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THE WAY OF

ADVENTURE

by Jeff Salz, Ph.D.

Digital Edition Published by Fearless Books
in collaboration with San Jacinto Press

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Adventure?

THE FIRST STEP

Leap Before You Look

Chapter 1: Mountain-Naming in Patagonia

Life Inside a Snowdrift

Chapter 2: Make Your Leap of Faith

Innovation Requires Action

Begin with the End

You Always Know What to Do

Look for “Inventure”

Change Your Environment

Take a Flying Leap

Trust Your Instincts over Information

Engage in Risky Business

Go for Maximum Aliveness

The Stages and Gifts of the Journey

It’s the Doing That Makes the Being

Make Your Own Adventures

THE SECOND STEP

Aim Higher Than Everest

Chapter 3: The Freaker's Ball Expedition

Chapter 4: Scale your Inner Mountaintop

Lessons Learned by Dying

Adapt Your Itinerary

Taste the Unforgettable Taste

Stay on the Cutting Edge

Choose the Biggest Challenges

Pick a Lofty Goal

Prepare to Fail

Aim Higher Than Everest

Remember That Stranger Things Have Happened

Renew the View

Stay True to Your Path

Make Your Own Adventures

THE THIRD STEP

Give It All You’ve Got

Chapter 5: Sailing in the Wake of the Sun Gods

A Gift to the Spirits

Chapter 6: Create a Generous Reality

Practice the Art of Sacrifice

Take Delight in the Process

Contribute to others’ Success

Practice Servant Leadership

Take Care of the Whole Person

Pull for Each Other

Give Up the Goal

Grow Invisible

Practice Mind Coaching

Find the Intuitive Edge

Create a Generous Reality

Make Your Own Adventures

THE FOURTH STEP

Work Some Magic

Chapter 7: The Shaman’s Apprentice

The Shape-Shifter

The Shaman Within

The Shaman’s Apprentice

Chapter 8: How to Make Magic

Become Your Own Healer

1. Find Your Vision

2. Make Your Own Meanings

3. Jump-Start Your Inner Search Engine

4. Live an Interesting Life

Make Your Own Adventures

THE FIFTH STEP

Keep on Your Bearing

Chapter 9: Going Loco with the Gaucho Guru

Work Is Life

Chapter 10: The Secrets of Service

Adventure + Service = Clarity

Dare to Care

Heed the Call

Leadership Rises to the Top

Stop Thinking about Yourself

Make Others’ Dreams Come True

Create a Circle of Success

See the Things You Can’t See

Increase Your Energy

Service Will Take You Places

Make Your Own Adventures

THE SIXTH STEP

Enjoy the View

Chapter 11: The Adventure at Home

Early Man as Family Man

Back with the Clan of the Stuffed Bears

Chapter 12: Live Beyond the Peak Moment

Begin with Celebration

Continue with Gratitude and Reflection

Seek Aliveness and Joy

Stop the World and Get on

Do Nothing

Meditation Takes Many Forms

The Lama’s Lesson

Secrets of a Visionary Consultant

Cultivate Soft Strength

Practice Controlled Folly

Maintain Balance in Chaos

Choose Gratitude

Stay Light and Graceful under Pressure

Make a Joyful List

Find What You Seek

Insist on Joy

Make Your Own Adventures

Epilogue

Adventure Is an Inside Job

What constitutes an adventure in my book is any intentional experience that substantially alters our perspective long enough to see things we have never before seen—and to see familiar things in ways we have never before seen them. In times of great transitions such as ours this kind of view is essential for our continued viability as a species.

In a Faustian bargain with life’s prosaic demands we all too often find ourselves trading our child’s innocence and receptivity for hardened stoicism. Adventure is the antidote. It is a bucket of cold water thrown over our comfortably slumbering souls. Without deliberate leaps of faith and dances of derringdo, we may survive . . . but that is all.

Unlike the Arctic explorer whose objective is simply to travel over vast distances, moving his body like a marker across the empty landscape, the efficient adventurer of the spirit learns to cover the most inner ground in the least physical distance. Traveling around the world, we will awaken someday and poke our heads from the tent in a yak pasture at 12,000 feet only to discover that we have arrived in someone else’s backyard—or living room. And that’s when it dawns on us that real adventure is an inside job.

It is an ironic but timeless truth that we often require a pilgrimage to Patagonia, Pakistan, or Papua New Guinea in order to discover the treasure that has long awaited us in our own home, hidden behind our own hearth. Adventure is either in our hearts and minds, or it is nowhere at all.

Because I’ve been something of a daredevil wanderer with a postgraduate degree, it’s not unusual to hear myself compared to another professor-explorer, Indiana Jones. But I like to remind people that I am far closer in style and character to another Steven Spielberg invention, the knobby-faced, wide-eyed alien called ET. While Indy wields a bullwhip and pistol, ET makes friends and influences terrestrials with his innocence, ineptness, and obvious need for assistance.

