Thinking Out-loud about a LONG Trip
I wrote a blog post February 2nd called “Life is a Forward Moving Force.” It’s about a river adventure that was out of character for me. As a student of Milton Erickson I believe we have the power to change what we don’t like about ourselves. In his therapeutic practice, Erickson brought about big changes in personality by suggesting small changes in behavior.
The part of who I am that I want and need to change the most is my need to be comfortable. Being comfortable in every way possible has been my number one priority in every situation since I was a kid. That need for comfort results in other things I’d like to change.
The very last thing that seems natural for me to do, is sell everything that isn’t essential and go live in a different country for a year. I’m thinking that is exactly what I SHOULD do. We have an offer on our house that will hopefully result in a sale by the end of this month. We have Dave Ramsey inspired emergency funds, and I have a novel that is about 70% finished. What if I sold everything but my MacBook Pro, iPad and 5D Mark II and traveled somewhere exotic to learn a new language and culture? What if I did the thing I fear most and risk comfort in exchange for adventure? The desire to do a Big Trip is still in my soul, so why not make that my next thing in life?
I’m throwing this out to the Internet to ask for advice. Have you done something like this in your life? How did it improve the person you are today? What are some things I would need to consider? What are some places I should consider (inexpensive so I can stay at least a year)? I don’t want to roam, I want an immersive adventure. What would I do with my dogs?!?!?!?
I don’t know if I can stretch this far, but it’s what feels right. It gives Luria freedom to not worry about me competing with what she does next. It gives me an opportunity to finish the novel, and I don’t think I will ever finish it without setting time aside to focus on it. This would cause me to grow in a way, I can’t fully anticipate until it happens.
If you’ve done something like this, I’d love to hear about it. If you know someone whose done something like this, I’d love to hear their story. If you’re uncomfortable leaving a comment, email me: neal [at] geekbrief dot com.
Read MoreTurning the Ship
As a creative person, my mind works like moths flying around a laser beam. Creative ideas and imagination are fluttering in chaotic orbits around a hyper-focused central idea, goal or mission. When my central focus is on faith or hope, my creativity produces good things. When my central focus is on fear and doubt, my creativity produces a mess. Anyone paying close enough attention to me over the last five years got to see both things happen.
From 2005 to 2008, my heart and mind were focused on GeekBrief.TV. That show was all about faith, hope and expectation. For the first time in my life, I truly believed I could make something valuable out of nothing more than what my mind could invent. Watching a dream turn into reality was powerful and motivational and it lead me to dream other dreams. I had the idea for The Big Trip, a dream where we would take the show on the road and travel to all 50 states in an RV or bus. When we were ready to buy the Big Trip vehicle, the economic crises was starting. Had we tried to purchase the vehicle sooner, we would have been able to get a mortgage for a bus just like on a house, but by the time we were ready, banks weren’t taking the same risks. As the dream of doing the Big Trip started to go down in flames, my focus shifted from faith to fear. I call it, “Going all Glen Beck.” I started worrying about the country. I started worrying about my future with my wife. I didn’t sleep well and the joy that was in my life gave way to misery and worry. If you followed me on Twitter during that time, you saw me collapse.
Dogs don’t bite because they’re mean. They bite when they’re scared. I’m like that too.
At Blogworld 2009, Chris Brogan said something like, “Be nice or get off the Internet.” That started to change my life, but changing one’s life is like turning a big ship. It takes some time to shift the momentum and that takes us back to that idea of where my laser is pointed. When my laser was pointed in the direction of fear about Obama and socialism, I did more damage to my soul than Obama and socialism ever could do to my bank account. When my wife left, the stuff happening in D.C. became irrelevant in my life.
Chris Brogan’s speech at Blogworld helped me to start to turn the ship, but I couldn’t turn it fast enough to save my marriage. My wife is filled with hope and optimism and living with my despair made her miserable and it isn’t something I can salvage because I’m alone in wanting to fix it.
It’s sad, but it’s a cautionary tale that I hope will end up strengthening other people’s marriages. If your life is filled with worry, doubt and fear, your life is going to crash. I believe in God and I believe God is a good Papa who wants good things for His kids. You may not have to believe in God to be optimistic. I do. Faith, hope and love will bring good things into your life. Fear, doubt and anger will bring bad things. It is just about the same as driving the Titanic in the general direction of an iceberg. We’ve all seen the movie. It doesn’t end well.
It’s very difficult to change who we are, but it’s rather simple to change how we are. It’s just a matter of changing our focus. I’m seeing it happen in my life. I’m experiencing joy and peace that I haven’t had for years and it’s simply because I slowly started turning the ship from a focus on fear toward a focus on faith, and not just faith in God, faith that tomorrow will be better than yesterday.
Read MoreBrief 400 and Bluegrass
Our littlest dog Zoe woke me up early with a request to go outside. When I got back to the room, I couldn’t fall back asleep. We’re on a road trip from Dallas to Chicago because a couple friends who own a restaurant in Highland Park, IL are having a BBQ emergency and we decided to be spontaneous and support the meat.
