#95: Choose Your Own Adventure

Rob, I just love your ability to so profoundly bring me on a journey, or adventure perhaps, through your writing. I start off somewhere familiar in the beginning, then travel elsewhere so unexpectedly, and then back to where I began. I have felt this trend in a few of your pieces. And I so wholeheartedly enjoy these little entrancing experiences you create with your words. 

Oh! And a wonderful happy birthday to Pip! I hope you choose your own enjoyable adventure today too.  :) 

- Amanda 

Robert Rose:            Robert@contentadvisory.net 

Choose Your Own Adventure

It’s been a trying week for me and my family.

So, last week I’m in Europe – you know just doing my usual consulting thing - and I get a text message from my wife: “we’re being evacuated – big fire in our neighborhood. Will text you soon. Love, Elizabeth.” 

I kept up through Google News and texts from my wife for the next four days. I’ve been back with my family for four days now, and safely ensconced in our temporary place – and we’ve just been notified that we’re allowed to go back to our home. It’s relieving.

Weirdly though – I have to tell you that, in addition to all the hard and difficult things we had to deal with, it’s been an interestingly liberating experience.  It spurred a question in me?

Are we choosing our adventures, or are they choosing us?   Allow me to digress a bit and explore?

Time, of course, is an illusion.  Einstein showed that the dividing line between past, present, and future is really not there… It’s as he said…  relative to where you are.  Other physicists have argued that time isn’t even real..  that it’s simply a place – an arrangement of everything in the universe at this moment. The now.  Every “now” is a waypoint – a beginning or ending line of an adventure - as we float through the universe.

Okay, don’t worry – I’m not going down that road too far here.

But we simply invent these self-imposed waypoints – don’t we?  They are mostly deadlines, that help us put beginning and ending demarcations around the adventures for when we should be showing progress. Your daily adventure is to come in at 9AM and work until 6PM. You work from Monday through Friday. The campaign will run for three weeks.  Our goals are due at the end of the month.  The financial results are due at the end of each third month, each quarter. The end of our fiscal year is on December 31st.  How are we doing on our 5 year plan?

“But wait,” you say. “I didn’t choose those adventures and the waypoints. Those are chosen for me.”  And, by my estimation you’re right.  Mostly these waypoints are useful, helping us find our way among each other.  Our goals are set against these waypoints IN time. They help define our progress and provide the check points for measuring the things we want to do. When we meet our objectives, they help us feel accomplished. And they help us agree on improvement when we don’t.

But when waypoints don’t change, or we assume they can’t be changed, they can also degrade our life experience. The world changes, but yet we stick to the same old waypoints. Until life finds a way to kick us in the proverbial… well… waypoint.

This week the fires in California emptied all the waypoints. I had to move some deadlines for deliverables, change my travel plans for a speaking engagement, and alter most of the operations of my family and my business. But it was fascinating to me how many of those waypoints simply fell away, elegantly and easily.  I had placed way more weight on them than they actually carried. 

I think – and am still exploring - that perhaps one of the more powerful exercises we can do with ourselves, our teams, our companies is to, at least momentarily, remove the existing waypoints that might limit our ideas.  What could we create if we didn’t have to meet the waypoint of the monthly report, the quarterly call, the customer event, the end of the fiscal budget cycle?  In the book Tools of Titans, author Tim Ferriss quotes investor billionaire Peter Thiel who asks “If you have a 10 year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: why can’t you do this in 6 months?”  Put another way – if you had to choose a different adventure and get to that place in 6 months, how would it change the waypoints?

Even just exploring that idea, can help us create new waypoints, new adventures.   We do need the waypoints. They do help.  As the wonderful philosopher Anais Nin said “if we don’t have an image, or if we aren’t following a dream, then we also don’t know what we are walking towards.”

But if we can at least start that process by knowing that all those waypoints are illusions. We can choose to keep them, or remove them – as they suit our adventures.  Then, that’s when we choose our own adventures and make them real.

Now, I’ve just seen on the news that the mandatory evacuations have been lifted for our area – and we can head home.  But, honestly, our family has enjoyed the forced “camp out adventure” – so we’re going to stay one more day. Just, because.

Rob's first-person bio:

I teach marketers to be storytellers. My job is as chief strategy officer for The Content Advisory, a company focused on helping businesses transform their marketing departments into media companies. My biggest joy is to witness people realizing their creative potential.