I know by firsthand experience that upon arrival in a new world—where one can face everything from the suspicion of the locals to the acquisitiveness of well-armed bandits—a show of force is far less effective (and a lot more dangerous) than a display of genuine guilelessness. There is nothing like falling off your horse or tripping over your own feet to swing loyalties and sympathies your way.

I offer in this book some expeditionary advice for successfully navigating through the single certainty in life: uncertainty. Surely nothing has changed in recent times like change itself. While in the old days it was only the world explorer who had to deal with untraveled environments and unforeseeable outcomes, now it is essential for everyone to have this skill set. Drawn from a few decades of extreme exploits over earth, water and ice from west of Ushuaia to east of Ulan Bator, I hope to lend you some techniques for mastering ever shifting circumstances. The fact that I have lived long enough to tender such advice is a testimonial to the fact that they work.

The way of adventure invites us to define ourselves through action, not just words. Adventurers tend to have short attention spans. They insist on the steepest, most direct path up the mountain. You get there faster, they are likely to explain, and the process itself invigorates. The way of adventure encourages us to experiment, to press onward and upward to discover how the view just keeps getting better. It is useful for those who know that the edge is where the view is best, where all growth and learning take place.

As a mountaineer prone to solo jaunts, I have come upon glorious clusters of flowers in a hanging valley so remote that I am certain no one else will ever glimpse them. Alone, having known these flowers, I have realized a certain responsibility to carry their beauty along in spirit to share with others. Similarly, I have met a few people in the wildest recesses—among the poorest, most disenfranchised of our species—whose fire and kindness deserve to be honored. My undying belief that there is hope for this wayward planet stems from the courage, dignity, caring, and innocence I have experienced in their presence.

I have spent many a night with humble folks who could not answer my questions about the “meaning of life” but lived it, danced it, celebrated it before my eyes. More than once I found myself hiding money under a dinner plate—the equivalent of a week’s wages for the locals—in an attempt to repay their kindness. Almost as often I was later chased down a trail by my host or hostess, pesos in hand, scolding, “Gringo! This meal was not for sale!” The meal was for love.

This book is dedicated to the vanishing wild people and places of the earth. It is a plea that the meek, if not allowed to inherit the earth, should at least be able to abide here peacefully. Our turbocharged society seems bent on destroying the very seeds of our salvation: the boundless natural wisdom and diversity of wilderness and native peoples. If I were to dedicate every waking hour to the task of returning in kind all the beauty and generosity I have been offered, it would still never be enough. This book is a small down payment for an immense debt of gratitude.

At three a.m. over tacos in a very bad part of Mexico City, someone once told me, “La nobleza no conoce fronteras”: The human heart knows no bounds. To experience the kindness of a stranger in a strange land is really not that uncommon, yet for me it has become the reason I travel. I don’t know if I had stayed at home if I ever would have learned the secret whispered to me that night on the lamplit streets of Mexico. La nobleza no conoce fronteras.

Somewhere along the trail we discover that, like the faintest of stars in a bright firmament, happiness is best seen out of the corner of our eye. Pursued directly as a primary goal, happiness becomes only a source of frustration. Yet it is likely to blossom fully in our lives as a by-product of a life of service. After some exploration we learn that our greatest joy comes not from self-seeking but in “other-serving.”

I first learned this lesson by transcribing many hours of taped conversations with Mapuche Indians, Chilean huasos, and wealthy Argentine estancieros during a year of foot travel through South America. Having queried all these people about the meaning of life, I finally found the common denominator in their replies: trabajo. Work. Not work defined as “that thing we do to earn the money to get the material possessions we want that will ultimately make us happy,” but work as defined by Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet and mystic, who said that work is “love made visible.”

The question for the modern adventurer of the spirit is how to change everyday work from the first kind to the second kind. How do we redesign both our attitudes and our work environments so that our daily work is experienced as a precious opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those around us? Whether we work at home, in an office, or in the wide open spaces, can work itself become our higher-than-Everest challenge?

The Buddha taught that beyond fulfilling our own basic needs, there are two other reasons for working. First, through our efforts we bring goods and services into the world that contribute to the well-being and spiritual evolution of others. Second, the necessity of having to earn a living requires us to work in concert with our fellows, helping us to overcome our innate tendencies toward self-centeredness and isolation. Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours working. That’s why I hope you’ll be able to apply the lessons of this book to your own work experience, transforming work from a mundane duty or drudge to an ongoing exploit that calls upon your creativity, resourcefulness, and perseverance.

How to Use This Book

This book has been organized so that you can read and review it in several different ways. Everything I have to say about adventure is presented in six progressive steps:

1. Leap before You Look

2. Aim Higher Than Everest

3. Give It All You’ve Got

4. Work Some Magic

5. Keep on Your Bearing

6. Enjoy the View

Each step includes two chapters. The first chapter is a true-life adventure of mine that illustrates how I learned the lessons inherent in that step. The second chapter presents original interviews with other adventurers from all walks of life—with special attention paid to insights and information that are relevant to business and organizational experience. Each of these prescriptive chapters concludes with a section titled Make Your Own Adventures, which provides three hands-on exercises. These exercises will help you bridge the gap between adventure theory and practice by firsthand experimentation.

