J.R.: for my teachers, parents, mentors, and leaders who just let me be me. I was on my own path and I’m sure many of you feared where that was going to end up. I honor you for honoring me and letting me get to where I was headed.
C.C.: for Cooper and Rosalie. May you always charge into your frontiers, overcome your trials, and share your rewards. And brush your teeth.
When the alarm goes off, you can’t believe it’s morning. Another day you’re not ready to face. You check your phone, pushing aside the book you’ve been meaning to read on your nightstand. Your feet haven’t hit the floor yet and your boss is already yelling at you through email. Why do you keep going back?
After a rushed breakfast and too little time with your family, you’re on the road for the thirty-minute commute to the office. As you hit the freeway on-ramp, all you can see are brake lights. Thirty minutes turns into ninety. You go from sitting in your car to sitting at your desk. More email. The picture next to your monitor of you and your friends at Yellowstone reminds you that you still haven’t gone to a national park in all fifty states. After the baby, you got stalled at twelve. And then it was hard to get vacation. And the flights to Alaska are so expensive. Maybe next year.
You crack open the single-use plastic containing your lunch. The turkey sandwich is drier than usual, so you settle for the chips. The guy next to you on the park bench is sweating profusely, his shirt sticking to his chest. You’ve lost your appetite. Back to the car. Sit. Back at your desk. Sit. Afternoon staff meeting. Sit. Your boss asks a question but it’s more of a directive, “Can you have the quarterly report done by end of day?”
The call home that you’d be late was received icier than usual. There’s barely enough time to do all the yardwork let alone have a date night. Back in the car. Sit. All the lights seem to be on in the house as you pull into the driveway. The mortgage was more than you could afford, let alone the electricity bill, but interest rates were so low, your dad said you’d be crazy not to go bigger. You look up and down the empty streets. Everyone inside, safe and sound. It’s Wednesday. Spaghetti night. Again.
You’re already awake when they knock on your door. You lock eyes with your mission lead, and he gives you a confident nod. You’re only a few steps out the door of your Mexican border-town motel when the beachside drug pusher offers you weed. You decline; you’re looking for underage girls instead. But he’s got you covered for that too, you just need to find boss Carlos. The adrenaline is building in your body. It’s good to be back.
You rushed out without breakfast, but undercover missions rarely follow a schedule. You were supposed to meet Carlos thirty minutes ago, but it’s turned into ninety. You can’t sit down; the alley you’re standing in is covered in urine and garbage. A black SUV with dark tinted windows pulls up and the brake lights engage. Two armed guards emerge who seem like they shouldn’t have even fit inside. You’re scared, but the thought of having a successful rescue calms you down.
Your stomach growls as the negotiation for the “party” drags on. You’re thankful for the Spanish you learned on a previous mission as you haggle over the price per girl and the preferred location to make it seem legit. The guy standing across from you, an ex-Navy SEAL, briefly touches his shirt. You pray they don’t see any of the hidden cameras. Carlos asks you a question, but it’s more of an invitation, “Can you be back in two weeks?”
The night arrives and Carlos parades the forty girls into the room. All the lights are dimmed. You’re standing next to a handful of Special Forces guys in bad Hawaiian shirts. When the code word drops and you get “arrested” along with Carlos and his crew, you revel in their surprised faces. Every one of those girls, safe and sound. It’s a Thursday or Friday, but it doesn’t matter. A few hours later, you hop on a plane back to the States, excited for what challenges the next day might hold.
Two paths. Which one makes you feel more alive?
You’ve probably heard of Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, and Marco Polo. These famous explorers set out on ambitious journeys to discover new worlds, pulled by the promise of foreign riches and fame, and made it back to tell the tale. But what about Percy Fawcett? Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real? They don’t ring a bell? It’s because they disappeared, following the washed-away footsteps of most explorers before them. History hasn’t been kind to exploration: disease, brutal conflicts, harsh environments, poor nutrition, not to mention the incomplete or inaccurate maps they had to follow. Even Magellan, killed in battle in the Philippines, and da Gama, who died of malaria, eventually ran out of luck. When a ship left port, everyone aboard knew they weren’t likely to return.
What explorers left behind were the settlers. These were the people who built walls around the places already mapped. Their job was to tame the “discovered” lands and make them predictable, destroy diversity, and eliminate surprise. It was a life dedicated to toil and slow expansion, never venturing too far off the beaten path for fear of what lurked beyond. They held down the proverbial or literal fort, tilled the fields, reproduced, and warned the next generation of the dangers beyond the walls. Settlers traded a life of discovery for a more certain existence, a safer anonymity. When the castle doors were closed at night, everyone inside knew it was the best chance they had at survival.
