Slingshot

I’m a Belgian, living in Paris.  I’ve lived in England, Pennsylvania, Mali, Ivory Coast, the Congo (PDRC) and (briefly) Scotland and Belgium.  I travel a lot for work and work a lot so I can travel.  In my more lucid moments, I look to fill life with extreme, unique, original experiences through the places I go and the people I go there with.

The stories and the pictures I collect along the way are like trophies.  While there’s more to life than travelling, meeting new people, enjoying the company of friends and getting a little close to the edge from time to time, these are the things that make me happy, and the pictures and stories are the fragments collected along the way.

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Managing Change

I don’t believe in radical changes to deal with a small degree of discontent, in the same way as I don’t like extreme phrases like “challenging the social order”.  I’m no revolutionary.

What I am is someone who’s become aware over time that the options presented to us are often only an excerpt of the full menu.  Sometimes, when none of the doors facing you represent the option you were looking for, you need to be able to walk through the wall.  After all, in your metaphorical situation, the walls are largely of your own making.

I’m in an enviable situation.  Good job, lots of travel, great friends.  I’m also in that situation many of us have experienced : In a gilded cage.  My situation is great, which is why I dare not make changes that could put at risk everything I have that I already profit from – even if these changes, carried out successfully, would certainly make me happier.

I don’t believe in giving the status quo the finger, jumping off a cliff and assuming there’ll be somewhere to land.

Actually, that’s not entirely true: it’s sort of how I built my career, but each time I knew I had the professional skills to get another job as a professional in a company somewhere.  It’s different when what you’re trying to get away from is another job in another company somewhere.

This blog is going to be about testing the changes that serve one of three purposes

1. Life Hacking – Being more efficient, making counter-intuitive lifestyle choices that work.  Challenging the way things are done and finding better ways.

2. Creating Opportunities for Change – Mini-entrepreneurship, mini-endeavours, testing the waters of new areas of work to create new opportunities, either by becoming good at more things, by finding new and better uses for my time, or by generating sources of revenue that reduce my dependence on my traditional source of income.

3. Micro Adventures – Planning and executing holidays, or hobbies that can be done in my spare time, that satisfy my appetite for big experiences.  This can be on a very small level (I love to travel… hey, let’s do Iceland in 4 days) to large-scale undertakings (let’s get a skydiving license, how hard can it be?).

I know how to do these things, I’ve done similar things at one point or another, but I don’t know how to do them consistently.  I always tend back to the rut I climbed out of in the first place.  So I’m going to learn how to constantly fill my life with the kind of opportunities that, one day, will allow me to look back and say that I constantly re-invented myself, rather than just got better and better at doing what I already did well.