If you want to read the tales of my exploits before anything else, you can take on all the odd-numbered chapters first, then catch the even-numbered ones later. If you’re the results-oriented type on the lookout for action steps, start with the even chapters. Or you can take the conventional approach of reading from the beginning to the end. However you approach this book, I hope that you finish with a sense that there’s no need to buy expensive equipment or make long-distance travel arrangements before beginning your next adventure.

Your Quest Begins Now

Above all, I want to help you see that your life is a quest in the here and now. A good adventure tale sharpens our inner vision so that we can recognize the spectacular elements of our own lives. Adventure helps us enliven our way of seeing the world around us. I hope this book and its stories, strategies, and exercises will inspire you with the willingness to take a few more chances, to leap before you look, to stretch beyond the old comfort zone. Most important, I hope you will be reminded of how each of us, simply by being alive, awakens daily at another point on a profound journey. What really nurtures us is an appreciation of the ongoing adventure of a lifetime.

The First Step: Leap before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:

The way is both short and steep,

However gradual it looks from here;

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

—W. H. Auden

__________________

Chapter 1 Mountain-Naming in Patagonia

My childhood nickname was Puffy. By age nineteen I wasn’t that puffy anymore, but the psychic residue of having gone through my entire elementary and secondary school athletic career as the last guy picked still defined my sense of self. It wasn’t until I discovered hiking and rock climbing in my early teens that I found a physical activity at which I excelled. Climbing, I had decided, would be the sole focus of the rest of my life.

Cowboy Steve McAndrews seemed to have chosen more ambitiously; since leaving his Texas home, his interests had ranged widely from climbing and kayaking to music, educational theory, poetry, even dance. In his wide-brimmed Stetson and ostrich-skin boots, he’d driven his pickup truck up to Big Sur to become one of the first people I knew to get Rolfed. In the wink of an eye, this shuffling, panhandle kid had transformed himself from redneck renegade to renaissance ranchero. This transcendental trailblazer was also my best buddy and climbing partner. So when McAndrews suggested the two of us organize a yearlong climbing expedition, it never occurred to me to refuse.

“Come on, Salz,” he’d chided. “Patagonia has mountains no one has ever climbed. You know, whoever is the first to climb a mountain gets to name it. What do you say we go down there and do a little mountain-naming?”

The conversation had begun earlier that year as we practiced our winter mountaineering skills in the mountains outside Silverton, Colorado. It had continued into the summer as we journeyed up to Crested Butte to make a few bucks teaching climbing and kayaking to high school students. Our pupils were not much younger than we were.

McAndrews, fresh off a feed lot in Hereford, Texas, was twenty years old and already a better climber than I would ever be. A few years earlier, he had traded in his lariat for a climbing rope and taken to clambering up walls of sheer granite the way he had once climbed atop Brahma bulls and bucking broncos. McAndrews wasn’t much bigger than I, but he was large muscled from growing up on a working cattle ranch. He had to buy his blue jeans on the loose side just to get them over his massive upper legs. He was sandy haired and freckled, with baleful blue eyes that reflected a wisdom far beyond his years. No one who met him disliked him, nor could they quite figure him out. He was a redneck with the unaffected soulfulness of a jazz musician.

He took his time getting anywhere, loping lazily rather than walking. The first time I met him, I thought that he moved through the world far too slowly. Later, I came to see that I was the one living too fast. While I lifted life up and hurled it over my shoulder in a mad rush to experience more, McAndrews took his sweet time, examining each moment as though it were a many-faceted jewel. (“Life is precious,” he said. “Why hurry a precious thing?”) There was an otherworldliness about him that you didn’t expect from a down-home cattleman’s kid from the panhandle. And there was a tinge of sadness in his smile.

Patagonia begins where the rest of the world leaves off. At the tail end of the South American continent, it’s known to have the worst weather in the world. Beginning at the barren, empty pampas of Argentina—at the line of longitude so windswept it is known as the Roaring Forties—Patagonia stretches southward toward its abrupt terminus, the icy, stormy Tierra del Fuego, often called the “uttermost part of the earth.”

McAndrews had done his research. There is a place called the Southern Patagonian Ice Cap, where glaciers and wilderness extend from a series of lakes on the Argentine side all the way across to the Pacific Ocean. No one had yet traversed its width. Mountains rise up from its frozen surface: beautiful spires of ice and granite, unclimbed and unnamed. We would cross the glaciers, traverse the ice cap on skis, and climb some mountains.

