If you can’t wrap your head around going everywhere, or producing a symphony with hundreds of performers, or undertaking any of the other quests I’ve described so far, it’s important to remember that dreams tend to grow as you pursue them. As you gain confidence, “I can do this!” becomes “What else can I do?”

For the price of a plane ticket, we can jet off to foreign lands. Whatever we could possibly want to learn is readily available to us. Yet these opportunities can also be overwhelming. After our basic needs are met, how do we choose a focus? For many of us, the answer is surprisingly simple: We choose to embrace a quest, and we choose to live for

“It has become ever more clear to me that if I had spent my life avoiding any and all potential risks, I would have missed doing most of the things that have comprised the best years of my life.”

You can apply the same “time and money” principle to many quests and projects. What will it take? What is required? The more specific you can be in your planning, even if you’re making rough estimates, the easier it will be to get your head around the goal. What is the goal, really? What does success look like?

Why should you consider a quest? Because your life is good, but you don’t feel completely fulfilled. You long for a challenge that requires you to develop new muscles and acquire new skills, and if you’re willing to work for it, you can find it . . . or perhaps even better, you can create it for yourself.

Embracing a calling is about being the best at something, or doing something that you feel no one else can do. Not necessarily in a competitive manner, where you have to beat someone else, but according to your own standard of what you know is true.

The long, slow grind of working toward something is all about loving the process. If you don’t love the process, the grind is tough.

every single day, each of us gets to answer a far more interesting question: What’s worth living for? If you could only pursue one thing, what would you craft a life around and do every day? And what if real sacrifice was involved . . . would you stick with it?

When I’d first gone abroad, originally on a summer trip to China, I returned with a perspective typical of the bedazzled novice traveler: “People everywhere are the same!” But as I learned with more experience, that wasn’t the case at all. Sure, the wide swath of humanity has a few things in common: No matter where you go, most parents love their