No Map. No Guide. No Limits.

Ed Note: “I Do This Because …” is a series of guest essays on this site by adventurers, entrepreneurs, and brave explorers of experience, uncharted territory, and life. As the title indicates, the essays offer the authors’ reflections on why they chose the path they did, and why they continue on that path, despite all the challenges, costs, and discouraging moments that come with any uncharted adventure.

For more information on the origins of the “I Do This Because” essays, see my own entry. And, as always, if you know of anyone you think would make a good guest essayist, or have your own answer to why you’re pursuing the particular, challenging path you’re pursuing, please share it!

About the Author

Jackson Bates is a graduate of Brown University (’83 ScB) and currently works in publishing. She has three grown children, a seven-year-old adopted son, and 4 grandchildren. In her free time, she copyedits manuscripts for new writers and independent publishers, and dabbles as a glass artist. She dreams of going back to school to study theoretical physics. And late at night … she writes. Her first novel, P.U.D.Z.S., was published at the end of 2010. She is now hard at work on her next novel, “Satanic Agents Hot on the Trail of Whiners and Cheeseburgers.” I introduced her to No Map. No Guide. No Limits. readers earlier this month.

I do this because …

Among the things I enjoy most about the day-to-day business of living, are the constant reminders that this universe of ours is a delightfully random and chaotic place. Women give birth on the side of the Interstate, and printer cartridges run out the night before final papers are due. And somewhere between the belly laughs and the tears, it becomes increasingly apparent that mankind’s attempts to impose order on all the madness are completely futile.
Work of the nine to five, power-suit wearing, soul-sucking variety is the most obvious example of our collective compulsiveness. It’s what we have to do to pay the rent, tuition for baseball camp and, of course, braces. We tell ourselves that following the rules make us responsible citizens and good mommies and daddies. It’s what we should do.

But on my own time, late at night when the kids are asleep and my half-fried brain is whispering that I should be as well, I write—silly, nonsensical romps that hopefully make people giggle and shoot milk out their noses—because it’s what I was meant to do. Writing is that thing that brings the wild pendulum swings of my thought processes back to plumb. Amid the never-ending conference calls and deadlines, I write. [click to continue…]

A little while back, I got a phone call from my college roommate … a woman who shared a God-awful basement apartment with me our senior year, enduring a crazy co-habitant, unruly basketball players living upstairs, flood (said basketball players got drunk one night and knocked their toilet off its mount, and the gushing water ended up as a waterfall in our living room), pestilence (the landlord started to replace our tiny windows and left them half-finished, allowing half of Providence’s flies to invade. We ended up vacuuming the flies out of the air, they were so thick), and more personal crises than even college students have a right to have.

Jackson (her given name is actually Jacqueline, or Jackie, but one of our other roommates, a quirky but brilliant computer guy named Gil, nicknamed her Jackson after Reggie Jackson, although the exact reason for that escapes me now) earned an organic chemistry degree and began life as a chemist. But then, well, life intervened. She fell in love with a guy who—to this day—adores her so much that he called me one time to inquire about buying a surplus military tank for Jackie’s birthday, because she said she’d like to have one for the back yard. The fact that Jackson wanted a tank for her back yard should tell you something about her independent mind and imagination, as well. (Personally, I think it was her reaction to living in a somewhat stultifying, way-too-homogenized suburb. That and a particularly inspiring encounter with the movie Tank Girl.)

Anyway, her new husband had two little girls from a previous marriage, which Jackson did her best to raise, in addition to another girl she and her husband had a few years later. In the midst of all that, she started to explore her creative side, in what little time she could carve out for creative anything. She learned glassmaking and started selling her stained-glass creations around the New England area. And she also started to write. [click to continue…]

One of the goals of this website and blog is to help adventurers, entrepreneurs and explorers find information, kindred spirits, and resources that might ease the journey or offer good advice. Sometimes I do that through posts. But in the Resources section of this website, I list books, articles, websites and other resources I’ve found that I think might be helpful for anyone interested in pursuing an uncharted, adventurous, entrepreneurial or passion-inspired path in life.

One of the blogs listed in the Resources section is one called “The Art of Non-Conformity.” Written by a guy named Chris Guillebeau, it’s part travel blog, part work advice, part … well, you can take a look and judge for yourself. But I hadn’t checked it in a while, so I looked the other day to see if he had any interesting new content posted.

Two recent posts stood out: one on “Redefining Risk,” and one on “The Good Job.”  The redefining risk post was a discussion on how to combat fears and prevent the disasters we fear, whether those fears relate to forging ahead with an entrepreneurial business or planning a public event. In “The Good Job,” Guillebeau talks about how the relevant point, in evaluating whether to stay at a job or leave it, isn’t whether the job is inherently good, or at a good company, but whether or not the job is good for you.