Because an impressive-sounding name and official stationery were essential to solicit free gear from mountaineering equipment manufacturers and charm suspicious officials of Latin American governments, the “American Ski Mountaineering Expedition” was born. McAndrews and I recruited two college chums to round out our team. Noel Cox, mountain guide and experienced Outward Bound instructor, was the most seasoned expedition member. Her shoulder-length blond hair, mischievous grin, and diminutive stature belied her inner toughness. Just over five feet tall, she reached halfway up the chest of the fourth member of our team, Randy Udall. The son of a U.S. congressman and descendant of Mormon pioneer and outlaw John D. Lee, Randy truly seemed larger than life, from his size-twelve climbing boots to the strength of his intellect and opinions.

From Estancia Cristina—the isolated, Brigadoon-like hamlet up a wind-whipped fjord at the extreme north-northeast corner of Lago Argentina—it took a week to set up a base camp at the foot of the moving river of ice known as the Upsala Glacier. We wove through twisted strata of exposed earth—sulfuric yellows, red oxides, canyons of color carved by aeons of ice. The metal sledges lashed to our backs transformed us into offerings to the wind that threatened to lift us kitelike into the skies. When the gusts came, we clamped on to the nearest boulder and held on for dear life.

Weeks were spent scouting our route, threading the frozen labyrinth of the Upsala, the longest glacier in the Americas. Strapping on our crampons—the sharp metal spikes that climbers affix to the soles of their boots for travel over ice—we were unprepared for the fantastical frozen universe we were about to enter. Turquoise rivers, borne on an icy surface, carved heavenly grottoes and then thundered downward and disappeared into crystalline chasms thirty feet deep. Like four blind mice wearing dark glacier glasses, probing with our ice axes, we felt our way forward day after day. Roped to each other and reeling under our extreme loads, we threaded the convoluted maze of crevasses.

There were sudden screams and curses each time one of us disappeared waist-deep into potholes filled with ice water that lay concealed like booby traps beneath the slush. A week passed while we lost feeling in our toes. We tucked our boots, soggy as sponges at day’s end, between sleeping bags, only to find them frozen solid each morning.

Often we stopped to marvel at the wild world that engulfed us. To endure the ceaseless insults of discomfort and insecurity that filled our days, it was essential to cultivate corresponding qualities of awe and appreciation. Slowly, grudgingly, the ice yielded its secrets: we discovered patterns within the chaos. Soon we were navigating the crystalline white caps with confidence. Hateful cul-de-sacs became the exception rather than the rule. By the end of week two, we had established marked pathways and set up glacier camp midway across the Upsala.

On the glacier at night, my dreams were of train wrecks and explosions. Our tents, pegged to the icy terrain, billowed in the angry gusts that hurtled down upon us from the north.The nylon of the tents whipped and cracked. Our lungs filled with the rush of frozen air as the tent inflated to the bursting point and seams popped with pressure. I imagined the metal screws that held our flimsy shelters to the ice tearing loose, our tents taking to the sky and heading toward the South Pole.

Life inside a Snowdrift

Thirty-five days after departing Estancia Cristina we established an advanced base camp, a snow cave feverishly dug in the face of a great tempest that bore down on us from the north. Buried ten feet deep in the snow beneath the rock towers of the ice-cap peak called Mount Murallon—the Fortress—the four of us lay hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, shivering in a space that was the equivalent of a household refrigerator. We had no choice but to wait for the storm to pass. We waited for two weeks.

By day, time crawled slowly. The diffused light was enough to read by. At night, our cave felt like a group coffin; darkness was absolute.

As each night’s blizzard deposited additional feet of snow on our hatchway, each morning’s foray to the glacier for water required an additional half hour of digging to reach the surface. Once topside, you never knew what to expect. One morning, blowing winds of a hundred miles an hour dropped Randy and McAndrews to their knees, propelling them forward like a two-man luge. It took them an hour, crawling face to the snow, pulling themselves arm over arm with their ice axes, to regain the entryway.

Another morning, Noel and I emerged into total stillness. An eerie whiteout blended the horizon and sky into one seamless dream. All that was visible were the tips of our toes. All that was audible was our breathing.

Each day we sank deeper beneath the drifts. A flickering candle let us know that death by asphyxiation was not yet imminent; there was still oxygen enough to keep us alive. We bickered for lack of anything else to do. Though it was April, we sang Christmas carols through chattering teeth. I set a record in the sleeping bag competition: thirty hours elapsed without my leaving a soggy synthetic cocoon.

One week passed.

Then another.

It was McAndrews, returning from the surface with the morning weather report, who woke us from our state of suspended animation. “It’s been so long that I’m not sure, but I think those tiny lights in the sky would have to be stars.”

The unclimbed mountains that waited across the ice cap seemed a long, long way from where the four of us sat in the pitch-blackness pondering our next move. We had consumed much of our fuel and food while waiting for a break in the weather. Was it prudent, we wondered, to pack up our ropes, climbing metal, and already waterlogged down gear to begin skiing deeper into terra incognita?

