The aim of The Next Challenge is to encourage people to live more adventurously and facilitate them in doing so. One way in which I strive to achieve this is by writing about my own experiences in the hope that they’ll variously excite, motivate and yes, even inspire others to take action.
As such, it could be said that part of my job is to keep going on expeditions so that I have new stories to tell and a degree of credibility.
Of course, this is no great hardship as I love expeditions. However, that does not mean that I want to spend my entire life off on adventures. I don’t.
Although I enjoy expeditions and believe that I develop through them, life as a “Professional Adventurer” would be as unfulfilling for me as a life spent entirely at a desk.
On expedition I am pushed both physically and mentally in a way that doesn’t often happen in normal life. I constantly find myself in new situations with new experiences and I relish those opportunities. But for me that is not enough.
I like to think and make use of my cognitive abilities in a way that scaling a mountain does not. You can insert your own jokes here but I have a brain and I believe it would be a waste not to use it.
Also, I enjoy creativity and value highly an outlet for it. Expeditions do not fulfill this need.
Finally, and far more importantly, I do not believe that expeditions alone are a good enough use of my time to make them my sole focus in life. They can be used to inspire, to raise funds for charities, to highlight causes and for general self-betterment but those things are not a worthy enough mission statement for my life.
There are increasing numbers of people for whom Professional Adventurer is a legitimate job title or aspiration and I wish them all the best. But, just as I don’t want to be a painter or a fireman, I also don’t want to be a Professional Adventurer.
2 Comments
Martin Holland
You sum up a lot of my own thinking here. I know that at some point I want to sail around the world. Does that mean I should become a full time yacht skipper? Of course not! This article sort of falls in to the “should I make my passion my job” category.
For a lot of people (myself included at times), it’s tempting to answer the question “how do I create the time and money to go on expeditions” by trying to find jobs in the ‘expedition’/adventure industry. I know that this would be extremely unsatisfying.
There are always alternatives to this, they just take a little more creativity and perhaps some sacrifice and effort too.
Tim Moss
Thanks Martin. That’s a really good point: you don’t have to be a full time adventurer to have an adventure (and it’s probably not even a very good way to go about it).