Welcome to Part 2 of "The Adventure Mindset", a 5-part Sunday Story series that is all about the attitude you bring with you on your experiences - and how that attitude can make all the difference in the world. This is a story about hypothetical lobsters, real-life motorcycles, and how having options and the human experience of hope are perfect bedfellows.
Yvon Chouinard once said "The word adventure has been overused...for me, adventure is what happens when everything goes wrong". You have a perfect plan, and then something happens - your plan has been derailed, and the adventure has begun.
Often, the only difference between an adventure and a disaster is the attitude that those involved embrace at the moment of “things going wrong”, and this post is all about how to set yourself up to embrace the right attitude when standing on the precipice of disaster. As we do here at Authentik, we’ll use some stories to illustrate what we mean, starting with a fictional one and going to a real-world one.
Let's say hypothetically you woke up this Sunday morning with a goal of hitting up your local grocery store for the week ahead, and you hopped in your car, got all your items from the store, and made it back home again without incident. Would you describe that as an adventure? Probably not. But now imagine you have arrived at the grocery store, and the store had water pouring from the front doors with all the lobsters from the seafood section making a break for the ocean. If you like, you can imagine the lobsters as sentient agents of their escape, like the penguins from Madagascar, as such a mental image might amuse you (This is a hypothetical after all - might as well have fun with it.).
This is a bit of a problem for you - you were going to be hosting a surf and turf dinner that very night, but this unexpected adventure reared its head and now you've got to pivot more for "turf" than "surf".
But what a fun and interesting story to tell to your guests, right? Witnessing the Crustacean version of the Great Escape (lobsters jumping fences on motorbikes optional) is quite the experience. It's not something that happens every day. That would certainly fit the definition of "adventure" for most people - the run-of-the-mill goal of going to the grocery store has suddenly become an adventure - but you certainly didn't plan for that to happen. For most people, adventure is the unexpected, the unfamiliar, and the novel.
Or is it?
Let's now imagine you were going to that grocery store because tonight you were hosting your boss and a really important client at your work for a Surf and Turf dinner at your house. You've been planning this dinner for months and it's a huge opportunity both for you and your organization. You arrive and notice the store has suffered a disastrous flood, and it's not at all set up for you to do your shopping. Plus, with the lobsters on the march, that means no lobsters for you to buy and cook. “Oh no!" you exclaim, wringing your hands. Your dinner party is ruined, right? All that planning for nothing. You’re going to lose the client, your boss is going to be mad, and this whole thing has just ruined your day. You had a plan - and you tried to control every aspect of your plan - and now that plan is ruined. This is unexpected, unfamiliar, and novel - but it doesn't feel like an adventure. It feels like a disaster, a defeat, and a failure.
The thing is, these are the exact same situation. The only difference is the attitude of the person involved at the moment of things going wrong.
Adventure is what happens when things don’t go according to plan.
Disaster is what happens when things don’t go according to plan.
Both of those statements are true. That’s the nature of adventure - it's usually not an experience that you necessarily choose, but the difference between disaster and adventure - assuming you live to tell the tale - is almost always is how you react to that experience. So how do you help yourself react to an experience and treat it like an adventure instead of a disaster?
It’s easy! You just have to scare the crap out of yourself before you start doing anything by imaging all the horrible things that might happen to you! Tune in next week for more great tips like this. See you next Sunday.
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In all seriousness, I’m mostly joking with the above (yes, just mostly). Anticipating problems is also giving you the power to anticipate solutions, and if you can anticipate solutions, then if and when those problems come up, you have given yourself options.
When you have no options, it’s easy to lose hope and accept defeat. But if you’ve already prepared yourself and given yourself just one more option to explore, one more thing you can attempt, and one more way to maybe turn a disaster into a victory, you will be empowering your future self to embrace an adventure rather than accept a defeat. Here’s a real-world example of this principle in action:
In July of 2015, we took a month away from work and had a goal: We were going to get to Deadhorse, Alaska. This was the first part of a larger objective for us - traversing the entirety of the Pan Am Highway, which runs from Prudhoe Bay on the north shore of Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina (with a tiny gap in the middle called the Darien). I was on my trusty Triumph Tiger motorcycle, and Teryn was piloting our Jeep Wrangler. We were going quite a distance - 14,000 kilometres - through some of the most challenging and remote terrain on the planet. The Dalton highway - a mostly dirt pathway that snakes its way north from outside Fairbanks all the way north to the small Oil camp called Deadhorse on the shore of the Arctic Ocean - is notoriously dangerous, so much so that it was the pilot episode of the TV Show "Worlds Most Dangerous Roads". It's particularly dangerous on a motorcycle - the road is coated with a substance that is intended to manage dust, but when it gets wet, it makes the road incredibly slippery. This isn't as much of a problem for the big 18-wheelers (the primary users of that road) but it means riding a motorcycle on that road is a bit like riding a motorcycle on a frozen lake - it is as slippery as can be. Motorcycle accidents are common on that road - during one summer, according to some number crunching I did on Alaska highway statistics, there was about a 1 in 4 chance that motorcycles attempting the journey wouldn't make it due to accidents. Anecdotally, I've known a number of motorcyclists who have attempted the journey, only to have it end in broken collar bones, shattered bikes, or worse - and worse seems to happen a lot.