But times have changed.
Social and technological advances have all but wiped out the dangers of the frontier. Calories are cheap, transportation is safe and fast, and the plagues of years past have been all but eradicated (not many cases of scurvy these days). Modern-day explorers can venture out with a high degree of certainty, knowing they’ll return in one piece. Entrepreneurial explorers can launch an armada of online products without risking their lives. Scientific explorers can make bold claims and discoveries without being accused of witchcraft or heresy. The sailing is undoubtedly smoother.
But modern-day settlers? They’re the ones in danger. Instead of protecting their inhabitants, the settlement walls are now unnecessarily confining and restricting. Today’s settlers have moved past a safe predictability and into a crisis of complacency. They aren’t surviving by staying put; they’re slowly dying in their office chairs and heated car seats. The well-worn path has paved right over their dreams and higher callings. The small cuts of apathy aren’t outward killers, but they drain the life out, nonetheless. The harsh conditions have moved out of the frontier and settled into our bodies and minds in the form of addiction, obesity, burnout, heart disease, anxiety, and depression. And for what reward? The biggest house? Lackluster relationships? Comfort?
The fates of Explorers and Settlers hit an inflection point long ago, but we didn’t update our cultural narratives or mental maps. The change was so subtle and incremental that we failed to adapt. Instead, we continue our steady diet of well-intentioned advice telling us to stay within the settlement for safety. We blindly follow the outdated risk meters of our brains to a life of lesser rewards. We trust but don’t verify. Yet, it’s not too late to open your eyes to today’s landscape and redraw the maps. It’s not too late to see what happened and change course. Exploration is within your grasp.
The joy of exploring is something humans have always known. We’re born Explorers, innately drawn to test the boundaries of our world, to pick up the things we come across and turn them over in our hands with wonder. It’s in our core to ask, “What if…” and follow our curiosity. And only through an ill-fitted modern “education” are we taught to be Settlers. We’re lined up in rows and drilled to rinse and repeat and regurgitate. The difficult task of today is to unlearn what we’ve been taught—to debunk the belief system that tells us exploring is inherently dangerous and settling is safe. The world and culture that rewarded settlers is long gone.
This book is for the buried Explorer in all of us. For the apathetic Explorer, whose dull comforts are barely outpacing the pain. For the fearful Explorer, held back by the anxiety of the unknown. For the lost Explorer, who started down the path but met resistance along the way. The following chapters will unfold the updated map of our changed world and plot the course for a modern way of exploration. But it’s up to you to take the first step, or you’ll be left holding down the fort while someone else discovers the world. As Lao Tzu said, “If you do not change direction, you might end up where you are heading.”
So who am I to set things straight? When you think of an Explorer, you likely don’t picture a real estate agent from Utah, but that’s what I’ve been doing for the past fifteen years and where I’ve lived all my life. I grew up in a family of seven kids and quickly learned it wasn’t in my best interest to settle. If you weren’t on top of things when Mom came home from grocery shopping, you were getting the scraps. We weren’t poor, but we definitely didn’t have any extra. If I wanted something other than school clothes or sports equipment, I had to figure out a way to get it on my own. Garage sales, hanging Christmas lights, buying and selling concert tickets—I was always hustling. I even learned the core tenet of investing, buy low and sell high, by searching out discount toys at one store and then “returning” them for store credit at another store that still had the toy at regular price. When my high school baseball coach challenged us to sell ten T-shirts to raise money for a team trip, I sold 157. I thought I needed to prove something to the coach, so settling wasn’t going to cut it.
When it was time for me to head out on my own, I’d already been wired the opposite of most people—settling scared the hell out of me. I was more afraid of dying with an unchecked bucket list than I was of kicking the bucket while checking them off. In my mind, I was following the safe path by squeezing the most out of life while I was still breathing. Leaving anything on the table seemed risky. I simply followed my heart and figured it out along the way. I built successful businesses but also had my life savings destroyed by bad investments. I went on a church mission to Mexico to baptize the unenlightened to my faith and returned years later on a humanitarian mission to liberate child slaves from their captors. I’ve swum with sharks, jumped off cliffs, and run with the bulls. There was huge upside and little downside to pushing the boundaries of the world around me. And even if something went wrong, I always knew there was pizza in the trunk. Stay with me; it makes sense, I promise.
