Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Favorite quotations, etc.
ertyu
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by ertyu »

This guy (Reddit link) is absolutely inspiring to me. No fancy sports feats, frugal feats, or traveling the world at an advanced age--just ingenuity and lateral thinking. May he live long and prosper.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by AxelHeyst »

This guy has been walking around California for 30 years with his mules, since he retired at 51yo.
3Mules Guy wrote:take only what you need.... at this point, all the money in the world would not do me any good.

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Ego
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Ego »

The Charpoua Way

https://youtu.be/5d8hdhVxecA

https://www.patagonia.com/stories/the-c ... 27891.html
Eight years ago, Sarah Cartier, a young woman from Chamonix keen to be her own boss, decided to look after this outpost alone. From mid-June to late August, she offers board and lodging to climbers. She provides information, keeps an eye on their progress and administers first aid should it be necessary. She knows how to brush off chauvinist comments that are still too common in the traditionally male-dominated alpine world. And she does it all with her kids until the temperature drops and the glacier closes off access to Les Drus for the season.

For Sarah, there was never any question of abandoning her role as the hut’s caretaker or leaving her family behind. With the support of her partner, Noé, she found a way to bring her family life into the high mountains. And so, in the 2019 season, her climb up to Charpoua was done with her first child, little Armand, on her back. During that first summer, he sat in a highchair in front of the window, where he could see outside and stare at the choucas (or alpine choughs, a very emblematic bird in the Alps). He became obsessed with them and at the end of the summer was able to mimic their calls, all before he learned to talk.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by AxelHeyst »

High schoolers forming Luddite clubs and reading books and learning skills instead of having smartphones.
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2022/12 ... -luddites/
The group’s founder, a 17-year-old named Logan Lane, said she had a hard time recruiting members. But the word seems to be spreading. The crew gathering in Prospect Park had heard of three different nearby high schools that were rumored to be starting their own chapters. Lane showed up to her interview with Vadukul wearing quilted jeans she had sewed herself. She explained that once she was freed from her phone, she had started learning what life as a teenager in the city used to be like. She took to borrowing books from the library to read in the park. For a while, she fell in with a crew that taught her how to graffiti subway cars.

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Ego
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Ego »

Four spots left. Not cheap, but certainly an adventure. I also like it as a way to finance an expensive boat retrofit.
https://sailing-south-2024.com/en/wanted-english/


Image

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Last edited by Ego on Wed Dec 21, 2022 2:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hristo Botev
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Hristo Botev »

Ego wrote:
Wed Dec 21, 2022 2:28 pm
Four spots left. Not cheap, but certainly a daring adventure.
Too funny; from a passage from Moby Dick that I just cited to in the Moby Dick Book Club thread (viewtopic.php?p=267010#p267010):
Image

Scott 2
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Scott 2 »

Klunkerz - the emergence of mountain biking, from the lens of 1970's San Francisco. My library had it through Hulu:

https://www.amazon.com/Klunkerz-Film-ab ... B00EB6EM3U

Good talk of how a community evolved around and then escalated the sport

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Ego
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Ego »

18-year-old spends three years alone building a log cabin.

https://youtu.be/FtiaSn5iCg8
4 years ago I felt lost, even though society had clearly paved the path for me. I was 17 and living in Stockholm Sweden. After seeing the documentary "Alone in the wilderness" by Dick Proenneke, I became completely obsessed with the idea of just packing a rucksack of hand tools and wondering off into the vast forest of Sweden to create my own life, living off the land and build a log cabin. I found my meaning, but I was still in high school. My Grandparents owned forest so I started spending more and more time with them every weekend, wandering out, dreaming of my obsession and asking for advise. I had absolutely no prior knowledge of anything how I was going to do this, just the obsession to learn. When I turned 18 I told everyone of my plans. I received a gopro camera from my parents, so I could at least film some of my adventures. I hadn't even thought about filming anything but I did so and am I glad I did. It is a long story from here of hard work, pain, cold, making many many mistakes and figuring out how to solve problems all alone by trial and error. But I finally built the cabin all alone after 3 years. Along the way I also became passionate in filmmaking, so I invested in a better camera. The whole journey is filmed on a tripod by myself, which was lets just say a struggle (I am insane). Some people will doubt this and say I had a film crew and construction team, which I just take as a big complement. I know my journey and I hope to inspire others the same way Dick Proenneke inspired me.
HT to Kevin Kelly's Recomendo.

theanimal
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by theanimal »

I've been following along. He has some other videos with more detail on individual segments (clearing site, raising walls, roof etc) if anyone is interested in watching further. A very admirable accompliahment, especially at his age and his starting skillset.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Western Red Cedar »

A family of seven move from Canada to Guatemala with only 2k in the bank.

The Giving Experiment: https://www.thegivingexperiment.com

"This experiment is our effort to flee the ruthless bombardment of inescapable media that creates a want for things not needed. Downsizing is our effort to live big. To unplug from those products that promised fulfillment but, in actuality, drain us once we've worked so hard to achieve them."

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Ego
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Ego »

The Russian draft-dodgers who fled to Alaska in a dinghy

Paywalled https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/01/ ... n-a-dinghy
As the wind gathered strength, Sergei (pictured above, left) and Maksim scanned the water nervously. Five days had passed since they left their hometown on the Siberian coast and struck out across the Bering Sea in Maksim’s tiny fishing boat, which was powered only by a small outboard motor. The voyage had been perilous. With its mercurial storms and frigid temperatures, the Bering Sea is one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of water. The pair had travelled down the coast of Chukotka, Russia’s easternmost province (it is so remote that it is often excised from maps of the world). They had braved lashing storms and somehow managed to evade detection in a heavily militarised region of Russia. Now they were tantalisingly close to the end of their 300-mile odyssey. Alaska lay just 20 miles away.

