Expedition / War Zone / Cruise Ship / Direction Over Speed

Direction Over Speed

From cruise ship to cruise missiles, from expedition history to everyday bets on an uncertain future.

Expedition History

Literature in a Hurry

It is very important that expedition history not be distilled to just the great men and women - Magellan, Edmund Hillary, Lewis and Clark - but also to the regular people who go out to do their own exploring and circumnavigation of the Earth, then blog about it: literature in a hurry.

"You worked on a cruise ship and you worked in a war zone, huh?" Yep. From cruise ship to cruise missiles. Same thing: "At your service. Yes Ma'am. Yes Sir." Both are the hospitality industry. Both are 24-hour work environments.

Documenting these travels with pictures has the added advantage of being true. Therefore, you have to tolerate contradictions and see things from different perspectives.

No matter where I go, there I am. I can still look up at the same moon and stars, albeit from a different hemisphere. It innately belongs to all of us, children of this planet. I am struck by what poet Diane Ackerman calls the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things. - Edmund Hillary

Video Signals

Moving Pictures, Moving Targets

Qatar / Expedition Signal

Future Self / Better Decisions

Travel Video

Blogger video reference

Blogger-hosted video

Original Blogger video content ID preserved: 64e19631ef1edd2a

Blogger video reference

Blogger-hosted video

Original Blogger video content ID preserved: 2ce02c4a3b1e852f

Blogger video reference

Blogger-hosted video

Original Blogger video content ID preserved: cf337c3329d91d30

Social Signals

At the Top / I Haven't Got a Crew

Perseverance / The Long Game

Wake Up, Drink Your Passion, Light a Match

What good is having a belly if there is no fire in it? Wake up, drink your passion, light a match, and get to work.

We rarely see the incremental baby steps taken when looking for enormous outcomes. But deserving enormous outcomes is mostly the result of a series of small steps. The art and science of achievement is turning the invisible into something visible.

State it and create it: I want to travel around the world. That was the mantra I told myself every day, as far back as I can remember. How did I do it? One port at a time, mostly by sea.

Perseverance - The Long Game

Decisions / Luck / Bets

The Earth School Kills All of Its Students

The Earth School kills all of its students.

Direction over speed.

There are two things that determine our life: the quality of our decisions and luck. You cannot make progress without making decisions, and you will make those decisions over time with uncertainty. I call them bets.

A bet is a decision about an uncertain future. Treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. It helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.

When your future version of you gets involved in the present version of you, your life takes on a new optimal perspective. You release your emergency brake. When you land, things start to take off.

You have two lives. When you realize that you only have one, the second begins.

Time Millionaire / The Present

Press Play and Live Here

In fact, we have no future. But what an awesome present. It is useless to make plans if you are never here. You can get anywhere from here, as long as you are here.

I am a time millionaire with hours of routine and drill, followed by moments of extreme terror.

What an awesome gift - the present. We spend too much time in fast forward worrying about the future and in rewind ruminating on the past, but we rarely press play and live in the present.

If you are pointed in the wrong direction, it does not matter how fast you are traveling. If you are locked onto your desired destination, all progress is positive, no matter how slow you are going.

Field Image Archive