I recounted a dream from the night before. Mickey Rooney had appeared with a truckload of cabbages for me to drive over a hill. The dream was an omen, I decided; we had to press on. Randy agreed that the dream was significant: “A sign of the mental decay that accompanies physical deterioration caused by weeks of inactivity.” I knew he was right. We would have to head back across the ice, past glacier camp, and back to dry land.

But first there was a mountain to climb.

Rising above us, Mount Don Bosco, the mountain within whose flanks we had established our snow cave, had but one recorded ascent. The British explorer Eric Shipton and his team summitted in 1961 at the conclusion of a fifty-two-day trek along the ice cap. We suited up, grabbed ropes, ice screws and axes, and emerged into the starlight of the waning ice-cap night. The second ascent would be ours.

First light found us flailing waist-deep through powdery snow, breaststroking toward the East Ridge. The rising sun poked over the glacier’s edge, illuminating the ice with a fire of brilliant amber. Mount Murallon, Mount Bertrand, and Mount Bertrand’s equally beautiful unclimbed satellite peak glistened in ice, towering above us like quartz crystals of the gods. Atop the ridge, thin sheets of verglas crumbled into crystals, filling our path with rainbows.

Hours passed unnoticed. There were moments of grace as our axes and the front points of our crampons chomped repetitively into the vertical ice and held fast. Screws were set and ropes were threaded through carabiners with a sure, rhythmic ease. At other times our efforts degenerated into slapstick. We stood on each other’s shoulders, hauling and pushing each other over collapsing snowbridges, and we floundered through new powder so deep we would never find bottom.

Unroping, moving on our own, we attained the mountain’s principal ridge. None of us had ever witnessed such a sight. The entire range of glistening peaks and sheer rock pinnacles shimmered before us in the bright sun. For a moment I stood lost in amazement. Then I took a single step forward and felt the world disappear beneath my feet.

I’d made a deadly error. Fatigue combined with overconfidence had caused me to succumb to an optical illusion. Through the dark lenses of my glacier goggles, I had confused the snow beneath my boots with the whiteness beyond and had strolled blithely over the lip of the abyss! The once-gentle ridge top was now an ice cornice with a jagged edge that ended in a spectacular drop of several thousand feet.

So, it seemed, had my life. As I teetered forward, my mind filled with regret and the recrimination that must be the final thought of many soon-to-be-no-more climbers: what an idiot! Suddenly, there was a tug at my waist and I felt myself being jerked backward. Glancing over my shoulder I saw McAndrews, rope in hand, leaning back, counterbalancing my weight with his. A split second more and I’d have been on a one-way ride to oblivion. Instead, overcome with vertigo, I fell to my hands and knees on the ice.

“Thanks,” I gasped.

“No problemo,” nodded McAndrews, cool as ever.

Apparently my number was not up. Not yet.

The summit was in sight. We moved slowly upward along the ridge, climbing through haystacks of rime ice—freezing rain hurled with such force and at such low temperatures that it creates formations with the swirling intricacy of brain coral. McAndrews, who was at the front of the team, stopped and motioned for me to take the last lead. The final pitch was steep but not technically difficult. Securing the rope with a boot-ax belay, I guided each member of the team to within a few feet of the summit. When we were all in place, we joined hands and stepped to the top. Spontaneously, we began to sing.

My heart soared like a condor. I witnessed the planet as primordial and as fresh as the day it was born. Thousands of square miles of virgin earth surrounded us, uncharted, untrammeled, and unknown. Directly below us, the Upsala Glacier extended forty frozen miles before turning into icebergs and disappearing into Lago Argentino. One hundred miles to the north we could see the legendary monolith of Mount FitzRoy, its mile of solid granite gleaming purple, its silhouette like a spaceship heading skyward. Someday, I said to myself, we’ll do FitzRoy.

You never conquer a mountain. If you make the summit, all you have conquered is yourself. There, on that peak, we gained the upper hand on our fears, our self-doubts, our own inner inertia. On the mountaintop we felt our souls expanding and prayed that some part of this newfound largesse of spirit would linger forever.

Eight days later we stepped once more upon the living earth. The loam felt deliciously spongy beneath my feet. I was overwhelmed by the texture of the leaves, the colors of the flowers. After weeks of near-total sensory deprivation, we had emerged from a frozen moonscape into the Garden of Eden. I dug my fingers into the earth and burrowed my face into a soft patch of moss. Lustily, I sucked in the sweet smell of life.

Chapter 2

Make Your Leap of Faith

Successful people are seldom purely outcome-oriented; they delight equally in the process and the result. Surprisingly, their insistence on immediate gratification, on savoring the intrinsic pleasures of each moment, turns out to be the most effective method for dealing with the vicissitudes of long-term change.

If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always gotten. The only thing about which we can be certain is that today’s solution will no longer work tomorrow. We rekindle our love affair with life and improve our chances of success every time we try something we have never tried and go someplace we have never been.