The advice Guillebeau gives in the posts isn’t new or unique. But the posts are worth reading, for two reasons. [click to continue…]

The New York Times ran an article back in May chronicling how two brothers stumbled upon some boxes in their grandfather’s attic and ended up starting their own company to exploit a new use for their grandfather’s forgotten invention.
The story goes like this:
In the late 1960s, a fun-loving entrepreneur named Bill Smith came up with a brilliant idea for how skiers could enjoy really steep, deep slopes without getting out of control. Called the Ski-Klipper, his invention was, essentially, a small, controllable sail/drag chute a skier could deploy from a backpack to slow them down on a steep descent. The idea had promise … until a Vail ski resort banned his product. So, he packed his unsold backpack sails away in the attic … where his two grandsons found them, 40 years later.
The two young men started experimenting with the sails to see what they might be good for … and came up with the idea of modifying them for use by skateboarders instead of skiers. Renamed the Sporting-Sail, the sails have elastic loops at all four corners. The bottom two loops attach to the skateboarder’s thighs, and the top two loops are held in each hand. The skateboarder can then open, close and open the sail again, like a spinnaker on a sailboat (in reverse), to control their speed on a steep downhill. The brothers received a patent on the idea in 2010 and have sold about 700 of the units so far.
To Bob Sutton’s point in my previous post about creativity and repackaging, Nick and Billy Smith didn’t come up with their Sporting-Sail out of the blue … or, as my mother would say, out of broad cloth. They had their grandfather’s invention as a starting point, for one thing. But they also had something equally important: a family history of curious tinkering and exploration that left them well-prepared to take their grandfather’s sails and figure out a new and better use for them. In the article, the brothers talk about a childhood spent making things in the family garage, and how both their parents and their grandfather encouraged all that creative exploration.
Nonetheless, creative inspiration still involves a little bit of alchemy. A childhood that encourages creative thinking and exploration may help prepare the ground so that a person stumbles upon a seed like an old ski sail in an attic, it can take root and grow into a new idea or invention. But that moment of germination, where that alternate vision takes form, is still an unpredictable and somewhat magical process that’s hard to pin down. Which is, of course, part of the challenge … as well as part of the fun.

The subject of creativity—where it comes from, what triggers it, what inhibits it, and how it relates to other processes such as innovation and invention—is an important one, especially on a blog devoted to exploring passion-inspired, adventurous, and uncharted roads and approaches to life. After all, some creative thinking is absolutely essential to finding your way forward with no map and no guide.
Creativity is also a huge subject. So it’s one I expect I’ll be pondering and chipping away at in pieces, over the course of my writing career. But I stumbled across a podcast on the subject the other day by Stanford professor Bob Sutton, whose ideas on life and entrepreneurship often resonate with me. This particular six-minute podcast video laid out Sutton’s theory that creativity is really just repackaging existing ideas in a new way.
Sutton gave the example of Play-Doh, which found a new use (as a children’s clay) for a pliable goo that had been marketed as a way to remove soot from wallpaper in the age of coal-fired furnaces. He also talked about how Apple’s iPod used mostly off-the-shelf technology repackaged to perform a completely new and better function. In addition, he told the story of Andrew Wiles, the professor who managed to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem—a problem long considered unsolvable. It took Wiles seven years of effort to come up with a solution, piecing together techniques from various branches of mathematics.
The video led me to ponder Sutton’s theory a bit. Certainly much of innovation is looking at existing objects and finding new ways of recombining elements to do something better, faster, or differently. I keep thinking of the guy that invented the pop-top for soda cans, and became a multi-millionaire in the process. How many times did he look at the problem of glass soda bottles and ponder the problems with packaging the drink in an aluminum can before he figured out that what was needed to make the idea work was a removable tab of aluminum on the top? Then, of course, there would have been the problem of making something like that workable, and producible in large quantities.
Perhaps there was existing technology that made that invention or innovation easier for that particular inventor to see. But what about an artist, from Picasso to Jackson Pollack? Are they repackaging existing elements in new ways? Or what about Alan Paton, whose book Cry the Beloved Country is one of my all-time favorites? Is that kind of creativity just repackaging existing elements? [click to continue…]

