What is there left to give when you have given everything you have, you don’t see a light at the tunnel and Resistance has the best of you?
Consider one more day.
For one more day, you will keep your promise. For one more day, you will hold your posture.
Often we will find that act–making it through today–to be sufficient.
Sometimes we need to be reminded that we are having a bad day, not a bad life.
A car accident can change things and so can holding your child for the first time. Change can happen all at once, in an instance. It can be unexpected, something that you are never prepared for.
But more likely it happens over a long period of time. It is an evolution, a process. Drip by drip. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year.
There isn’t a specific day when someone put it all together. It isn’t a sudden transformation. But further down the road, you don’t recognize yourself from what you used to be.
While it is easy to always want things to happen this second, real change–the kind that you deserve–almost always happens over an extended period of time with the right habits in place.
What does a medical company do when there are no more sick people?
What does a car insurance company do when self-driving cars eliminates accidents?
What happens to the oil industry when all cars are electric?
The goal of any successful business is to solve problems, to make lives better. But when the problem is solved, the greedy’s first impulse is to make up fake diseases, to refuse to change, to maintain the status-quo.
The wilderness therapy industry charges upwards of $15K per month to be in a program. So how do the typical family afford this opportunity for youth that desperately need a chance to be inspired?
You can’t. Not yet.
But there is an alternative.
At Pivot Adventure Co., we have developed an experiential educational program to inspire youth to receive the benefits of a wilderness therapy program at a fraction of the cost. We stripped away the 24/7 care, doctors, lawyers, therapists to make an affordable program for those who need direction. We use adventure activities to give students an opportunity to reflect what they have learned being in a perceived risky situation and how that relates to what is going on at home and at school.
The wilderness therapy industry is broken. Many are on a mission to save people–we say leave that to the Coast Guard. Wilderness therapy treats teenagers as patients. At Pivot, they are students. Teenagers are not sick or broken or damaged. These teenagers are full of potential with the ability to become someone special because all of our DNA is the same as the greatest among us. Wilderness therapy has goons to snatch teenagers in the middle of the night, effectively dissolving what trust is left with the parents and starting teenagers off on the wrong foot for the path of healing.
Someday, I hope Pivot Adventure becomes obsolete. That the barrier to receive recreation/adventure/therapy/experiential education are more affordable, that teenagers are not diagnosed in a way that they are needing to be cured. But, until then, we will be flipping the industry upside down, providing a path for families that have nowhere else to turn.
What is joy, happiness and meaning?
Is it a state of mind?
How is it obtained?
How does it flow?
Where does it come from?
How can it be replicated?
Can it be bought?
The thing is, there are no life-hacks, no dummies guide, no step-by-step set of instructions to live a life of meaning.
There is no map.
What we need is a compass. A compass that can help us navigate through life’s challenges, something to help us get to where it is we want to go.
I am beyond excited to announce that after eight months of work, my wife and I are starting an experiential education program for teenagers to help them build their compass.
At Pivot Adventure Co., we help students:
When we have done something once, we can do it again. In time, new habits can be formed, replacing old ones. Most of all, we do the things we fear the most, we embrace failure that leads to growth and we do work that matters.
One-by-one we are opening the doors for students that will turn around and open doors for others.
One-by-one we are flipping an industry upside down that needs to be innovated.
One-by-one we are building a culture that we can all be proud of.
Enrollment is now open.
Sometimes all we need to rediscover is what we knew all along: That we are good enough, we have potential and we can share it with the world.
We have never lived in a time in human history with so much choice available.
We can choose what we can eat, drink, learn, listen to, watch. We can choose where we work, how we recreate. We can choose our filters–the lens on how we see the world. We can choose who to vote for and where to sit. We can choose to make something that needs to be made or help someone who needs to be helped. We can choose to try again after failing for the hundredth time. We can choose to perfect our craft.
What are you doing with all this abundance in choice?
Are you choosing to do the thing you fear the most or are you choosing to hide?
Zachary Simpson did a fascinating vocabulary analysis of the 54,000 free e-books posted on Project Gutenberg.
