Adventure Is In Our DNA

Advenir (Latin): to come towards.

Aventure (old French): chance, fate, risk.

Adventure: to move towards something new.

Lessons From Leaders On Adventure

“Most decisions in life are two-way doors. You pick the door, walk through it and you can always turn round and walk back through it if you don’t like what’s on the other side.” 

Jeff Bezos. 

“It is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown.”

Ernest Shackleton. 

"As you begin to walk on the way, the way appears." 

Rumi.

“Fill your days with more life, rather than your life with more days.”

Ben Fogle.

We Are All Some Version Of Space Faring Astronauts.

Since the dawn of human time, we have been adventurers and explorers. Hominid beings didn’t miraculously pop up in Africa, the Americas and Eurasia all at once. Our ancient ancestors started in Africa, battled, ate, fought, walked, forded rivers, climbed mountains, hugged coastlines, and sailed into the unknown, all in the hope of a better life. As tribes grew, climates shifted and food sources changed, humans walked their way around the world.

We are adventurers at our heart. It is in our DNA. Humans that couldn’t hack the journeys, weren’t socially smart to help the tribe, weren’t able to buy into a vision of something better – well, they were left behind, along with their DNA. 

In the millennia to come, humans moved across oceans and continents. We still do. I am sitting on my balcony in Bangkok writing this. Days like today, I sit here and write and think my life is incredible. Adventure is at my heart. It is at your heart too. 

Perhaps you have forgotten? 

As a child we didn’t dress up as office workers, lobbyists and computer coders. We dressed up as frontier busting cowboys, space faring astronauts, faraway-land princesses, scary savannah animals – adventurers. Our childlike wonder is wrapped up in the excitement and fear of the unknown. 

We are adventurers at our heart. It is in our DNA.

As children we are obsessed with Harry Potter, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and other universe stretching movies. We are meant to explore and be uncomfortable. Why do so many young adults travel and explore the world? It’s certainly not for fame and fortune. We have an in-built desire to adventure.

Adventure is filled with emotion: inspiration, wonder, danger, risk. When we have adventures, we are inspired to take positive actions we wouldn’t have dreamed of in the first place. 

Adventure can not only come from travel, but also from new experiences. New experiences that evoke emotion. Watching Wilding by Isabelle Tree, I was inspired by the positive actions that this couple have taken over the last 25 years to regenerate a part of the UK from depleted farmland to wilderness. It inspired me to see two people so in love with what they do, so risk taking to do something so different. 

The constant oscillation between movement and stopping, between adventure and rest, is what brings inspiration.

My friend Pete has an in-built compass for adventure. He joined us on our annual leadership retreat in Thailand. He grew up in a working-class family in the UK and followed all the usual routes, watching his parents work incredibly hard throughout his childhood before applying for an apprenticeship to learn a trade. At the same time, he was born into a UK system of schooling where everybody was encouraged to apply to university. He was not offered an apprenticeship. He was offered a place at university. Neither his parents nor his two sisters had been to university. It wasn’t a route well travelled. 

His Dad gave him some great advice, ‘Pete, you aren’t going to sit around playing PlayStation. If you don’t have an apprenticeship, go to university.’ So off Pete went, and the rest is history. Now he is in Dubai, another kind of adventure, working for an incredible legal. His parents and sisters could not be prouder of him. 

I continue to write this at 30,000 feet, enroute to Bergen. The past few days have been a whirlwind – landing in London from Bangkok on Sunday night, delivering a workshop for a brilliant B-Corp on Monday, coaching Next Gen leaders in Birmingham on Tuesday, and catching up with friends and old colleagues back in London on Wednesday.

By adventuring from one thing to the next, you build a catalogue of experiences but a debt of rest. The brain needs time to recover. 

It was fast paced, but it was my pace. I get inspired when I jump from café, to train, to park run, to meeting, to lunch with a friend. I get inspired when my pace speeds up. I get reflective when my pace slows down, such as now, on the plane. This constant oscillation between movement and stopping, between adventure and rest, is what brings inspiration. Adventure to be inspired, rest to decompress, process and learn. 