Innovation Requires Action

As a speaker and consultant working with some of America’s most dynamic executives and corporations over the last few years, I have discovered one fundamental truth: Successful individuals and organizations innovate; radically successful individuals and organizations innovate radically. To take first prize requires taking a chance. When we are innovative, we don’t always have the luxury of waiting for all the information to be in because, quite simply, the information is never all in.

Innovation means action. When crossing a busy street, we cannot look both ways at the same time. We look one way, then the other. We assess the situation, calculate the odds, and make necessary preparations. But then we must leap. Gathering our gumption, we put pedal to the metal and make our move. Or we will never go anywhere at all.

In much the same way, the pace of today’s world no longer permits us the luxury of prolonged deliberation. We must grow comfortable taking action before all the data is compiled, neatly graphed, and pie-charted; before all the subcommittees and focus groups have made their reports. We must be willing to find our courage, gather our wits, trust our instincts, and take the leap—sometimes before we look.

Begin with the End

“To me, leaping means always starting with the ending I want,” says Norm Fawley, self-educated inventor and president of NCF Industries. Norm holds more than twenty-five patents and is a leading developer of composite materials (like fiberglass-reinforced plastic) that do everything from increasing the strength of highway bridge supports to decreasing the weight of oxygen cylinders used by high-altitude climbers. Norm’s lightweight air cylinders helped make possible the first American ascent of Mount Everest. “I always begin with the conviction that the thing will work even before I start to make it. I don’t just postulate a hypothesis about something that is supposed to work. I physically go do it!”

Norm and I first became friends on a Himalayan expedition I was leading in western Nepal close to the Tibetan border. One afternoon in particular cemented our friendship. After several days of rigorous climbing, I realized I had lost track of something important: our location. We were heading for a settlement previously unvisited by Westerners, rumored to be an inspiration for the legend of Shangri-la. We had spent most of the day struggling through knee-deep snow, heading toward a pass through the mountains. Our lucky break came almost at dusk when, as if from nowhere, a party of yak herders carrying salt from Tibet appeared above us, thundering by with a flurry of greetings and hooves. For several hours we were able to follow the trail they had left behind. I informed Norm and the rest of my party that we would camp just a few minutes beyond the pass. There were cheers, especially from Norm, whose knee injury was acting up painfully. Darkness was almost upon us when we topped the rocky outcropping and found ourselves gazing down a precipitous ice gully several thousand feet long. Suddenly the possibility of finding a warm, dry, flat camp was very remote.

As we pulled together to survive this and other fiascoes that followed, Norm and I became fast friends. Over the course of many tent-bound evenings and pots of Sherpa potato stew, I learned a lot from this freewheeling, wildly successful inventor.

“Whenever I get the feeling that what I am doing is right, I just do it,” says Norm.

In our modern-day society, so many people have lost the belief in their innate capacities. They plan too much, and then they slip into what I call paralysis through analysis. They go through life wanting to do something, but not believing they ever will. Ten thousand years ago, you didn’t sit at a fork in the road and wait for someone to bring you a map and a weather forecast. Hannibal crossed the Alps, Magellan sailed the world and somebody irrigated Chaco Canyon. How did people get such things done? Not by sticking a toe in the water and waiting for it to warm up. They leaped.

You Always Know What to Do

Norm and I later spent some time together in eastern Nepal, close to the Tibetan border. When we once had the opportunity to seek advice from the local high lama at a mountaintop monastery, Norm spoke out. “Everybody was asking the lama, ‘What should I do with my life?’ What popped into my head was, ‘What can I do for your village?’ That threw the lama for a loop; he didn’t know what to say. After a while, he came back and told me, ‘You always know what to do.’ Now I was thrown for a loop! This was a very perplexing piece of information for me at that time. But it has turned out to be true ever since.”

What Norm did for the Nepalese was to bring corn, squash, and sunflower seeds back from his ranch in southern California on subsequent expeditions. In the last few years I have seen stands of giant sunflowers towering up over fences in tiny villages far from Kathmandu. I have eaten their seeds, toasted and salted, along with potato stews containing huge hunks of sweet yellow squash. One day I asked my Nepali host where he had obtained such tasty and unusually large squash.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Somebody came through,” was his reply.

Making a difference does not depend on intellect alone. Coming up with an idea is only the beginning; it is “coming through” with action that completes the equation. While ideas are necessary to plot the course, action alone hoists the anchor and sets sail for success. We may always know what to do, as the lama told Norm, but in doing it lies the thrill of adventure.

Our creativity, innate wisdom, and capacity for greatness always lie just below the surface, awaiting the moment we pick up the pen, grab the brush, or attack the keyboard. “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius power and magic in it,” wrote Goethe. Whether we are taking on a new job or creating our own, beginning a new relationship or revitalizing an old one, if we trust in our own capabilities we will seldom be disappointed. The only guarantee of disappointment is never to leap at all.

