Blue Ocean / Hero's Journey / Sea Years / Ed Reif

You Get There Faster by Plane, but Farther by Ship

A life at sea, reframed as mini-retirements, probability, blue-ocean thinking, and the long game of becoming.

Opening Signal

There Is No YES in Yesterday

There is no YES in yesterday and the longest day of the weak is someday. The secret of living your dream instead of your backup plan is starting. I have had all the disadvantages required for a successful start on the hero's journey: no money, no time, no opportunities. Only acting as if.

Deserving enormous outcomes is mostly the result of a series of small steps that magically make the invisible visible - that is the science of achievement. Mine was: I want to travel around the world. Staying at sea for 6 to 13 months consecutively is how it happened. The days went by slowly, the months fast, and the years even faster.

I reframed the experience as a sequence of mini-retirements because it is not a very blue-chip thing to do - renouncing the established templates for career fuel and leveling up.

This quasi-PT - permanent frequent and constant traveler - designation seemed natural. The Peculiar Club had no membership dues. Anyone could join. Blue ocean cruising around the world provides a legitimate shortcut for taking things with gratitude instead of for granted.

I met a bunch of folks who were, and are, the unmoored, never dropping anchor too long. They are an ever-growing number of the privileged homeless, where home is a feeling, not a place. Our souls are surely from somewhere else.

Like attracts like. Those who have a sense of wonder and curiosity choose this option. I take solace in knowing there is a world which is purely one's own - the experience in that world, of travel, danger, happiness - shared with no one else, while others undergo their own version.

I totally get it. Travel is a backdrop: fish-out-of-water rituals of reassurance that life is bizarre and awesome, cruel and kind. Despite the photos and power spots around the globe, all the significant events of your life take place in your brain.

Neurons / Decisions / Long Game

Neurons That Fire Together Wire Together

The Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road, but neurons that fire together wire together, and the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

There is no absolute grid I live in where things occur independent of my own thinking about them. The old ME Generation said: I am the center of the world. My New Wor(l)d Order says: I create the world - and more importantly, my thoughts do too. Change your thoughts, change your world. That is wired thinking.

As the brain changes, the mind changes. In practical terms, each time you repeat a particular thought or action and use your marbles, you strengthen the connection between a set of brain cells or neurons.

Decisions are bets on the future. Be nice to your future self. Play the long game.

We lived in ambiguity and made decisions in conditions of uncertainty over time, because that is what living on a ship teaches.

Luck is probability taken personally. It is preparation and opportunity colliding at the right time, at the right place, doing the right things.

The hardest arithmetic I have had to master is the one that enables me to count my blessings.

There is no doubt about it: travel can evoke an exhilarating state of mind, where everything seems suddenly fresh, vivid, intensely interesting, and memorable.

We call it planet Earth, but it is mostly covered in blue ocean - and you cover a lot more territory by ship. You get there faster by plane, but you get there farther by ship.

As you detect the storyline in your own life, write it and tell it to others. It will open up a hidden world of self-discovery and meaning.

I know. I have seen it for myself. Follow your bliss, and do not be afraid; doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there would not be a door for anyone else.

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