By adventuring from one thing to the next, you build a catalogue of experiences but a debt of rest. The brain needs time to recover. Adventure + Rest = Growth. Without the rest it becomes a slippery slope to burnout. When we double down on adventure we need to double down on the brakes.

Adventure for you doesn’t need to mean being on a flight from one continent to the next. It can mean reading a new book, exploring a new part of town, being inspired by a documentary. 

Ben Fogle, the British adventurer, talked about how he had a mental health ‘blip’ in 2023. A blip in the course of his life, but a fierce storm at the time. This was a perfect storm built up from many different factors, none more so than his constant rush from adventure to adventure. His privilege was his curse. Privileged to be invited to climb Mount Everest one month, traverse rural Japan the next, and run a marathon the week after. All lifetime achievements for most, but an ordinary week for him. Ordinary, but no less consuming. And when you consume that much adventure, there is a necessity to slow down. He had to pump the brakes for a few months to recover from his debt of rest. Now he is fortunately through to the other side and has a much healthier relationship with adventure and rest. Even for someone whose identity is shaped by exploration, the body and mind eventually demand stillness.

Adventure is at the core of my life, it is something I value deeply. Being able to travel the world, meet new people, work with amazing clients and share it all over again creates an amazing feedback loop of inspiration for me. Adventure for you doesn’t need to mean being on a flight from one continent to the next. It can mean reading a new book, exploring a new part of town, being inspired by a documentary. Adventure is a tool to bring emotional inspiration.

The best leaders are adventurers. Not because they climb mountains, but because they step toward uncertainty. They choose growth over comfort. And they rest, not because they’re tired, but because they know growth depends on it. Ask yourself, what adventure can you have today?

Deepen Your Curiosity

My favourite learnings on adventure and exploration:

1. A History of the World by Andrew Marr.

2. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

3. The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo. 

4. Walking the Nile by Levison Wood. 

5. Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.

6. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. 

7. Podcast - Ben Fogle on High Performance Podcast. 

Values Are Not Words. They Are Sentences With A Word Attached

Valere (Latin): to be strong, to be worth, to be well.

Value (economic 14th century): the price or monetary worth of something.

Values (philosophy 19th century): deeply held beliefs.

Lessons From Leaders On Values

“The true test of character is whether you manage to stand by those values when the deck is stacked against you. If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.”

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant.

The antidote to Fear of People’s Opinions has two dimensions: (1) to have deep love and care for others’ well-being … and (2) to act in alignment with one’s purpose, values, and goals. 

The First Rule of Mastery by Dr. Michael Gervais. 

“Our values are constantly reflected in the way we choose to behave.”

Mark Manson. 

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”

Rumi.

“If you stand for nothing, Burr, what do you fall for.”

Alexander Hamilton.

Values Are Not Words. They Are Sentences With A Word Attached.

Most people hear the word values and quietly switch off. It sounds corporate - the kind of thing you'd find painted on an office wall or buried in a slide deck. We say we care about values, but most of us would rather talk productivity hacks. Yet, values are not corporate. They’re personal. They’re not what you scribble down in a workshop and forget. They’re what you do, especially when no one’s watching.

They’re there when you choose to tell someone the truth, even if it hurts. They’re behind that rising feeling of frustration when someone flakes on you. They’re the reason you give your time, or your money, or your energy, to something that matters to you, without needing a reason. We don’t need to manufacture our values. We just need to notice them. Think about a time:

• You did something courageous, because you knew you had to even when you didn’t want to.

• You disagreed with someone because what they said was so fundamentally wrong that you couldn’t sit idly by.

• You told a friend the truth even when you knew it would hurt them.

• You can’t help but give money to the homeless man on the walk back to your train station after work.

• When things get comfortable, you can’t help but add a bit of jeopardy, risk, or change into the situation.

Chances are, one or two of these sentences will resonate with you. That’s because it is what you value. A value isn’t a word you scribble in a notebook during a workshop. It’s not what you post on LinkedIn or hang on an office wall. It’s not the five adjectives you hope people write about you in a leaving card.

You value what you spend your time doing. You value what you spend your time saying. You value what you spend your time thinking about. 