One of the themes of this website—and, indeed, much of what I’ve written about adventure over the years—is the unpredictable places any adventure can take you. Most of my big adventures have come from what seemed a simple enough idea at the time. In 2001, for example, I only intended to go to Kenya to do a story on flying in the national game parks there. But that story started to fall apart (welcome to Africa), and I ended up having a chance encounter with two pilots in a coffee house in Nairobi who offered me another story opportunity … which ended up with my flying into a war zone, which, in turn, opened my eyes to a staggeringly complex world of war, politics, mercenaries, missionaries, and an international aid industry that bore little resemblance to any of my previous ideas on the subject.
Once you agree to take that first step on a journey or adventure, in other words (whether it’s physical, emotional, or personal) … you may find yourself in places, or compelled to explore new directions, that weren’t in the plan to begin with. That’s what makes adventure journeys so challenging and rewarding.
Take, for example, the search for the Great Yellow Duck.
Well, okay. It was really the search for 28,000 very little ducks, or “duckies” as they are often called. As in, the cute little toys that bob around children’s bathtubs squeaking water and eliciting squeals of delight from their 3-year-old owners. In 2005, a writer (and a senior editor at Harper’s magazine) named Donovan Hohn decided to go in search of 28,000 plastic yellow ducks (and frogs, beavers, and other bath toys) that had been swept off a container ship in 1992 en route from China, where they were made, to their U.S. destination. [click to continue…]

In researching another post a few weeks ago, I came across an older item on Stanford professor Bob Sutton’s blog that I thought was worth excerpting here … especially seeing as this is graduation season, when millions of young people set forth in the world to make their mark and their fortune.
I am an unabashed fan of entrepreneurial energy; of that relentless desire to somehow explore, change, or improve the world as it is while taking command of your own life in the process. It’s one of the reasons I loved living in Silicon Valley for the seven and a half years that I did. But in this particular post, Sutton cautioned about what he called the “negative underbelly” of this “drive for human achievement.”

I am all for high performing teams, excellence in performance, and I love the restlessness that drives creative people at places like Apple, Pixar, and Facebook. But there is a negative underbelly to this human drive toward achievement. It can become a disease where, no matter how much some people get, they keep wanting more, and the result is not only chronic unhappiness for themselves and those around them, it is also often propels unethical and otherwise inhuman behavior. [click to continue…]

Ed Note: “I Do This Because …” is a series of guest essays on this site by adventurers, entrepreneurs, and brave explorers of experience, uncharted territory, and life. As the title indicates, the essays offer the authors’ reflections on why they chose the path they did, and why they continue on that path, despite all the challenges, costs, and discouraging moments that come with any uncharted adventure.

For more information on the origins of the “I Do This Because” essays, see my own entry. And, as always, if you know of anyone you think would make a good guest essayist, or have your own answer to why you’re pursuing the particular, challenging path you’re pursuing, please share it!

About the Author
Brian V. Hunt is a writer and entrepreneur with a lifelong passion for Egypt. He has visited Egypt ten times and remained breathlessly glued to al Jazeera night and day during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Friends and family thought him mad for wishing he were with the people he knew who were Tweeting from Tahrir Square in Cairo, but this is the nature of passion and the revolution was one of the most thrilling things he’s ever witnessed, even from afar.

I do this because … I have to

When it comes to passion, there is no other honest ending to the sentence fragment, “I do this because…” except “I have to.” In the darkest moments of our pursuit of passion, we feel a bit unbalanced, maybe even crazy for the intensity of our dedication. We turn the statement into a question: “Why the hell am I doing this?”

Whether that question arises out of physical fear, frustration at the perceived distance of a goal, or distrust of the value of the pursuit, we ask the question to attempt some justification. The end is uncertain and we question our motives, our judgments, and our fortitude to continue. We think the answer to the question above will quell with logic the mounting discomfort we feel.

But it can’t. The nature of passionate pursuit defies logic. I have no explanation for my endless fascination with all things Egyptian and its outsized place in my life, the feelings that Egyptian art and architecture arouse in me, nor for the particular love and kinship I feel for the modern Egyptians. I can only speculate and employ dime store psychology to explain it. [click to continue…]

Just a quick note to thank everyone who’s written me since I announced my departure from Flying magazine at the end of March (and the move of my “Flying Lessons” column to the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Sport Aviation magazine).
It has been heartwarming to hear from so many people that my column found a home with them. It’s also reassuring to hear that the effort I put into trying to write interesting pieces that look at more than just the mechanics of flying has made a difference to so many people.
I had … and still have … the best intentions of responding to all those emails. But the house construction project I’m working on still isn’t done, I’m driving 2-4 hours a day, taking a teenager to various airports every day this month, madly trying to get him his pilot’s license and some experience working on airplanes before he heads off first to Montana to work on planes and have some mountain adventure after he graduates next week. That is, by the way, before he heads off to Mongolia, where he’s decided to spend a few months of his post-graduation year. And then there’s the writing deadlines and career stuff.
All of which is to say … I haven’t made it very far toward the goal of responding. So my apologies to anyone who sent a note and didn’t hear back. Know that I read and really appreciated them. And … I may still get around to those responses. But if I don’t, it’s just because the swamp is so deep, and so filled with alligators this year.
Thanks so much for writing and sharing your thoughts. And for all the kind words. They make more of a difference than you know.
Best,
Lane Wallace