One of my favorite movies growing up was Tommy Boy, starring Chris Farley and David Spade. Farley is the hapless heir to a struggling automotive parts company, and Spade is the straight man trying to keep him out of trouble as they hit the road on a last-ditch sales trip to save the company. After a particularly bad afternoon, they find themselves at a restaurant trying to regroup. The kitchen is closed until dinner, but Farley is determined to order chicken wings. He launches into a crazy monologue in hopes the unrelenting waitress will see the world like he does. It’s bizarre and vulnerable and a little bit scary. And it works. Spade is dumbfounded and wants to know why he can’t sell like that in front of customers. What Farley says has replayed in the back of my head ever since:
“I’m just having fun. If we didn’t get the wings, so what? We still got that meat-lovers’ pizza in the trunk.”
If I went after something in my life and I didn’t get it, the worst-case scenario was the life I already had (the pizza in the trunk). The best-case scenario was the thing I wanted (delicious wings!). Where other people saw risk, I saw nothing to lose. Where other people saw a straight path, I saw exciting paths in every direction. I wanted to live, not just exist.
As I expanded my world beyond the walls of high school and college and the borders of my home state of Utah, I came across other kindred spirits who believed they had nothing to lose as well. I built a network of people who seemed to have a never-ending supply of pizza in the trunk. They already knew how standard life tasted, so they were constantly pushing to get the kitchen open when everyone else said it was closed. They pushed the boundaries of their bodies, they pushed the reach of their ideas, and they pushed the limits of their spirits. It was a secret society who discovered the key to living a full and expansive life.
I started a podcast, The Jimmy Rex Show [1], because I thought the stories I’d heard needed to be told firsthand and it seemed wrong to keep this wisdom to myself. I bought some microphones, called up my friends, and hit record. I had no idea what I was doing and the horrible audio on the first couple of episodes made that clear. But as the interviews piled up, I knew I was onto something. No matter where a story unfolded—the baseball diamond, the hair salon, or the cramped offices of struggling entrepreneurs—it followed a common arc. My podcast guests weren’t a bunch of risk-seeking anomalies but a group with a shared mindset and a limitless path they all seemed to be following. They felt safe to explore, knowing the downsides were limited. But how did this group of people, myself included, escape the settlement while so many others were still stuck behind the walls?
The conditions that create Explorers, or turn them into Settlers, are well-studied areas. Two twentieth-century scholars in particular were experts in exploration. One was a mythologist, who spent a lifetime examining history’s greatest journeys (the path of the Explorer). The other was a psychologist, who dedicated his career to understanding human motivation and the drives that propel people forward or hold them back (the psychopathology of the Explorer). Together, they complete the picture on how to live a full life through exploring your personal potential.
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist and a sought-after professor at Columbia, Brooklyn College, and Brandeis. Maslow was a leader in the positive psychology movement, a focus on mental health rather than mental illness, and believed strongly in the potential of humanity. He was best known for his hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health focused on the fulfillment of five common human needs—physiological (e.g., food and water), safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (i.e., reaching your peak potential). If someone was severely deficient in a lower-level need, Maslow claimed, it was almost impossible for them to fulfill, or even consider fulfilling, a higher-level need. For example, if someone was worried about their personal safety on a regular basis, they wouldn’t be capable of pursuing their talent and passion for art.
In addition to needs, Maslow also believed we are propelled forward in life by delight. “Growth takes place when the next step forward is subjectively more delightful, more joyous, more intrinsically satisfying than the last; that the only way we can ever know what is right for us is that it feels better subjectively than any alternative” [2]. He thought the key struggle of our lives was a never-ending series of choices between “the delights of safety and growth, dependence and independence, regression and progression, immaturity and maturity.” If safety feels better, that’s what we choose. If safety feels less desirable or even dangerous, we opt for growth.
I’m sure if Maslow were to examine the Settlers of today, he’d say their safety was more than sufficient but the delight associated with growth was low. When faced with a choice of fulfilling a higher-level need or stockpiling safety nets, most are choosing the latter. When there’s a clear and desirable path forward—high school to college, yellow belt to green belt, manager to regional manager—progression happens willingly. But when the pavement abruptly stops and the road signs disappear? The choice between safety and growth isn’t so clear. When you hit the border walls of your life and see the uncertainty beyond, you stop; the risk of the unknown feels too great. It’s a bit like starting a hike and seeing this sign at the trailhead:
Path One: Everyone is doing it, no big surprises. The trail is flat and wide, no rocks to speak of. DO NOT go off the path for any reason. It’s basically the same every time you do it. Three miles.
Path Two: Rarely traveled, gets hard at some point but we’re not sure for how long. There might be someone or something dangerous partway through. It could go on forever without a way to get back. Return rate unknown. Have you heard about Path One?
