to remain.
The final transformation was not another port. It was the friendship that became partnership.
Companion Story · The Enduring Voyage
Funemployment with Sarah and Ed
The friendship that became partnership—and kept sailing across every horizon.
The Final Equation
Resourcefulness gets you moving. Relationship gives the movement meaning.
I went to sea to escape boredom, sell pickaxes, and become a multinational soul. I returned with a more valuable operating system: time is wealth, story is currency, curiosity is propulsion, and the enduring voyage is the one shared with someone who keeps choosing the horizon with you.