The Beginning of an Adventure: Where am I going?

Every journey and every adventure needs a destination. Some adventurers are thrust into a journey or forced to partake in a mission. Others are filled with an internal desire that drives them. Others still, have hit a moment in their life where there nowhere left to go, and a journey of improvement is the only path forward.

This is precisely the problem with my old roommate, Mediocracy. He provides for all my basic needs. He keeps the house warm the bills paid and my desires quenched. There is no reason to go on an adventure and for a long time I have struggled with this. Why do I even want to leave the comfort of my life to go somewhere risky and dangerous? Why would I want to try something that could end with me going right back to where I started? It is harder to answer these questions than one might think. At first, it might seem easy, because we think the adventure will be fun so why not go? The reality is that the adventure is going to be a tough and grueling fight. And if there is not a deeper why then we may run home with our tail between our legs.

There are only two ways to fail in an adventure, to die or to give up. Dying is unlikely in our modern age, but the second threat is greater than we realize. It is all too easy to return home because the adventures we go on are rarely adventures of travel. Mediocracy is always around the corner ready to teleport us back to where we started at any moment. This is why a deeper more powerful "why" is required to keep us on the straight and narrow path.

I will admit, I am still trying to figure out my why. I will continue to uncover what it is so that I am no longer tempted to go back home. For now, the idea of living with Mediocracy any longer is enough. I do not want to live a boring ordinary life of working, pleasure and sleep for forty years until I die. Living in such an ordinary way seems to me to be the ultimate failure of life, to die without doing anything of note, and to leave zero impact on the world around me. To be forgotten like a leaf blowing in the wind is the last thing I want on this earth.

This is why I have decided to go on a journey. The destination may change along the way, but the ultimate goal will never change.

The adventure is not just about achieving a goal, it is the goal.

The goal of the game is not just to win the game, it is to play the game, because in the game of life there are not winners, or rather all who play are winners and all those who choose not to are the losers. We may play different games; we may have different strategies we may even have different measures of scoring but if we all play, we all win. So, it is time to play, and it is time to pay the price of entry.

The journey I have chosen to start with is the journey to a net worth of $1,000,000. The reason I have chosen this goal is because many of my other desires and many other adventures I want to go on are heeded by the strains of limited resources. I have chosen this number almost arbitrarily. It is simple, it is safe, and it is well above what I need to ensure finances are almost never an obstacle in the future. In addition, it is a goal that I believe many of my future readers will share, and I hope these posts will be of use for them in their own journey.

It is not my only goal, but it is the goal I hope to devote the most resources too. There will probably be side quests along the way that both help me achieve this goal and also some that are irrelevant to it but important to me. For example, physical fitness will indirectly contribute to the achievement of this goal, but for the most part it is a side quest. This goal of wealth is also not my highest or most important goal. Those will always be related to my family and my relationship with God. Think of your classic adventure stories. While the adventurer may be putting the majority of his or her focus on finding the treasure or defeating the evil dragon, they may go on side quests to save a small town, and they will almost always have higher priorities to their family or religion. But at the time of the adventure the adventure will take the majority of their focus until it is accomplished.

For now, this will be my primary focus, gathering the resources necessary to free myself from financial constraints, create security for my family for future adventures and to have the resources to build a team of fellow adventurers around me. I hope this adventure and journey may be swift so that I may continue onto bigger adventures, but I will be patient and put in the work necessary to reach my destination and I will begin developing a plan of action to reach it.

Until next post,

John Robert Abraham