Path Two doesn’t stand a chance. And that’s when you settle. You settle into an identity (“Market Researcher” or “Middle-Aged”), you settle into ways of thinking (“bad with numbers” or “good with kids”), and you settle into routines (the “tradition” of watching eight hours of football on Sundays). You could walk through your life with your eyes closed. And you do.
Those trail signs are exactly the inner dialogue we have with ourselves when faced with a choice between settling and exploring. “I’m a great mom, but I don’t know anything about starting a business,” “I want to sign up for a marathon, but I hear the training is brutal,” “I want to go into sales, but I’m not outgoing.” The delight of something new can’t overcome the perceived risk. Back to the grind, stay put, sit down. But the result is not contentment; it’s a gnawing restlessness that won’t go away. Each passing day is an ever-widening gap between what you hoped for in life and what you settled on. You’ll take the same vacation, order the pad thai again, and stay in the job that “pays the bills.” Why? Because it’s the smart play. The safe play. Going out on your own is dangerous. So you settle. Down.
What I learned from my podcast guests and from examining my own life, was the Maslow antidote for settling—yielding to uncertainty to unlock the delight. Fifty years before the invention of the iPhone, Maslow could see the pace of technological advancement would require humanity to change in fundamental ways. He believed we would need to “make ourselves over into the people who don’t need to staticize the world, who don’t need to freeze it and make it stable, who don’t need to do what their daddies did, who are able confidently to face tomorrow not knowing what’s going to come” [3]. When you embrace the uncertainty, you allow yourself to see the delight instead of just the danger. When you accept that you can’t freeze the world into something safe and stable, you can put your full focus on the delight of growth. And with those new eyes, the sign at the trailhead (and your inner dialogue) will look like this:
Path Two: This path is made for you! It’s going to seem a bit scary at first, but you’ll get over it and eventually embrace the novelty. The middle is hard as hell, but you’ll feel amazing when you get through it. At some point, you’re going to see a cave. DO NOT pass up this opportunity to explore some deeper truths about yourself. Back on the main trail, you’ll see an enormous mountain. Climb it. You can do it. At the top, you’ll find an incredible reward but probably not what you expected. This trail is as long as you need it to be. Repeat visits will never be the same. Enjoy.
How could you pass up Path Two?! You can always come back safely behind the walls of the settlement, but you can never find the riches beyond if you stay within them. The delightful path of the Explorer will be opened up and you’ll be drawn to the thing you previously feared. As Maslow put it, you will have recovered “the ability to perceive one’s own delights,” someone who “enjoys change, who is able to improvise.” But which way should you go?
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and one of the most influential figures in comparative mythology and modern storytelling. His groundbreaking work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), describes the familiar arc found in all world myths of adventure, personal change, and a triumphant return. It’s a thread you can find in epic poems (Homer’s Odyssey) and epic space operas (Star Wars). Campbell named this ageless path of the seeker the Hero’s Journey.
The appeal and familiarity of the Hero’s Journey is widespread because of the core human issues it deals with. It’s the fear of facing the unknown and overcoming failure. It’s building on small wins and the necessity of joining with other people to accomplish incredible feats. And ultimately, it’s the riches of personal growth that outshine the treasure initially sought. Campbell saw this cyclical journey as the secret to life: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive” [4].
Although his work focused on legend and lore, Campbell knew the learnings could (and should) be applied to the paths taken by real people. Where Maslow knew why we find it hard to leave the settlement, Campbell understood what we’d find on the frontier. Campbell’s Hero’s Journey framework has been used widely by creators of fictional worlds, but I wanted to make it accessible for the world we live in. A hero is the mythical idea of someone born different than us, endowed by the gods at birth and given divine assistance along the way. But you and I are human, a mortal bundle of flaws. We’re ordinary Explorers who have to develop and draw out our greatness; it isn’t handed to us. We struggle and hit dead ends and don’t always get what we set out to find but often get what we need. I wanted to cut from the same cloth as the Hero’s Journey but end up with something an everyday person, flaws and all, could follow. Mythical heroes need providence; Explorers need a plan.
Building on Campbell’s map and Maslow’s mindset, I created my own system for the process of rediscovering your inner Explorer. It breaks down into four phases:
The C.H.A.R.T. framework is the continuous cycle of choosing growth over safety, creating new habits, accepting and integrating who you’ve become, and sharing what you’ve learned along the way. This will become a familiar loop you’ll travel throughout your life, and as long as you remain committed to the forward progress of exploration, this path will never lead you astray.
