Bigger Things #57 - Reality is Negotiable

Marathoning, Past Adventures & Rethinking our Priorities, Decisions and Lives

35 Years of Running with Dave - Post Marathon (Dave) and Half-Marathon (Brad)

Following the Paris Marathon in April 2023 I wrote…

“I ran Paris (marathon) yesterday with 50,000 others… and the energy of all, the beauty of the people and the city, the crowds, the drumming bands, the positivity, the pain and joy, the determination.. Wow, just wow!”

This past weekend I ran the Bay Shore (Half) Marathon in Traverse City Michigan, with my best friend Dave with whom I’ve had most of my life and travel adventures - Dave ran the full, I ran the half.

While Bay Shore only had 5,000 runners, it had that same energy, beauty, positivity and of course pain and joy as all marathons tend to have.

Despite the smaller race size, the crowds were awesome including spectators holding many great signs including:

• Worst parade ever.

• You thought they said RUM, didn’t you?

• Pain is temporary. Internet race photos are forever.

• I’ve been training for months to hold this sign.

• BELIEVE (the famous Ted Lasso signs).

There was even a spectator playing Chariots of Fire on the trumpet. 🎺🎺

That's me in the red shorts

Post-race we drove back to Dave’s house and sat around the dinner table telling his daughters stories of the many adventures that he and I have lived together.

Dave and I have known each other for 35 years and our adventures began as teenagers competing against each other in endurance events which led to backpacking trips across Ontario, and from Vancouver to the Grand Canyon.

We sat around the dinner table reminiscing and telling his daughters the stories of:

• Travelling by bus for 50 hours across America, from Flagstaff to Detroit. 🚌

• Narrowly missing crashing into a massive python snake that was stretched entirely across the road while riding a scooter in Asia. 🛵

• Adventure riding on enduro motorbikes on the paved and unpaved roads of Northern Thailand. 🏍️

• Camping the beach of the Otter Banks, Cape Hatteras windsurfing. 🏄‍♂️

• Days of travelling up leech infested rivers in the Borneo jungle to stay with Head Hunter tribes. 🥾

• Running Boston Marathon together in 2018 in the worst weather in the events 100+ years. 🏃‍♂️

• Putting my tooth through my lip whitewater kayaking, having no clue how to roll my kayak back right-side up! 🛶

• Making convoluted but effective plans to meet up in Indonesia; explaining to a 13 year old and 10 year old how we made plans in a pre-cell phone era… 🤣

I’ve seriously been on a LOT of trips and adventures with Dave.

And all of that reminded me that living in a different paradigm and reality is in fact totally possible!

On Sunday morning I picked up The 4-Hour Workweek, which was one of the 16 books I featured last week, and came across this line:

“How would your decisions and priorities change if you could never retire?” - Tim Ferriss

As I approach turning 50 years old and am hitting the proverbial “halftime”, this question is resonating with me.

So many of our beliefs, so much of our reality about career and life are actually just social conventions that we’ve been trained into believing.

“Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken.” - Tim Ferriss

Most of our constraints are self-imposed.

To the point, years ago I had a conversation with a friend on the verge of retiring from her executive level job.

She was retelling me the story of going to HR to give her notice that she was retiring and they responded by asking her… “what would it take for you to stay?”.

I was like “Well…. WHAT WOULD IT TAKE for you to stay??”.

We actually went through the exercise of answering that question and came up with the full list of her “demands”. 😁

It was really her answer to Tim’s question of “How would your decisions and priorities change if you could never postpone retirement?”.

She gave HR her list of “what it would take for her to postpone retirement”.

They agreed with all but one small concession and she ended up stayed on for another two or three years, on her terms.

It is a good reminder to think about - what is that we really want?

The traditional world model tells us to think about our careers as binary:

1. We are either working 50+ hours a week, or

2. We are retired and working zero hours.

We confuse retirement with what is possible through Lifestyle Design.

Tim describes Lifestyle Design of the New Rich as those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility (it’s too much to unpack here, the book is amazing and I highly recommend you read it if you want to understand this further).

We don’t actually want to have X million dollars but rather we want the freedom and experiences that we believe that money can bring; our true desire is freedom, freedom of time and experiences, freedom to live out our Bigger Things.

Contemplating and answering these question is a great way to see the world of infinite possibilities:

1. How would I change my life and work if retirement wasn’t an option?

2. What do I really want out of life - time and experiences?

3. What “non-acceptables” exist in my life and business that I need to deal with and change?

4. What three activities do I need to stop doing entirely and delegated to someone else?

5. What new capabilities do I need to develop to go to a more rewarding stage of my career (e.g. use of AI)?

As I head toward “halftime” and “Freedom 55”, these questions really resonated with me this week.

We have unique talents and abilities to share with the world.

We have Bigger Things to accomplish and most of us don’t ACTUALLY want to retire.

Let’s revisit our priorities, rethink our decisions, and reshape our lives into a more sustainable way of living.

To Your Bigger Things,

Brad 💕👊

---

You are receiving The Bigger Things Letter because you either signed up or you attended one of the events that I spoke at. Feel free to unsubscribe if you aren’t finding this valuable. Nothing in this email is intended to serve as financial, accounting or legal advice. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions and make your own decisions.

---