Where Could I Go?
Unless something falls through, our house will be sold next week. I guess technically, I’ll be a little homeless while my wife and I wrap up details of the divorce and I prepare for what’s next.
I’m planning to put stuff in storage and rent some short-term apartment while I prepare to go on that writing trip I wrote about a little over a week ago.
I’m drawn to Eastern Europe and I hope that’s where I’ll end up. The first place I considered was Thailand, but Thailand is a hot place and I’m happier in cooler climates (but Thai food is so good!). After Thailand, I considered Estonia. Estonia is an intriguing place because it’s a country that cares about technology. It’s where Skype was created. As I drifted around the map, I started to really focus on Budapest, Hungary, and then a couple days ago, I learned about Dubrovnik, Croatia. If you don’t know about Dubrovnik, take a look at these images! My best friend in college was from Poland and he taught me how to say “She has nice face” and “She has nice breast” in Polish, so if I choose Polland, I have something to say when I get there.
Really, I don’t know where I should go and really I doubt it matters. Life isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey.
This is a trip about stretching myself and doing things outside of my comfort zone. I don’t particularly enjoy going to the grocery store alone. Staying in a hotel alone is even less fun. The idea of going to a different country without Luria’s partnership is the single most scary thing I can imagine and that’s exactly WHY I have to do it. Doing things that scare me tends to be worth it in the end because I grow. I want to grow. I also want to write. The main purpose of this trip is to write a book and I registered what I think is a great domain, awaytowrite.com. While I’m away, I will produce a show or maybe more than one that I will publish through Mevio.
If you know anyone in Eastern Europe who could answer questions, I’d appreciate an introduction. My email address is neal at geekbrief dot com.
Read MoreTake Real Vacations!
When you start a business you love, you may be tempted to put 100% of your time and energy during waking hours into making it a success. Cali and I have done that with GeekBrief.TV. Even when we took time off from the show, we used the time to work on parts of the business you don’t see. We took that quote, “Find something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” to heart.
The problem is, people aren’t designed to only work. We need rest, and we need play.
Yesterday morning I was listening to the audio version of My Life in France by Julia Child and I got a life lesson. She wrote,
In 1963 I was shooting four episodes of The French Chef a week while also writing a weekly food column for the Boston Globe. In the Fall, we were scheduled to take a break from TV work and had planned to visit Simca and John at their rambling farm house in Provence, but as November hove into view, we began to regret it. The quicksand of my cookery work, Paul’s painting and photography projects and all the mini bits of upkeep and improvement that 103 Irving Street required were sucking at our feet.
‘I just don’t know if we have the time for a trip to France right now,’ I sighed.
Paul nodded, but then we looked at each other and repeated a favorite phrase from our diplomatic days,
‘Remember! No one’s more important than people.’
In other words, friendship is the most important thing–not career or housework or one’s fatigue–and it needs to be tended and nurtured. So we packed up our bags and off we went, and thank heaven we did!
Throughout the last five years we’ve produced Geek Brief, we had similar opportunities and intentions to travel, but we always made the other choice. We prudently decided we should use that time to work on the business. Sure it would be great to go to Italy. I want so bad to go to Scotland. Hey, we should go to Japan and see all the crazy gadgets and have real Ramen! Instead, we opted for the more prudent choice. We stayed home and worked on our business.
Rest and play are the other side of the work coin. You can’t just breath in. You also have to breath out. Lot’s of people look at our story and think it is inspirational, but I hope people will learn from what we got right AND from our mistakes.
Take real breaks. Leave the Mac at home or at least in the hotel room. Enjoy life with friends and enjoy the beauty in the world. Otherwise you’ll just wear yourself out and burn yourself up.
Read MoreLife is a Forward Moving Force
When I was about 12-years-old, I got to see Zig Ziglar speak. Up until Zig, the only people I had seen standing on a stage talking were preachers. Zig is a motivational speaker. He’s funny and compelling. I wanted to grow up and do that.
The desire to become a motivational speaker persisted through college. I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand how people think. I started working on self-help book ideas around the time I fell in love with the Internet and learned HTML. The Internet won out over my dream to be a pop-psychology guru, but my first book was going to start with these two sentences:
Life is a forward moving force. There’s little to be gained by wallowing in the negative aspects of your past.
I was inspired by Milton Erickson in college. He demonstrated that big changes where accomplished when people made small changes in their lives. Start doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do and you’ll start to notice that everything else in your life will shift to accommodate the small change. Life is a forward moving force is a thought that came to me after taking a completely out-of-character kayak trip down the Buffalo National River in Arkansas.
