Debriefing February 2011: Welcome to the Quest for 1%
Welcome, Zen Habits readers. Thanks for coming over from my guest post, A Simple Guide for a Mindful Digital Life. Make yourself at home!
My fellow riskologists,
Welcome to the new monthly debriefings. I’ve been thinking for awhile that these updates could be more useful and informative, and this month I’m making a shift in how they work. Here’s what’s changing:
Rather than a simple run down of what’s happened at Riskology.co and what’s coming up, the focus will shift to regular reporting on my progress towards the 1% Club.
I get so many comments and emails from people about their own big plans for adventure and asking for advice that I thought it would be nice to have a place where I can share the regular successes and failures—the daily grind so to speak—on my way to taking bigger risks and accomplishing my most important goals. Over time, it should become a really great repository of info for anyone trying to get started on their own adventure.
I’ll also start using the monthly debriefing to feature other awesome people from the Riskology.co community and the adventures they’re on. If you’re pursuing a big goal and want to be featured in an upcoming report, send me a note and I’ll be in touch if your story is a good fit.
Finally, in classic Tyler fashion, one big announcement just isn’t quite enough, so here’s two more:
Advanced Riskology is Moving to a New Neighborhood!
I’m moving Advanced Riskology to its own domain. That’s right, no more tylertervooren.com/advancedriskology. Just plain ol’ advancedriskology.com. I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile now, but never got around to it because, well, it’s a lot of boring work, and I’ve had more exciting things to do. But, the time has come.
This’ll be much better in the long-term as the only way I have to tell people about the site right now is kind of awkward.
“Yeah, so I have a website called Riskology.co. Just go to t-y-l-e-r-t-e-r-v-o-o-r-e-n-dot-com and then do a backslash and type ‘advanced riskology.’ In the unlikely event you remember any of what I just said, I’d love it if you checked it out.”
Once the switch is made, I can just say, “I run a website—advancedriskology.com.” Much better, right?
Important: You don’t have to do anything. This is all on my end. Once I make the change, I’ll remind you to switch any of your links or bookmarks to the new site, but all old URLs will automatically redirect to the new site.
Update Dec. 2013: We’ve moved again! We’re now just riskology.co! Simpler! Better!
A Community Forum is in the Works!
In the first Riskology.co survey, a lot of you told me that you’d love to have a community forum where you could connect with other readers and share your own tips, read others’ stories, and get advice about becoming a better risk-taker. And, over the last few months, I’ve gotten numerous emails to the effect of “Um, hello? When are we going to get this awesome forum?”
Well, here’s your answer: soon (very specific, right?)
I expect it will take me most of the month of March to get the site fully moved, and when we re-launch at the new domain, it’ll come with a fancy new forum where you can get your chat on with fellow riskologists.
I’ll be honest, I’m not looking forward to how much work this is going to be, but I’m really excited to finally be doing it as it’s a great opportunity to make Riskology.co a much more useful site for you and for me.
Alright, let’s get on to the 1% Club updates, shall we?
***
Just to give a brief explanation of how future updates will look, I plan to focus on:
- What was accomplished each month – goals that were totally completed
- What’s currently in progress – long-term projects that I’m chipping away at
- What’s on the horizon – goals I haven’t started yet but are “on deck”
Valuable lessons and funny stories included throughout, free of charge, of course.
Reaching Milestones in February
Since I’m mostly working on big, long-term goals, I expect this section to be a little sparse most of the time. Actually crossing an item off of the 1% Club list takes an extraordinary amount of work. Doing so is not likely to be a monthly event.
However, in any given month, I’m usually doing quite a few things to make sure the ship is sailing the right direction, and February was no exception. In fact, I did get to cross an item off the list this month.
Flying an Airplane
Flying a plane is something I’ve dreamed of doing since I was kid, but due to many untested assumptions and ingrained beliefs, I never even explored its possibility. When I learned from Riskology.co readers that it’s actually not that hard, I was skeptical, but I started looking into it.
I was floored when I learned that $129 would by me a ticket in a pilot’s seat with no prior training, and I jumped at the opportunity. I’d always assumed that flying was incredibly difficult—that is, until I tried it.
We all know where assumptions get us, and I learned a big lesson about testing my own. Flying a plane is officially crossed off the list. Here’s the recap of the whole event.
7 Summits/7 Continents Club
If you’ve been following along the past month or so, you know that the bulk of my focus has been on an upcoming trip this summer to Africa and Europe where I’m planing to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro (Africa) and Mt. Elbrus (Europe) as well as run a marathon on each of the two continents.
It’s a big trip, but most of the major hurdles of getting there are taken care of—I just need to show up and do it. I have a plan, but as Mike Tyson likes to say, “Everyone’s got a game plan until they get punched in the face.”