Do we get to choose our values? I’ll take you back to Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone. When Harry and his classmates arrive at Hogwarts, they are led into the grand banqueting hall and one-by-one, the first years sit on a rickety wooden stool, and an oversized wizard’s hat is placed on their head and a dialogue between the sentient hat and young Harry ensues. 

‘Not Slytherin, not Slytherin, not Slytherin…’ says Harry, desperate to avoid being placed in the progressively evil house of Slytherin. The Hat is drawn to all the dark things that have happened to Harry, his parents being killed by the dark wizard Lord Voldemort. As any good lead character, Harry has other ideas, he wants to be away from evil, and to be with the brave and courageous wizards sat in the red and gold of Gryffindor. In that moment, he chose his values. ‘Gryffindor!’ Roars the hat to everybody’s delight. He chose Courage over Cunning and Adventure over Ambition.

Much like Harry chose to not be Slytherin, we can find our values by defining what we are not. Warren Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, delivered a speech on how to guarantee misery:

First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit, you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great. If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for you.

In Hiroshima, Japan, a cool city with an incredibly dark past, Liv and I found a beautiful little coffee shop in the rain. Since I’ve stopped drinking alcohol, coffee has become my daily ritual of a bloody good drink. I’ve switched up searching out surreal vineyards for coffee shops that serve world class flat whites.

We drop our umbrellas outside and get welcomed graciously by the server behind the counter. I see an older Japanese man drinking his flat white, and I can see the foam is done precisely. ‘Flat white please’. 

We sit down, the barista now weighing out the beans precisely on scales, the milk measured meticulously in a clean jug, the machine checked, the espresso pressed, and the milk poured. Another European couple walk in and order some coffees. We get our coffees after ten minutes and it is exactly as we expected. Precisely the same coffee as the guy before us. I savour it and watch as the barista performs the same rituals with the same precision at the same steady pace for the European couple. 

If they had company values pasted on the walls in that coffee shop (they don’t because it was a cool place and not at all corporate), it would say Customer Service: Delighting Every Customer in Exactly the Same Precise Way. Customer Service across a lot of Japan has a ritual and deep respect throughout. The ritual is important. The treatment of the customer is almost religious. Time does not always come into it. If you want a fast coffee in Japan, go to Starbucks. 

Because the truth is, you can’t live your values on a whiteboard, and you can’t understand them by staying inside, in your own head, your own comfort zone, or the echo chamber on your device. You can only live your values outdoors.

Values are a sentence with a word attached. Much like Charlie Munger, one of my core values is Reliability and I would define it as doing what you said you were going to do. Reliability means something to everyone. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as consistently good in quality or performance; able to be trusted. It is similar, but certainly not the same as my definition. 

Yesterday evening, I had a conversation about values with my colleague Garreth. He talked about Integrity being one of his key values. His definition of Integrity, do what you said you were going to do. This is remarkable in how it is exactly the same as my definition of Reliability, one of my key values. How much more deeply can Garreth and I connect and understand each other, now that we know what it is we truly value. 

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know what you value, you just haven’t put it into words yet. That’s the point. Your values don’t need to be pinned on your LinkedIn bio or printed on your company t-shirt. They need to be lived. You’ll spot them in how you show up under pressure. You’ll hear them in how you speak to the people closest to you. And if you're brave, you’ll start to consciously take tough decisions with values in mind. Because the truth is, you can’t live your values on a whiteboard, and you can’t understand them by staying inside, in your own head, your own comfort zone, or the echo chamber on your device. You can only live your values outdoors.

Deepen Your Curiosity

My favourite learnings on strong values:

1. Hidden Potential by Adam Grant.

2. The First Rule of Mastery by Michael Gervais. 

3. Mark Manson’s Blog on personal values.

4. Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger.

What Is Your Wildest Dream?

Dream (Old English): joy, mirth, merriment. 

Dream (modern): A cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal.

Welt (Indo European root for Wild: 4500 BCE): woodland, untamed land.

Wild (modern): not domesticated or cultivated, uninhabited, emotionally intense, or enthusiastic.

Wildest Dream: a bold and aspirational ambition, sitting in the uninhabited part of your mind. In its purest form, it is unconstrained and deeply personal.