He used two measurements:
“Total Vocabulary‘ is the measure of unique words in a book. A word is defined as a set of case-insensitive alpha characters and apostrophes (to include contractions such as can’t) thus excludes numbers and punctuation. Each work is scanned in its entirety including titles, indices, and page numbers after eliminating the Gutenberg Preamble which prefixes each work.”
“Vocabulary Density‘ is a measurement of vocabulary usage in comparison to the length of the book…(basically) how many words will be read on average before a new word is encountered”
What Simpson found was that the Book of Mormon and the Bible (King James Version) had the least dense vocabulary for books over 30,000 words.
What a wonderful insight.
Seems to me that God makes his words easy to read, understand and follow.
It isn’t hidden in some dark alleyway waiting to be discovered. It isn’t some damsel in distress waiting to be saved. No map to follow or formula to learn. There are no short cuts or life hacks to finding your voice.
It is developed, over a long period. It’s made when we take a job that we don’t want to do and it is built with many hours alone on a keyboard. It is created with shipping your work into the world, to be torn apart by critics. And it is assembled when you don’t feel like working today. You get a voice when you work in the trenches–beaten, dismissed and torn.
It is when you are invisible to the rest of the world, getting reps, when no one is watching that you “find” a voice.
Takes grit and guts. Most people don’t have what it takes to push through the dip. You are not most people.
In 1800, 75% of American working man’s expenditures went for food alone. By 1850, that had dropped to 50%. Today it is a little more than 11%. – The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 1996
That is the miracle of the industrial economy. In 200 years, we have lifted more people out of poverty than ever before in human history. And as Moore’s law suggests, we are continuing to move even faster and more productive for the foreseeable future.
If the nation is so wealthy, why can’t we get spending under control? It appears unsustainable with no end in sight. How can you afford health care and education and infrastructure and other government programs?
But what if there’s no spending problem?
As Andrew Tobias has pointed out, “Every public company in America uses ‘Generally Accepting Accounting Principles’ except the US government. As a result, the way the government does its accounting, investments are counted as spending.”
Imagine trying to balance a budget with all your investments like education or a home are only counted as spending. That would be really hard.
Doug Muder‘s blog post on William Baumol and his theory on cost disease takes it a step further:
The economy as a whole becomes more productive with the advance of technology, but not all sectors progress equally, and some don’t improve their productivity at all.”
As a society, we aren’t doing without manufactured goods because health care is soaking up all our money; we’re just using less of our labor to produce the manufactured goods we want.
But the improvement is almost entirely on the outcome side rather than the productivity side.
Baumol looked at this situation and concluded that medical inflation was here to stay. Not because doctors are greedy or health insurance companies are evil or socialized medicine is inefficient, but just from the nature of health care. While other factors undoubtedly matter, the exponential growth would happen anyway.
Baumol predicts that over time government spending will rise as a percentage of the economy. But we can afford it…in Baumol’s model, government spending isn’t crowding out everything else. As a society, we aren’t doing without manufactured goods [or food] because health care is soaking up all our money; we’re just using less of our labor to produce the manufactured goods [and food] we want…
So is there a spending problem? It is a fascinating question to think about. If we want a better picture of what is actually happening sometimes we need to put down the magnifying glass.
[Andrew Tobias and Doug Muder‘s blog posts are worth reading about this topic over and over again.]
When things break, we have a bad habit to throw our hands in the air and wait for the problem to fix itself. We see it with the internet or our car and even on the escalator.
We don’t see that the solution is often right in front of us. Even though the escalator is broken, the stairs are still working.
Sure, it isn’t as easy or convenient. But it is better than being stuck.
What are we going to do to fix the problem?
In response to the banal Dick and Jane children’s book series, Ted Geisel wrote one of the most beloved children’s books of all time, The Cat in the Hat, by choosing two words off a list given to him that rhymed.
And then he did it again, writing Green Eggs and Ham on a bet with his publisher that he couldn’t complete a book using only 50 beginner words.
And I can’t help but think about the 50 metaphorical word constraints we have in our lives–the lack of time, money, resources, attention, the know-how…
How do we respond to the constraints we face?
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