“This above all: to thine own self be true” – William Shakespeare
My decision to try to carve a career out of doing what I love has given me plenty to think about. I act as my own auditor, inspector, counsellor and critic.
I set my own rules and plan my own year. It is the privilege and the curse of the self-employed. I struggle to find a job title for myself that feels right, and I feel uncomfortable saying any of the usual options out loud; Explorer, Expeditionist, Adventurer, Writer, Speaker… None of them quite fit. So I am not even sure what it is that I do.
What I am more certain of is what I am not. My golden rule for myself is that, in whatever I do, I must do it because I want to do it, and do it to a level of quality acceptable to the man in the mirror. If he is satisfied then the rest of the world is likely to have few qualms either. Specifically in the case of this blog entry, the journeys/expeditions/adventures/challenges that I do must be done because I want to do them, and they must be worthwhile.
I read an interview where Ranulph Fiennes talked about the dangers of expeditions becoming “gimmicky”, such as “pogo-sticking to the North Pole”. In other words, the sort of career described below by Peter Fleming, of pointless records set merely to be records, rather than to add value to the world or to your life.
“Adventure in the grand old manner is obsolete, having been exalted to a specialist’s job or degraded to a stunt… Of course there is still plenty of adventures of a sort to be had. You can even make it pay, with a little care; for it is easy to attract public attention to any exploit which is at once highly improbable and absolutely useless. You can lay the foundations of a brief but glorious career on the Music Halls by being The First Girl Mother To Swim Twice Round The Isle Of Man; and anyone who successfully undertakes to drive a well-known make of car along the Great Wall of China in reverse will hardly fail of his reward. And then there are always records to be broken. Here you can make some show of keeping within the best traditions, and set out to take the Illustrious Dead down a peg by repeating their exploits with a difference. Rivers which they ascended in small boats you can ascend in smaller; if they took five months to cross a desert, go and see if you can do it in four. Where they went in litters, you can ride; where they went on mules, you can go on foot: and where they went on foot, you can go (for all I care) on roller-skates. It is a silly business, this statistical eye-wiping. These spurious and calculated feats bear about as much relation to adventure as a giant gooseberry does to agriculture.”
This article also touches on some of the things I’m talking about:
http://www.andy-kirkpatrick.com/site/the_big_sell_out1/