The Case for Adventuring
The Case for Adventuring
Honestly now, has your life become a little bit boring?
Dull, drab, uninteresting, people don't get far in business, or in life. Colleagues don't want to work with or for them. Customers don't want to buy from dreary sellers. And who wants to be in a personal relationship with someone who is blah or boring?
The fact is, people who are interested and interesting get further in life, have better relationships, and progress more rapidly in their careers.
To be a leader who inspires others to follow, be interesting. To engage prospects and customers, be interested in them. If you want others to view you as a great conversationalist, be interested… and interesting. To nurture any kind of relationship, be interested in the other person, and be interesting, yourself.
Adventuresome thinkers face the same issues that stymy others in their organizations, but their nimble minds conceive clever, creative solutions and leap over the roadblocks that impede more conventional thinkers. That’s what propels them in their careers and helps their organizations excel.
Face this Fact:
Our Brains Deteriorate with Age
This is a simple physiological reality. Each day, many hundreds of thousands of the neuronal connections that make up the activity of your brain die off. The physical part of your brain does "shrink" over time. The latest scientific studies point to an average count of 86 billion neurons for adult brains. However, those billions of neurons don't count for all that much until they make connections.
What really counts is the connections between those neurons. Brain researchers number these in the neighborhood of one quadrillion possibilities! These synapses are like electrochemical lightning bolts that fire off between axons and dendrites. The more synapses there are, the more connected your neurons will be, and the more nimble your mind will become.
There’s an overwhelming case for building a better brain by stimulating adventuresome thinking. Call it open-mindedness, or cultivated curiosity, or just plain being creative. Whatever label you use, "getting out of a rut" allows you to see things differently, recognize opportunities you'd have otherwise overlooked, and "think outside the box."
The more creative you are as a thinker, the more interesting you are as a person. And to stimulate that creativity, you need to be both interesting and interested. In other words, to keep your brain young and forestall the effects of aging, dementia, and the mental deterioration you don't ever want to experience, be adventuresome.
For me, the ultimate way to stimulate adventuresome thinking is to travel to parts of the world where the local culture is entirely different from that to which I'm accustomed. Other sections of this website spell out how I approach these far-flung adventures, and I've posted links to many of my travel adventure videos on YouTube.
Check my adventure blog for my latest travels, or close-to-home adventure reports.
However…
You don't need to travel anywhere
to stimulate adventuresome thinking
You can still be an interesting and interested person without leaving home. And that's why there's another section of this website dedicated to exactly that goal: stimulate your own adventures in creative thinking without leaving home.
However you choose to do it, actively setting out to stimulate adventuresome thinking will help keep your brain healthier and delay the onset of aging-related mental deterioration. Being an adventuresome thinker will make you more interested in seeking out unfamiliar stimuli, and that in turn will make you a much more interesting person.