Look for “Inventure”

I asked my friend Dick Leider why more people don’t take leaps of vision. According to Dick, the urge to explore—which comes easily to us in our early years—fades soon after college for the simple reason that we get out of the habit. Dick has spent a lifetime in career counseling and now runs a consulting firm called the Inventure Group. He’s an experienced outdoorsman who has written a number of popular books on attaining personal and business success. Nowadays, Dick works most often with senior executives in major corporations; that is, when he is not on yearly expeditions to Africa, where he was recently initiated as an elder in the Masai tribe. Here’s what Dick has to say about keeping one’s sense of adventure alive:

We can spend so much of our lives, especially in corporate environments, cogitating and contemplating without actually experimenting, experiencing firsthand, and taking risks. In the first half of life, you may get a good game going in conventional terms of salary, and then before you know it, your life has become a replication of the same old patterns leading to numbness. I meet a lot of people who are highly successful but feel numb and unfulfilled. This is because they have defined success only in an external, power-and-money way. Not that I am against power and money, but we all discover sooner or later that it is not everything in life.

I see more and more people approaching the second half of life with something new uppermost in their minds. They are looking for the rest of themselves. They have played by the external rules for so long, they don’t know how to go inside themselves and find what is missing. They fear the inventure—the risky journey into their own unknown territory.

Change Your Environment

In our roles as expedition leaders, Dick and I have both experienced the truth of the old Outward Bound dictum: we become more alive simply by changing our environments—particularly by entering the wild. In a novel setting where we can no longer count on things being as they were, our senses become more finely attuned and our instincts sharpen. Leaping into an unfamiliar environment—be it a trip to the other side of town or the other side of the world—is a sure ticket to a revitalized awareness.

“People feel much more alive on a trek and then they want to know how to bottle that experience and bring it back home with them,” Dick comments. “And they hunger to share what they felt. For a while they may stay in touch with other trekkers they met, but eventually the experience recedes if they don’t do something to keep it alive in their everyday environment.”

And how do we keep that spirit of adventure alive in everyday life? Try creating your own personal inventures. “Everyone is an experiment of one,” Dick says, “and what to do depends on your environment and personal issues.” But he agrees that an effective first step is to change your internal environment—that is, to pursue on a regular basis some creative expression or activity that is uncomfortable or unfamiliar to you, and see where it takes you. When you launch yourself into new internal territory, sometimes you will fail miserably—but you have already succeeded! Because regardless of the outcome, you feel more alive.

The real reason to leap before you look is that after the split second of initial discomfort, your entire being starts to feel so good. Your adrenaline pumps, your pulse quickens, your breath grows short, your eyes open, and your nostrils flare wide. As your feet leave solid ground, even momentarily, you rediscover your own aliveness and find yourself renewed, revitalized, and awakened.

Take a Flying Leap

My colleague Jim McCormick, an M.B. A. who once served as the chief operating officer of an international architectural firm and now works for himself as a motivational speaker and consultant, often raises eyebrows—not to mention pulses—when he greets a new client. That’s because Jim has a penchant for leaping out of the sky trailing an American flag and a trail of smoke, then landing within a stone’s throw of his astonished clientele.

A world-record holder and North Pole sky diver who advertises himself as a leading authority on risk taking, Jim showed up for the first meeting with his publisher after taking such a flying leap, and he has staged similarly vivid demonstrations of risk for such clients as Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Sun Microsystems, and the American Payroll Association. Jim explains, “You have only one chance to make an unforgettable first impression.”

Trust Your Instincts over Information

Jim is teaching a deeper lesson than showmanship to today’s corporate movers and thinkers. “Today’s businesspeople have to trust their instincts more than ever before,” he muses. “Things are happening so quickly that they can’t go to the same level of study and preparation that used to be possible. I interviewed a fellow who started up two Silicon Valley firms who said that the greatest challenge he faced as an executive was having to make decisions on what he knew was insufficient information. Because he knew that if he waited until all the information was in, the opportunity at hand would pass him by.” That’s where Jim makes the connection between skydiving and the modern business climate:

People always ask if I was scared for my first jump, and I say of course. And I’m still scared, because every time I leave the plane I’m potentially killing myself. In that situation, some degree of fear is healthy! What’s relevant for businesspeople to understand is that if I wanted to be totally prepared for every possibility, I would never have made my first jump. You don’t have to be particularly imaginative to come up with a fatal scenario, and it does happen to people on their first jumps. But if I was overly concerned about that, I would never have proceeded.

Again and again I’ve heard stories of companies in the midst of rapidly reshaping their approach—whether they’re expanding, downsizing, or changing their market position— having to tell their people, The old ways don’t work anymore and we have no way of knowing if the new way we’ve chosen will work. But we have no choice but to go ahead. No one has the luxury of defending the status quo any longer, partly because the competition is now coming not only from new contenders in the same field but from whole new forms of commerce that didn’t even exist a few years ago.