Then, in the distance, Sergei saw something that made his heart quiver: the white caps of enormous waves. He consulted the weather app on his phone and saw that they were about to run into a gale. This was the same storm they had encountered a few days earlier. Then, they had raced back to shore, where they waited three nerve-racking days for the weather to die down. Now, in their haste to flee Russia, they had inadvertently caught up with their nemesis. Maksim’s boat, a flimsy 13-footer, was no match for the behemoths that threatened to flood the vessel or capsize it.

As the waves began to slap the hull, spraying Sergei with water, the boat began to pitch and roll. If they were going to return to shore, now was the moment. This time they headed straight into the storm. “We didn’t even think about turning around,” said Sergei. He had already tried once before to make this crossing, on a solo journey a few months earlier, and been forced back by pummelling winds. He and Maksim knew they might not get another chance. They were confronted with a choice: throw themselves at the mercy of the Russian army or plunge ahead. They chose the storm.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by mountainFrugal »

Ego wrote:
Thu Oct 24, 2013 11:03 am
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek is retracing on foot the global migration of our ancestors in a 21,000-mile, seven-year odyssey that begins in Ethiopia and ends in Tierra del Fuego.

National Geographic dispatches: http://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.com/
Extra details here: http://www.outofedenwalk.com/

Image
Almost 10 years later update and amazing interview with Tyler Cowen! https://conversationswithtyler.com/epis ... l-salopek/
Updated NatGeo Link: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/proj ... eden-walk/

Now a 15 year project!

Western Red Cedar
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Western Red Cedar »

theanimal wrote:
Sun Feb 06, 2022 4:59 pm
Lost in the Valley of Death

Very much Into the Wild esque both in narrative and personal journey.
I got a copy of the book for Christmas and was reading it this morning. This quote from Justin Alexander on Christopher McCandless (from Into the Wild) made me think of and appreciate this thread:
I'm not trying to cut myself off from society like he was. I do have a lot of respect for that guy. That said, I think it's too bad we don't look at the many examples of people who went 'into the wild' and lived to tell a great story.
*ETA - From the Epilogue:
He was brave enough to follow his heart not his mind. The mind always calls for safety. The heart knows that life is not only about safety; it is also about adventure and challenge.
Keep the stories coming...
Last edited by Western Red Cedar on Sun Feb 26, 2023 12:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Ego
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Ego »


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Ego
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Ego »

John Jaso walked away from Major League Baseball at 34, potentially leaving millions of dollars on the table. The sea was calling.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/spor ... -jaso.html

But he found the M.L.B. life to be unfulfilling in some unexpected ways. “Baseball set me up for life,” he said. “I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me.

---

Boating filled the void in his life. He familiarized himself with every foot of the ship. He took a class for diesel motor mechanics and installed solar panels and a wind generator. He devoured hours of YouTube videos about the electronics and made sure he knew what every wire did. “If anything goes wrong in the open ocean,” he said, “I’m the only one out there to fix it.”

All that was left to do: Learn how to sail.

He found an ad for a sunset tour on Craigslist and emailed the captain, offering a few hundred bucks for a crash course in commanding a boat. After a few hours, he felt comfortable enough to go it alone. “It was like learning to hit a fastball and lay off a slider,” he said. “You can hear coaches talk about it all day, but you’ll only learn how to do it if you face it in a game.”

Western Red Cedar
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Western Red Cedar »

Anthropologist Wade Davis was recently interviewed on Tim Ferriss' podcast. Shoutout to Roaming Francis for putting Wade Davis on my radar:

https://tim.blog/2023/01/27/wade-davis/

Famed Explorer Wade Davis — How to Become the Architect of Your Life, The Divine Leaf of Immortality, Rites of Passage, Voodoo Demystified, Optimism as the Purpose of Life, How to Be a Prolific Writer, Psychedelics, Monetizing the Creativity of Your Life, and More

I began at a very young age jumping off cliffs...The great lesson of life is that when you do that you don't land on rock you land on a featherbed. The world exists to lift you up, not beat you down. Jim Whittaker, the great climber and a good friend of mine, said that if you are not living on the edge when young then you're taking up too much space....I've always believed that nothing is beneath you, nothing is a waste of time, unless you make it so.
I was able to become the most important thing, which is the architect of my own life. And this is what I say to young people: be patient, never compromise, give your destiny time to find you. Bitterness always comes to those who look back on a life of choices imposed upon them from the outside. And you may not make all the right decisions, but if you own those decisions they all become the right ones because together they become the path of your own creation and you become the architect of your own life.
The real challenge is to make the art of life itself your vocation.

ertyu
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by ertyu »

After getting evicted from the building where he lived with his artist friends so a mall and a grocery store could be built there, artist dude + wife create a secret apartment in the mall's parking lot and live there for four years before getting busted.

Legend

zbigi
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by zbigi »

In similar vein, a software developer friend of mine saved on paying London rent by sleeping in the office building of his job. He found some place on the last floor that was not occupied and basically camped there (sleeping bag etc.) for a couple of months. He only had to be careful about getting in and out of the building to not raise suspicion of coworkers or security people. And he only did that once he decided that he will quit this job soon anyway - so a termination upon being found out was not an issue. Still, he saved a good couple thousand dollars this way.

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Ego
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by Ego »

Both inspiration and de-inspiration.

The Sailor https://youtu.be/Gh48B5mX29A

guitarplayer
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Re: Life is a Daring Adventure | The Inspiration Thread

Post by guitarplayer »

Looks like my cup of tea this movie, thanks @Ego !

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