That rings true for me since the only thing I needed to do in February to stay on track was to get a few immunizations, but even that turned into an ordeal. I budgeted about $150 assuming I’d only need a few shots. Well, “a few” turned into about ten and $150 turned into $600. I’m annoyed, but that’s the price you pay to do fun stuff, so I try not to complain. No yellow fever for me.
I also bought five weeks of travel insurance from World Nomads. Normally, I’d skip this as an unnecessary precaution, but I don’t have regular health insurance at the moment and Russia requires it in order to get a visa. Compared to the total cost of the trip, it’s a drop in the bucket at about $120.
Since I’m packing a lot of action into a short time frame, I decided to get started with marathon training a little early this year and had my first real training run (11 miles) on Saturday.
Last year, I only trained for 8 weeks and was totally surprised by my finishing time of 3:56, but it left me entirely depleted for about a week. I don’t want to jeopardize my whole trip, and since I’ll be adding another marathon, two mountains, jet lag, and a several timezone changes, I’m giving myself plenty of time to train slowly and steadily.
If you have goals for high adventure, you might like to read the digital travel guide I released last week on organizing an international adventure.
Finally, the most important part of making these trips successful will be documenting them so that I can show you guys what I’m up to and share my successes and failures along the way. So, I bought waterproof handheld camcorder to capture some mountain-top updates and finally joined the 21st century by getting an iPhone that I can use to send Twitter and Facebook updates en route to the summits.
Charity work
This month, I diverted $600 from my personal savings to my “charity fund” which is just a separate savings account that I keep to make sure I don’t spend money I have set aside for giving.
My goal for the last 3 years has been to double my charity giving and this year is no different. $600 each quarter will leave me with $2,400 to donate this year. Even with Riskology.co growing strongly and steadily, I’m still making considerably less than I was at my previous job, so this is a stretch for me, but I think it’s worth it.
Of course, with a goal to raise $250,000, it’s still not enough, and I need to get more strategic about how I raise that capital.
I also plan to start a non-profit, so that will be a big part of achieving this goal. I floated the idea of building a non-profit blog network to a few friends. That felt like a natural fit for what I’m already doing here at AR. My friends were all very supportive, but they all brought up the same, extremely good point: blog networks, with very few exceptions, are incredibly uninteresting for readers, and readers are exactly what it will need in order to raise money and be successful. Doh!
So, back to the drawing board. In March, I’ll be giving this some hard thought. I’ll either need to find a way to break the boring blog network mold, or ditch the idea and start working on something new.
The Road Ahead
For the month of March, I’ll be working on a few important things to make sure the 1% Club momentum stays on track.
Advanced Travel Hacking
For the last year and a half, I’ve been buying $1 coins from the U.S. Mint in order to rack up frequent flyer miles. To date, I’ve purchased $27,000 in coins. That’s a lot, but not nearly as much as I could have if I’d been more disciplined.
I need a lot of miles to get to the places I’m going, so I plan to get more serious about it. The original article I wrote about this was met with a lot of confusion and disappointment from people telling me it’s no longer possible to do this. That’s not true, and I’m actually filming a short update right now about how I still use this strategy on a regular basis to rack up miles. Expect to see that here in the next week or two.
Also, I was finally declined a new credit card after obtaining nine new mileage earning cards in a little under six months, so I’m backing off of that strategy for awhile and will start looking for other earning opportunities.
Free Mountaineering Gear
I’m still a novice when it comes to alpine mountaineering, and I don’t have a lot of the expensive gear that I’ll need to successfully climb some of the peaks I’m targeting.
So, I’m planning to devote a large chunk of March to approaching gear manufacturers and asking for equipment I can review here at Riskology.co. Maybe I’ll start a small section on the site specifically for reviews of the gear I’m using to join the 1% Club.
I may also approach the guides I’m hiring for my climbs to work out a discount in exchange for a review of their service in an update like this one.
Of course, this all comes with the important caveat that I’ll never accept money or special treatment in exchange for a positive review. Any review I make here needs to be authentic and completely unbiased or they wouldn’t be useful and you guys wouldn’t trust me.
Working on My Iron Lung
There’s not a lot you can do to prepare for being at high altitude besides actually be at high altitude. There’s less oxygen and atmospheric pressure, and your body just needs to learn to adjust.
That’s why I’m planning a few more mountain climbs here in the Oregon Cascades; I’ll spend some time in March making sure my plans are set for climbs in April and May. There aren’t any mountains around here that compare in height to Kilimanjaro or Elbrus, but these will have to do as they’re the best I’ve got.
As always, big plans seem to come together a lot better when they’re the sum of many smaller ones. Each day, I try to do a little something to get one step closer to the 1% Club. Over time, these little steps will add up to big achievements.
What do you think of the new monthly debriefing format? Is it more useful? What’s missing? Let me know in the comments.
Yours in risk-taking,
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Images by: jercraigs, rocket ship, andre.vanrooyen