Luria/Cali and I planned like crazy for the trip. We packed enough dried food and provisions to last a month. We didn’t have much money, so we bought inflatable kayaks and plastic paddles. My grandmother dropped us off on a river bank and we floated away. Before we were out of my grandmother’s sight, our paddles broke and the water pushed us right into a pile of brush where there were several water moccasins coiled up getting some sun. We used our hands and broken paddles to escape from the snakes and back into the flow of the river.
It took us about three days to get to a place where we could get out of the river and walk to a phone. We had to adapt to our circumstances in order to keep the boat moving. We made our way with broken paddles, our hands, and the natural flow of the river. The river was a moving force and nothing we could do would stop it. It pushed us into the snakes and we had to deal with that. We had to cope with whatever challenges the river threw our way and it didn’t matter that our tools were inadequate. We had to adapt.
Life is a forward moving force just like a river. Sometimes it’s relaxing and fun and just kind of carries us along. Sometimes the current is overwhelming and we have to struggle to get back on track. It may feel like changes we need to make are more than we can handle, but sometimes little changes can bring about radical transformation.
Our trip down the river changed my life in a lot of ways. It made me stronger, more outgoing and more willing to take risks. It was transformational because it was the kind of thing I would never choose to do. It’s good to remember the snakes and broken paddles were only a small part of the journey. It’s even better to remember how we made it through.
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 MoreIt’s Not Easy NOT Being Green
Someone posted a comment on BigTrip.TV:
I’m interested to know what you’re doing to offset the carbon emissions from this “trip”.
I love that he put the word trip in quotes, as if it’s somehow suspect and not really a trip at all. Surely our true intention is to destroy the planet as we know it with our harmful carbon emissions. I don’t care to argue, so I replied with a joke, “We’re going to eat more cows.”
We live in a time where environmental fascism is being pushed so hard and so often, that thinking, logical people are bending over and giving into global, irrational, unscientific peer pressure. You can’t turn on a television anymore without hearing environmentalist nonsense about being green to save the planet. The planet is not in danger.
As a thinking person, I can’t base my opinions about the environment and global warming on emotional arguments like those offered by Al Gore and his allies in Hollywood. My gut feeling is that their arguments are nonsense, and oh you cannot imagine how much, I would love to ignore these people and just go with my gut.
My gut instinct is based on simple logic. If scientists cannot accurately predict the weather next week, they also cannot predict the weather next century. It’s the same logic I used to discount disaster theories about Y2K. When everyone was worried and spending millions of dollars on solutions, I changed the clock on my computer to see what would happen at midnight, January 1, 2000. Nothing happened, so I knew nothing would happen anywhere else, and I was right.
I can’t rest with simple logic, though, because the people making arguments based on emotion appear to be winning public support. In order to continue to believe what I think is true, I have to spend time reading the science behind the arguments to see for myself it the emotional arguments have scientific validity.
The emotional argument is that the scientific community has reached the consensus that global warming is a reality and it’s caused by human activity. Global warming is necessarily bad, and since it is caused by humans, it can be corrected, but only if we act now before it’s too late.
There is nothing scientific, rational or even reasonable about that argument. To begin with, scientific fact isn’t determined by consensus. I worry about the state of science education if we don’t remember what we learned about the difference between law and theory in science.
It is a fact that the existence of global warming and its causes are based on climate models that could turn out to be accurate, but could just as easily turn out NOT to be accurate. It is also a historic fact that warmer periods in the past have resulted in global economic prosperity, so global warming, if it exited is more likely to be good for us than bad for us.
It is not, however, a fact that global warming exists. The planet hasn’t warmed since 1998, and 2007 was cool enough to offset all warming that has taken place over the past century.
One of my favorite presidents in history is Teddy Roosevelt. He loved nature and he lead us to set aside parts of our nation to be preserved in a natural state. Nature is good. Pollution is bad. Protecting nature is good. Making people feel guilting for using resources is evil.
Rather than bowing to environmental fascism, religious fundamentalism or any thought system not based on reason, I choose to embrace logic and balance. I have full confidence, when we go too far as humans, a little something God built into nature called homeostasis will bring everything back into balance.
My favorite climate scientist is Dr. Roy W. Spencer. He just released a book explaining climate science. It’s called Climate Confusion. It’s based on science not emotional arguments and I highly recommend it.
If you read this and disagree, feel free to post scientific research that contradicts what I’ve written. I would love to read it, but I’m not going to get into an emotional argument with anyone about science.
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