The road is like a non-stop experience of one of the most beautiful vistas in the word - in my dreams, I still see and am inspired by the Atigun pass (behind our vehicles in the header photo), it's rugged beauty is an incredibly hostile yet vibrant example of the natural world. But somewhere between Yukon River Crossing and Coldfoot, my motorcycle's brakes stopped working. It probably goes without saying, but functioning brakes are an incredibly important thing on any vehicle. They are especially important in a remote place like that, where even a minor accident or fall from a bike can mean death or disaster.
We had a decision to make. The bike was probably not safe to drive in its current state, so we needed it fixed, and the absence of motorcycle shops meant we had only the resources at hand to solve the problem. If we weren’t prepared, our only option would have been to give up, turn back, and not achieve our dream. That would have been a disaster. Alternatively, we could try to fix the bike and keep going to complete our adventure.
If you know us, you already know what we chose, and exactly HOW we fixed the bike is a story for our next post, but let's talk about the mindset and earlier decisions that enabled us to make that choice: We knew going into this trip that it was likely to be an adventure. We anticipated that things were going to go wrong, and would have been shocked if they didn’t. We had a plan for a wide range of potential disasters - spare parts, tools, emergency food, water, shelter, and medical supplies; a satellite communicator if we were in a life-or-death situation to call for help, and so much more. Every trip up the Dalton is an adventure because the nature of that trip means things go wrong all the time, and we knew that from our planning.
Even for a more mundane or every day task, a little bit of preparation can go a long way from turning something from 'a disaster' into 'an adventure’ - or at least, giving you the option to choose which one it will be. For example, in the grocery store analogy, you didn't need to anticipate that you would be the only person in the world to see Lobsters zip lining from the seafood tank to the ocean, red bandanas tied under their antenna and Rambo-style knife in their tactical vests like a deep-ocean version of Sly Stallone (this hypothetical is growing as I write it).
What would you do for your dinner party if they were just...sold out of lobster that day? The Plan B for the relatively mundane (sold out) can often be quickly and easily adapted to a revised Plan B for the extreme adventure (sentient lobsters with tactical gear) - the point is, have the Plan B.
Moltke the Elder, a Prussian Field Marshal in the 1800s, once said “no plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength”. This is a strategic maxim that is generally accepted in all militaries today. He was a big advocate of having a series of plans, not just one. This is the exact same principle we’re talking about here. Having multiple plans gives you options, and options allow you to make choices that help you achieve your goal.
Now let’s bring all this home: The adventure mindset is a hopeful mindset. It's a “this is hard, but I think I can do hard things” mindset. It’s fundamentally human - our species has survived and persisted through some of the most extreme hardships imaginable in the course of our journey over the last few hundred thousand years, and we did so because some of our ancestors said “I think I can get through this adventure” instead of “I can’t do it, I give up, this is a disaster” - and the ancestors who most likely adopted the first attitude were able to do so because they had options to try that gave them hope. By anticipating problems, you anticipate solutions. By anticipating solutions, you give yourself options. By giving yourself options, you allow yourself the chance to be hopeful that one of these options will work out - without options, there's usually little hope, but with hope, you can choose adventure instead of defeat. Human history has taught us that if all you've got is hope, you've actually got quite a bit, and if you have options, you'll have hope.
Next week, we’ll bring you Part 3 of the Adventure Mindset series, so stay tuned. And there’s even more to come from Authentik very soon. The Adventure Mindset series isn’t just web content for the sake of sharing our blog on LinkedIn - our species is already over the threshold into a time of massive disruption, with two major drivers on the horizon. We’re about to publish a White Paper to help you as a leader and as a human prepare for what's coming. I believe we’re all going to need the adventure mindset to weather the disruption ahead - the scale of which is mind-boggling - because I think we’d all rather this disruption be an adventure instead of a disaster. If you want to be notified when we publish our White Paper, sign up for our e-mail list here.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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