Ultimately, we’re not afraid of hard things; we’re afraid of uncertainty. My hope with this book, and this framework, is to help remove the uncertainty of Path Two, the Explorer’s path. The following chapters will explore the nuance of each step and introduce you to extraordinary modern Explorers who are following the path today. These are real people who came to the end of their settlements (refugee, drug addict, single mom, failure) and chose the endless road of growth instead of accepting their fate. They pushed beyond the walls constructed by their cultures, faiths, and family to reveal the joy of continuously discovering their own potential.
Explorers’ lives are built on investigation and becoming more familiar with themselves and the world. There are no limits on exploration, no ceilings, and no wrong answers. Obstacles become observations. Ambiguity becomes adventure. The only expectation of an Explorer is movement, with the gap between what they want and what they get closed with every step. Explorers can’t walk through life with their eyes closed because they’re not always sure what’s ahead. They’re open and awake to every possibility, and you can be, too.
But a word of caution: “A map is not the territory it represents” [5]. There are limits to any model, and the world is not as simple as “Follow These 10 Easy Steps to Succeed.” Real life is full of experiences that happen well outside the bounds of any framework. The circumstances of your life (your territory) may not come in the same order as they’re laid out in the book (the map). Life isn’t order; it’s a mess. A twisting, turning, beautiful mess. So when you look at this map, don’t forget to fit it to your territory. You’re the only one who can confirm the details on the ground. Otherwise, you’ll end up like the drunk who lost his keys in the park but is only searching under the streetlight because “that’s where the light is.” The power of the C.H.A.R.T. framework doesn’t come from its literal exactness but from a sense you’re moving in the right direction for you.
The following pages are your field guide on the Explorer’s Path, but I’ve also developed online resources specifically designed to complement the book. Below is a link to access self-assessments, video content, and further explorations to help you C.H.A.R.T. your own unique path. These resources are exclusively available to the readers of this book, and I know you’ll get value from this extended exploration. Access these resources by heading to www.youendupwhereyoureheading.com/account.
Every good explorer learns the best practices before they set off: don’t climb Everest in high winds; red at night, sailors delight; red on yellow, you’re a dead fellow; and so on. The Explorer’s Path is no different. Heed the rules.
The stories shared in this book represent the myriad ways to C.H.A.R.T. a path toward a more complete version of yourself. The lives you’ll read about aren’t meant to be put on pedestals for emulation but are illustrations of how to look at the world differently. Beware if your path starts to look like anyone else’s. Take the spark; don’t build the same fire.
You’ll require strong, loyal, and trustworthy companions on your adventures. Don’t forget to return the favor. Where can you be a mentor? Where can you provide the slightest nudge to help someone get started on their journey? How can you share what you’ve learned?
Knowing where you’re at is just as important as knowing where you’re heading. You might not be at the beginning of your journey but in the middle. Identifying your current position can provide peace of mind and a sense of control as you look toward the next step. Keep an eye out for the chapter that feels especially familiar to your current situation.
The atomic components of your journey are decisions. These are the small parts that when stacked together make up the whole. But indecision will stop you in your tracks. At the end of each chapter is a section called “Get Traction.” These strategies and questions are designed to help you get a foothold, to gain traction, when the momentum of your journey feels stopped. Action can be useless movement, but traction is progress.
You can’t skip the hardship. The richest rewards are from personal change, which won’t happen if someone carries you across the finish line. There is no “cheat code” or “7 Easy Steps” to become an Explorer, so there’s no need to go looking for them.
Final pep talk: You’re either exploring your life or you’re sitting safely in the settlement waiting for it to be over. It’s all within your control. Whenever I’m about to start something hard, I always think about this definition of hell: a meeting you have on your last day on Earth between the person you became and the person you could have become.
Your becoming starts now.
You’re at the beginning, but you’re acting like it’s the end. You’ve settled. Your daily life is routine and safe but unfulfilling. This place is called your Charted Territory, the walls and borders built up around your life.
But something will begin to draw you out. A quiet yearning, a sudden change, or an unsuspecting mentor will open up the edges of your world. These are the Frontiers of exploration. The Frontier is the expansiveness of the world you’ve turned away from or blocked from view—until now.
As you take the first tenuous steps out of your comfort zone, the chorus around you (and inside you) will rise up to hold you back. Movement into the unknown is too scary, too risky, too hard. Yet, the call toward exploration is stronger than the fear. You’ll take the first steps toward the discomfort, the excitement, and the challenge drawing you into the new world. This decisive moment is when you Cross the Bridge. You’ve cast off the thought patterns of settling, and the exploration of your life begins.