Laying in bed, trying to go back to sleep, I was thinking about the next episode of GeekBrief.TV. It’s episode #400. Cali and I think celebrating round numbers is arbitrary. We’d much rather celebrate the episodes that are good–the ones that inspire funny comments and make people smile or laugh. The 400 number isn’t even accurate because we haven’t always given every episode a Brief number, and if you’re pedantically minded, like we are, celebrating 400 is celebrating an inaccuracy and it doesn’t compute.
The restaurant we’re traveling to is called Bluegrass. It was opened in Highland Park at the same time Cali and I opened a self-storage facility for Extra Space Storage next door. Jim Lederer and Chef Dave Teichman fed us well. In fact, when we were saving money like crazy to get out of debt and buy production equipment, Jim and Dave made us honorary Bluegrass employees and gave us an employee discount. The bar manager when Bluegrass opened, Brad Davis, introduced us to all manor of martinis. Brad was so charming and funny (and generous with his pours) that when Cali’s sister Ariane decided to move to Chicago from Atlanta, we looked forward to introducing Brad to Ariane. We fell in love with martinis and Brad fell in love with Ariane. She fell in love with him too. 
So far about 30 people have RSVP’d for the Emergency BBQ Meetup, and it just hit me! Brief 400 is going to happen back where Brief 1 happened!
It’s the place where we lived when we first heard Adam Curry on NPR talking about Podcasting. Adam inspired us with his idealism about the indie nature of Podcasting. It’s where we lived when we first heard Dawn say “Get ready, baby! Get ready! It’s The Dawn and Drew Show, ohhh!” It’s the place where we coined the phrase, “Tyranny of the Day Job” because no matter how well we were treated by Extra Space, the day job was getting between us and our driving desire to podcast full time. It’s the place where we spent a whole weekend with Cali’s whole family the Summer before Curtis Safford, our brother-in-law died of cancer. It’s the place where I interrupted Cali’s shower one morning in October 2005 and told her our next goal was to start a podcast that’s good enough and popular enough that we’ll be able to do it full time.
About a week before our last day at the day job, our Curtis passed away. We packed up the truck fast, dropped off our stuff in Dallas and headed to California for the funeral. Curtis was an IT guy at USC and he’s the person who converted us to Mac. He’s also the father of our most awesome 3-year-old nephew, Loki.
Friends of the Brief (FotB, pronounced FothBas) who come will be able to see where we started, where we lived and taste how good we ate when we WEREN’T eating Ramen Noodles. It really feels like we’re going home.
Read MoreJust Ordered Big Trip T-Shirt Samples
This may be the official men’s t-shirt for the Big Trip:
It’s a 100% Ringspun Cotton Preshrunk American Apparel Fine Jersey T-Shirt. The logo is distressed. The samples should arrive in a week. What do you guys think?
Read MoreOperation Pixel Baby
Cali and I both grew up poor, but blessed. Cali grew up connected to an amazingly supportive Italian family and I grew up raised by Baptists who introduced me to Jesus and home grown tomatoes.
We’ve been married nine years and we’ve put off having a kid because we have an amazing relationship. We’ve never had an argument…ever and the big fear is that having a kid might be the factor that changes that.
For our Big Trip, we started a site called PaidByPixels.com. It’s similar to the principal of buying a brick in a pathway to support your college. You buy pixels to support our trip and get ads galore on PaidByPixels.com and on our network of Web sites. We call it the Pixel Board.
We don’t need nearly all of the pixels to sell to fund the Big Trip, but we need most of them to sell. Cali said tonight, if we sell all of them, we can have a kid after the trip. I’m pretty sure I can convincer her to get started on the kid mission about half-way through.
People have always said that you can’t wait for everything to be fine finically to have a kid because things my never be okay. Cali grew up in a struggle and she doesn’t want to raise a kid that way. I’m not opposed to admitting that I need your help convincing her. She loves me, and she loves y’all.
When people don’t get this Web 2.0 world we’re living in, I wonder if they want to connect to people at all. To us the connection we feel to our GeekBrief.TV friends is more real than the connection we have to anyone in the flesh-and-blood world. That’s why I’m sharing this mission with you guys and not the natural fam.
Read MoreSupporting The Big Trip
We’ve talked a lot on various channels about our plan to take GeekBrief.TV on the road for a year. We’ve named the road trip, The Big Trip, and the goal is to get started sometime this summer. We’ll be shooting GBTV as usual, but we’re also going to be producing travel stories like this one we shot at the Fish Wharf in Washington, D.C.
Our friends are supporting The Big Trip by buying pixels at PaidByPixels.com. Several people have asked us for a Web badge they could use to show support for the trip, and we aim to please:
It should link to http://www.bigtrip.tv. Here is the code, for your convenience:
<a title=”I Support The Big Trip!” href=”http://www.bigtrip.tv”><img src=”http://www.bigtrip.tv/assets/bigtripbadge.png” alt=”" width=”175″ height=”175″ /></a>
Thanks in advance for your help promoting the trip!
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