Lessons From Leaders

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

TE Lawrence.

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right.”

Henry Ford.

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

Steve Jobs.

What Is Your Wildest Dream?

What does wild mean? It means uninhabited, inhospitable, impassable, unknown. Wild. You can only be brave enough to get there when you are totally uninhabited by restricting thoughts, negative people, dreary circumstances of reality. In Thailand on our annual leadership retreat, we answered the question ‘what is your Wildest Dream?’ We answered the question in the sea with the rain falling on our shoulders. The preparation was critical.

We finished eating lunch an hour ago. I look around at everyone, seven good men at the table, all fully bought into the change process. I’m so excited for the next part. I want their lunch to go down and be digested properly. 

The rain starts, often that would be a hindrance to leadership development. Perfect. I stand everyone up and I just say, ‘to the beach’. ‘Will we get wet?’ Asks someone, ‘yes,’ I reply. We walk, with me speeding up, to the beach – it is just 20 metres. Down on the beach I gather everyone in a circle. I want to pump the blood up, get people moving. 

“The dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

TE Lawrence.

‘Max, give us an exercise to do.’ Max obliges and gets us to hold our arms horizontally, making the shape of a cross for one minute. Aching arms, ‘Patrick give us another exercise.’ We run on the spot doing high knees. Carter, Luke and Rami all give us push ups, squats and lunges. I’ve left Nate to last before me, he usually has a wild card. ‘Do roly-poly’s’ says Nate.

My eyes get wider as I see Nate doing one, getting covered in sand. I love it. It feels almost primal, childlike, and hilarious, watching everybody getting sand in their hair, down their back. It’s my turn. ‘I want everybody to jump in the sea, and I want you to grab the shoulders of someone opposite you in the sea and just shout! Shout and whoop in their faces!’ 

We get so primal, so wild, so unknown versus our usual environment. 

‘Come in close guys, get in the circle, let’s just float here in the sea.’ Everyone comes in, a bit tense from throwing themselves in the sea, but ultimately relaxed, a thousand kilometres away from sending emails. I say, ‘what is your wildest dream?’

‘What is your wildest dream?’ 

Your Wildest Dream. This question is best thought about after a deep period of reflection, a quick period of dopamine release, a total reset of our brain. The magic, the courage, the uninhibited dreams that flowed from my friends’ brains and came out of their mouths was wild. Creating solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges, building an independent architecture practice, creating an interactive documentary to change a million lives, taking a business franchise to Africa from Turkey. Wild. Crazy. Totally out there, yet in that moment, we all believed it, we all felt it, we all knew we had the courage, creativity and grit to achieve it. 

Your Wildest Dream is what sits in the rusty recesses of your mind. It is the tiny thought that you might have entertained once, but perhaps not shared with many people, if anyone. It’s that crazy thought that seems completely unachievable. It might be as crazy as flying to the moon, or as down to earth as living by the sea. We all have them. We all have excuses we tell ourselves that means we don’t entertain the thought. ‘I have a mortgage, I need to hold onto this job, I don’t know what will happen, the other candidates are more qualified than me.’ 

It is the tiny thought that you might have entertained once, but perhaps not shared with many people, if anyone.

I just finished reading Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly, the CEO of KPMG who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 53. He quit his job right away and lived out his final 90 days with the positive intention with which he led his company. “After I was diagnosed, I came to consider consciousness king among virtues. I began to feel that everyone’s first responsibility was to be as conscious as possible all the time.”

Creating a Wildest Dream doesn’t mean fanciful living in the future. It means stopping to reflect, to think, ‘where do I want to go,’ because only then can we know and be truly conscious that the steps we take today, and tomorrow are in that direction. 

Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s time to go back to that thought you once dismissed, the one that felt too bold, too uncertain, too ‘not me.’ Maybe it’s time to entertain the possibility that it’s not crazy – it’s just unclaimed.

Deepen Your Curiosity

My favourite learnings on finding your wildest dream:

1. Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly.

2. Podcast - What your dreams are trying to tell you about your waking life with Dr Rangan Chatterjee and Dr Rahul Jandial.

3. The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo.

4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.