AND SO IT BEGINS
I can’t tell you how many times over the past two decades, I’ver started a journal entry that goes something like this…
“Did a man like Daniel Boone chase what was hard or difficult, or did he just follow what interested him in the spirit of exploration?
Very few things left to explore in this world outside of yourself what you can dredge from the depths of yourself via challenge and hardship.”
No, I don’t write about Daniel Boone that often, but rather, I find myself always returning to the central theme of what to do with my life. How can best be of service? What is my purpose? How to go about finding these things out?
The are not novel concepts among the human race, nevertheless, I’m haunted by the thought of untapped potential.
I’ve chased threads of purpose all across the U.S., from Florida, to Colorado, to Alaska. I’ve been in insurance sales, skied 128 days in the San Juans, bought and sold gold straight from the Alaska mountains, and then I found myself in a graduate program in St. Louis, MO about 14 years ago.
I had traveled and tried, and ultimately landed in a position that seemed fitting, I couldn’t quite explain why, but I felt I was meant to do this.
Chiropractic school allowed me to follow a standardized curriculum while exploring and integrating other areas of interest and expertise. While in Chesterfield, I dove head-first into the rapidly growing world of trail running. The exposure to the outdoors was my pressure valve from school, but it also allowed me to have a lab to test the knowledge I was learning in the classroom. Little did I know this was the first foundational stone in the many more to be laid in building my process.
As school neared an end, and the real world took hold, a balancing act became necessary.
Run a practice.
Be a husband.
Train like an athlete.
Keep learning as much as I can.
Early on in practice, it was actually pretty easy to create a routine that was conducive to all of the aforementioned. Life was pretty Spartan. No kids, no mortgage, no distractions at our tiny apartment. Sloan and I went to work, built a practice, trained, and cultivated our fairly new relationship, and in the time I had leftover I would read, study, and attend seminars. Looking back, I view this time through rose-colored lenses.
As time pressed on, life (our American version) became more complex. A bigger practice, more employees, a house, kids, a second house, etc… These are all great things, don’t get me wrong, but I slowly felt a twinge of something I hadn’t felt for a very long time.
You see, in all of that travel and self-exploration from the time I graduated high school in 2002 until I locked in on graduate school in 2009, I realized something. I was always searching for what I was meant to do, but what I didn’t recognize until almost twenty years later, was the fact that I the search WAS the purpose. And continues to be so to do this day.
Ask my wife, what my passion is, and I would assume she might ask you what day, month, or year you’re talking about. What at times seemed like a detriment to a modern view of forward progress in the name of traditional success, has all along been my superpower.
What looks like skipping from hobby to hobby, place to place, career to career, has been intense dives into the entire worlds that surround each one of these areas.
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Learning to play the guitar in high school —> realizing how important the thought process behind musical improvisation is to overall improved creative thinking.
Studying business in undergraduate school because I thought I was going into pharmaceutical sales like my sister. —> opening multiple businesses of my own years later.
Becoming a professional photographer while living in Alaska working as a commodities broker —> consistently use images, design, and the creative process to help multiple arms within my businesses.
I could go on and on with examples, the point being, I don’t consider myself a polymath on the level of someone like Leonardo da Vinci, but I do believe that my meandering interests have largely worked out in my favor. This somewhat flies in the face of popular self help advice to go all in on one area of expertise in order to get ahead. In fact, one of my favorite books