Engage in Risky Business

Jim’s point seems almost understated when you reflect that such major players in the current American economy as Amazon.com or America Online not only didn’t exist ten years ago, they weren’t even being imagined. The Internet itself, perhaps the most significant force in the rapid reshaping of worldwide marketing, was not in the public view until 1994 and was just beginning to gain popularity by 1996.

Jim adds that the capacity to engage in “risky business” is crucial for individuals as well as companies:

One thing that’s so exciting about today’s business world is that losing your job is no longer a badge of shame. In fact it’s inevitable. The single-employer career is history, and the single-occupation career is on the way out, too. That means people need to take risks in their careers in order to advance. Even the risk-averse type who likes to play it safe is going to get fired. It’s the corporate adventurers who not only land on their feet but end up at the top of organizations—or heading up their own companies. That’s why I teach the importance of lifetime education. People must be retraining themselves on a perpetual basis. But in the final analysis, whether you’re on the high-speed train to the future or just watching it go by depends chiefly on how comfortable you are taking risks.

Go for Maximum Aliveness

Joseph Campbell, the scholar of mythology and philosophy, came to the conclusion that maximum aliveness is the ultimate prize. “People say we are seeking a meaning for life. I don’t think that is really what we are seeking. What we are seeking is to feel the rapture of being alive.”

In his book The Hero of a Thousand Faces, Campbell offers us a schematic of the archetypal hero’s journey—a topographical map of the elevated terrain of the human spirit. This map is, far and away, the best navigational chart I can recommend for the trip. And Joseph Campbell is among the finest guides I have encountered. An archaeologist of the human story, Campbell has traveled the world sifting through our species’ subconscious and digging up a template that transcends time and culture. His work provides a blueprint by which to construct a meaningful life and a resource to consult when the trek toward a goal seems to be getting off course. It is the map that all adventurers of the spirit will do well to keep on hand for easy and frequent reference on the circuitous path ahead.

Campbell believes that the basic storyline of the human experience has remained unchanged from the stories of Gilgamesh of Mesopotamia and King Arthur of ancient Britain to modern-day movie epics like the Star Wars trilogy (for which his research served as inspiration). We would do well to recognize it as our story, too. According to Campbell, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

For all of us, the initial step is always a leap—of faith.

The Stages and Gifts of the Journey

A herald appears to instigate our journey. The herald is the individual or experience that delivers the wake-up call, challenging and inviting us to leave the comfort of familiar shores behind— just as Steve McAndrews called to me to head for Patagonia. To answer that call requires a level of trust and a willingness to fly by instinct and the seat of our pants. There is rough and unfamiliar country ahead, adversity and uncertainty. We must remember that the night always looks darkest—just before it goes totally black. Then we hit bottom.

Every quest must have a Dark Night of the Soul, its Pit of Despair. Losing our orientation, we may feel totally defeated.

But we can remain in the pit for only so long. Life’s natural buoyancy reasserts itself and we find ourselves lifted upward once again toward the light. At last we experience some success. We vanquish a couple of dragons and begin to realize the three principal gifts of our subterranean odyssey:

1. We have gained a heartier faith in life than we had heretofore known.

2. We acknowledge that we have the power to make a significant difference in the circumstances of our lives and the world around us.

3. We discover that along the way we have forged new and profound alliances, not only with individuals but with our own humanity.

It’s the Doing That Makes the Being

We must all leap wholeheartedly into everyday life; we must commit ourselves daily to move in the direction of our dreams. If we are to make measurable progress we must define ourselves in deeds, not just words. The human doing creates the human being. With equal parts audacity and uncertainty, we take the plunge. Surprised at the sound of our voice saying yes, the sight of our hand raising to volunteer, we find ourselves stretching toward what we hoped we might become. Playing for higher stakes we master the game more quickly.

“I can’t say that I love danger,” wrote André Gide, “but I love a life of risk. I want life to demand of me, at every moment, all of my courage, all of my happiness, all of my health.” Life is the ultimate Olympiad. We qualify at birth. Sometime later the herald arrives, the starting gun sounds, and—if we choose to answer the call—the event begins.

For a kid from Jersey, my journey to Patagonia was a real-life Alice in Wonderland experience. I had gained entry into a world of adventure and freedom that I had only imagined before—a country of marvels to which, despite its dicey moments, I would always return. My first visit to South America changed me forever. Having stepped through the looking glass, I had begun my hero’s journey and would never look back. How could I have known that the leaping was the easy part and that the most difficult moments of my life lay just a few months ahead?

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Adventure Is an Inside Job

How to Use This Book

Your Quest Begins Now

The First Step: Leap before You Look

Chapter 1

Mountain-Naming in Patagonia

Life inside a Snowdrift

Make Your Leap of Faith

Innovation Requires Action

Begin with the End

You Always Know What to Do

Look for “Inventure”

Change Your Environment

Take a Flying Leap

Trust Your Instincts over Information

Engage in Risky Business

Go for Maximum Aliveness

The Stages and Gifts of the Journey

It’s the Doing That Makes the Being