I Will Not Die

That was yesterday, Friday, June the twenty-seventh, two-thousand eight. As many of you know, I’ve led an unusual life filled with sometimes tragic events and squashed dreams. I made it my primary focus in life to turn toward my dreams and focus all of my energies on becoming what I want, hopefully before it’s too late. Over the course of the last several years I’ve made great strides toward managing my private affairs and moving forward. I wake up everyday with a fire in my gut to continue down the path of the course I set myself on. I finally turned to blogging as a way to express my own understandings of personal achievement and motivation. I also blog in the hopes of developing a community of people who are also in hot pursuit of their own goals. At the same time though, I work an extremely boring job as an accountant that serves only as a means to an end. I do not want to do what I am doing as a career and never have. I have very few prospects for enjoyment throughout each day that I spend in my little cubicle where I plug away crunching numbers and other repetitive tasks. My prospects for self-fulfillment are limited only to a distant light coming in at the end of the very long tunnel I am in. But then I snapped.

Cubicle monkey goes mad

There I was, with my eyes briefly closed, focusing on summoning my energies to complete the day. My mind drifted toward my life, in general, and I began to think about how I’ve spent so much time and energy focusing on my own goals. Normally, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. There’s definitely a shortage of motivated people on the planet. But I also began thinking about how I was tired. Here I was, another day another task. It occurred to me that after spending so much time and energy on returning to school, and not being happy all the time about it, that maybe I was doing something wrong.

I must have divided by zero. At that point I had a small short circuit and an epiphany that could turn out to be a life-changing event. I thought, “What if, instead of focusing all of my energies on my own goals (something I was growing weary of), I did a complete about-face and turned to focusing all of my energies on others?”

The paradigm shift

What if I could revolutionize my actions, do something extremely useful for others, and enjoy doing it, all at the same time? That’s when I decided I was leaving my cubicle. I decided that I was going to ride a bike across the country, use the power of the Internet to tell the story, and raise money along the way for something or someone more important than I am, more important than my goals.

Blogger turned road-warrior

So here I am, day two. I’ve begun the initial planning, and training begins on Monday. To make this possible, I’m going to need lots of help from lots of people. If you’re a blogger, you can help by sharing the news. I’ve created a page on this site where you can direct your readers, if you would like to. I’ve already received lots of questions from people I know, and so I’ve begun a FAQ section for this. For more information, go here.

(Update): To see the promotional video about this event directly on YouTube click here. Please rate/comment on it if you can.

Dereck :: Jun.28.2008 :: CUBE :: 9 Comments »

I am writing this in part because of the large international audience I enjoy. A significant percentage of my visitors arrive here from countries outside of the United States. I have many visitors from Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and Japan, and smaller numbers from many other nations. While it’s nice to enjoy the international audience, it’s also something that provides me with an opportunity to reflect on the one planet that we all share, which is something that contrasts with the “worlds” we each grew up in, whether they were our families, cities, states or nations. Consciously developing an expanded worldview has many benefits, all of which relate to open mindedness. I developed a very wide worldview in my early twenties, while in college (and if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll one day get to mention when I finish “in my early thirties”, if I can ever get back). I believe my worldview was developed as a result of the wide range of things I studied. I had idols from every land. Oh, and the Crocodile Dundee movies rock.

You can romanticize about worlds unknown to you

We all grow up in some kind of niche. I grew up on the outskirts of Detroit, and if I had retained that experience for life, I’d probably be pretty naïve. But I’ve never taken much of that with me. In fact, I remember visiting Belle Isle a few times which sits on the Detroit River partway between Michigan and Canada. From one point, you could just barely make out the land mass on the other side. I remember my mother explaining to me that it was another country (I also remember her words mostly being lost on me at the time). Once I got a more serious education in college however, my sense of empathy grew by exponential proportions. While reading Discourse on the Method for instance, I found it lovely to imagine Descartes himself, studying and writing in solitude in the Netherlands, while I sat in a modern library some 350 years later, enjoying the scientific advancements he helped bring about.

You can more fully enjoy the fruits of strangers’ labor

When you get to enjoy a product from some other part of the world, and you have a worldview, you get a lot more out of it than you would if you just used it normally. For instance, I happen to enjoy some scotch from time to time. Not often mind you, I have to save up for school, so scotch sadly, often falls low on the priorities list. The most expensive scotch I’ve ever had is Glenmorangie, and after trying about fifteen different kinds in my life, nothing compares. Not even close. Now if I snapped some Glenmorangie down like it was a shot of cheap American-made vodka, then it ruins the whole experience. Instead, by having a worldview, it causes you sip it slowly, and think about the origins of what you are enjoying more fully. Imagining employees in the northern highlands of Scotland, working away in a similar tradition over their history of about 150 years, makes me almost nostalgic about it. I might even go for a visit someday.

You learn to gain humility

By having a comprehensive worldview, you learn very quickly that the ways of your peers are just local ways, and that there is an abundance of culture in the world at large that we each deserve to be proud of. I find it humbling to imagine some reasonably intelligent human glaring off into the hills of New Zealand, who might turn back to his screen to read what I, some man staring off into the plains of the American Midwest, have written. By imagining that scenario, and a thousand just like it, I can make those places, many of which I may never have the chance to see myself, my own. And for that my friends, I thank you…

Dereck :: Jun.27.2008 :: Perspectives :: No Comments »