Lessons Learned

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About a year ago I sold pretty much everything I owned and decided to travel with my family for a year or so. As I’m tying up the year, here is what I learned so far. Some lessons were fun, most were painful and still others I knew and only had them reconfirmed to me (and remind me I’m not doing them enough).

Experiences > Things. (Experiences are greater than things, if you forgot your 4th grade math.)
I learn this from a man named Jim Rohn years ago, and the older I get, the more I agree with it. If you have the choice of upgrading your car or taking a trip to somewhere outside of your comfort zone, do the latter. Clothes will fall out of fashion, cars will rust and you’ll forget about whatever collectable you bought. Once you have an experience, nothing can take that away from you, and if you do it right, it will make you a better person.

Spend more, get more: Quality time comes from quantity time.
We all want more quality time, especially with our kids. Just because I had more time to do more cool things, didn’t mean that time was “quality” time per se. I found out that most quality experiences came from spending more “quantity” time with my kids… but I also found more quality time with myself, my wife even locals the more quantity time I spent with them.

Death of a Beach Bum. Health doesn’t come from taking time off.
For some reason as Americans we think that just stopping work and sitting on a beach is healthy. Although taking time off to rest is important, time off leads to more eating, less exercise and even stressing about stupid stuff we don’t have the time to stress about when we’re in our regular schedule. I realized that “healthy” comes from doing healthy habits to their optimum and consistently, not slacking on them.

Who are you sleeping with tonight? You may not really know your spouse.
I am so lucky to have Stephanie as my wife. I said before she gives me more love than I need, more trust than I deserve and sacrifices way more than I admit. We went from our busy lives at home, where many times we were two ships passing in the night and having so much to tell each other about our week, to spending almost every waking hour around each other, and having 99% shared experiences. It was like “relationship shock”.

We ended up completely reassessing our relationship, and because we had so much time to talk, we found out about topics we just didn’t have time to dive deep into while we’re putting out fires at home. I’m not going to lie… it was tough and rough, but we continued to love each other even when we hated one another. In the end, we made adjustments, recommitted to each others’ needs and had to do a lot of forgiving. Completely worth it, but don’t want to go through it again anytime soon.

The world is big, your world is small. Stop doing that.
We like comfort, and we end up making our world small so things are more predicable. The challenge is that we miss out on other life experiences which give us a better understanding of others, other people’s conditions and how good we have it. Life is too short, and your world is not meant to be that small. Growing your world teaches better self-reliance, gratitude and reminds you that life is not all about you. What a concept.

Retirement may not be the end goal.
I’m all for not having to work for financial reasons. I’m just against stopping working because you don’t want to work. If you don’t consider your work some form of contribution to others, I would suggest to find another job… or adjust your awareness. If you change tires at a garage, realize how much you’re contributing to other’s ability to go to work, support their families and help others. How does the product line your company makes help someone’s quality of life? Whether you’re a cop, teacher, barista, IT specialist or lawnmower, connect to how you help others. If you can do that, retirement may take on a newer meaning, or you might find some other way to contribute to a greater audience.

Flexibility + Spontaneity = Happiness.
The experience of this trip helped me a lot to realize how inflexible and unspontaneous I was. I related it to parents who have five kids. Just like all of us, we’re horribly anal retentive raising the first kid. We take a suitcase of supplies to run a 20 minute errand, bleach everything to kill any bacteria and watch their every move like a hawk.

By child five the experienced parents grab one diaper for a three hour shopping trip, brush off a dropped bottle nipple on our own dirty pants and at times even forget there is a fifth kid.

When we started this trip, we planned everything months, and in some cases over a year in advanced. By the end we decided our next destination a month before we left, and found housing, rental cars and plane tickets only weeks or days in advance.

This new game plan allowed us to be more spontaneous and fun, while helping us be more flexible and better problem solvers. An extra bonus is that we did it all together, making it fun, building a bond and giving us some crazy stories.

Another thing you take for granted: Everyone knows a little English everywhere, so use it to grow.
Granted we didn’t go to some distant, lost community in the African jungle, but we visited enough continents and countries to realize that we have a huge advantage: Almost everyone knows a little bit of English. That is an asset you can and should use to experience and grow more.

The gravity of negative habits will crush you.
We all have bad habits whether we communicate to our loved ones poorly, overspend our budget or swear too much. With more time on my hands, I found out that I had more time to do those negative habits I naively thought would disappear once I left my hometown for an extended period of time. I quickly realized, but slowly acted on this fact. More lessons learned.

Small Question: What is your life really about?
This is a tricky one, so hang with me. Your life is about you, because you are the driver, but it isn’t about you at all. Most parents know what I mean, but even as a young father I was still cluessless. I still might be a little too. Here is my point, if you don’t have a cause that drives you, and people you would do almost anything for, I can care less what dream house you build, how many luxury cars you own or even how many countries you’ve visited in your life.

I know it is cheesy, but “The Key to Living is Giving”. I found out that once I started caring more about others, much of my stress went away. It is easy to get wrapped up in our own lives, and I’m not saying to ignore your own growth and actualization. What I am saying is that if you make every day you have about you, you’ll have nothing of true value when your last day arrives. If you can figure this one out, you’re far ahead of the game.

Change = Growth, So Grow Up.
I used to be one of those stubborn people who believed that I am who I am, and no one is going to change me. Then experiences this last year reconfirmed to me that growth is change. Finding better ways to think, live and treat one another is what life is all about. Here is a newsflash: You don’t have all the answers, and the way you live your life right now is not 100% right. The only way to keep on growing is to keep changing, and finding flaws in yourself which are ineffective, inefficient and downright wrong. Having this humility is painful to most, including yours truly.
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