The Doorstep Mile: Live More Adventurously Every Day

the newsletter at www.alastairhumphreys.com/living-adventurously) • I feel guilty/selfish/it’s not fair on my family! (49%) • I don’t have enough money! (38%) • I’ve got nobody to do adventurous stuff with! (37%) • I worry about making the wrong choice! (29%) • I don’t know how to begin! (24%) • I feel like an imposter! I’ll fail! (23%) • I’m scare

OVER TO YOU • What did ‘living adventurously’ mean to you ten years ago? • What does it mean today? • If you continue living the way you are, where will it put you ten years from now? • Is that a direction you are happy with?

It is much less painful to offer an immediate, polite ‘no thank you’ than to agree to do something and then later regret it. [By the way, if you find it hard to say ‘no’ to nice people – as I do – try setting up automated ‘canned responses’ for your emails. Having a set text to click saves you having to actually type mean things to friendly people

How do you define ‘failure’? • Is this definition sufficient cause to not attempt something bold?

OVER TO YOU • Think of something you have been doing for a long time. It could relate to your job, outside work or with your family. Ask yourself, ‘why do I do this thing?’ • Has the answer changed over time? • Is it still valid?

Sonder is ‘the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness.’

OVER TO YOU • What practical barriers stand in your way? • What mental barriers have you built up? • Which concerns can be shunted further down the line? Think of the most significant thing blocking you from living adventurously. • Now ask these questions, known as the Dickens Process: • What has that barrier cost you in your life so far? • What is

Write down a bunch of gut feeling, top-of-the-head parameters and see where they lead. Use them to draw up a list of plausible projects. • Rank these by preference. • Select one specific project that you will take into the rest of this book and turn into action. • Slash a rejection line through all the other ideas on your list. You can return to th

What are your symptoms of flabbiness that are an early warning of a deeper malaise? • Physical Flabbiness. • Mental Flabbiness. • Moral Flabbiness.

There was no escape. I found the prospect appallingly bleak. I felt very small. We were in this for the long haul now. But this also meant that the only thing we could do was keep rowing. Stroke after stroke, day after day, week after week. If we kept rowing and did the key things correctly (harnesses clipped on, avoid collisions, close hatches) th