Curiosity

What are you curious about?

What are you losing time learning about?

Where does your brain land if you catch yourself daydreaming?

I’ve been attempting to let myself dream again, and I didn’t realize I had squelched it. I was listening to Matt Mullenweg, one of the founding devs behind WordPress, on the Tim Ferris Podcast earlier this week. WordPress is the CMS that ultimately sparked my curiosity, sparked my entrepreneurial life, and got me to where I am in my career today. Happy birthday Matt 🙂

I was snooping around Ma.tt – Matt’s GLORIOUSLY DOMAIN’D website. I found myself on his bag post. It’s just simply a post that outlines the gear he carries around in his bag, and I found myself fascinated. He runs a company with a distributed workforce so he finds himself traveling frequently for work, and so he makes intentional and well thought-out decisions on what gets put in that bag.

However, this post isn’t about Matt’s bag. It’s about curiosity. Because that bag post awakened something inside of me.

All of a sudden I was going back down a rabbit whole of one bag travel. – It’s a simple thing where you…. you like travel. but only with one bag.

I was remembering post grad dreams of minimalism and a simple life that entailed longterm travel. Somewhere along the way that dream was buried figuratively under a mound of good intentions and literally under a mound of possessions in the form of owning a house and all the purchases that seem to follow.

So again. What are you curious about?

What’s hidden under those handcuffs of routine, busyness and obligation?

What’s the subject of your YouTube rabbit trails? Everyone is different, and honestly every one of us is unique and intriguing for those different interests

Right now, some of the things I find myself curious about include:

1. Electric guitars, and electric guitar tone. Guys. I can’t get enough of this stuff. it’s ridiculous. There’s something so magical about both the craftsmanship behind beautiful instruments, and the electrical wizardry that happens inside the metal boxes in the pedal world. This has been a 2 year deep dive at this point, and I want to start dipping my toe into the world of mods and effects myself.
2. Fitness: both strength training and endurance racing. My girlfriend and I are looking at doing at least a 10k in may, and I’d be lying to you if I said I could run a mile right now. But there’s a dream inside to do an ironman someday.
3. Minimalism and Simple Living. I am embarrassed to tell you how often I think about what my life would look like if I were a monk. Actually, one of my goals for 2024 is to take a silent retreat of some sort.
4. One bag travel and what a multi week or even months-long trip could look like.
5. Business / Investing and what my career trajectory looks since stepping away from freelance web work. Currently, my entrepreneurship is in the form of partnering with my friend Caleb to do a coffee catering business called Relation Coffee and I’m excited to see what the coming year will look like for us with that, but there might be something else on my horizon too, I just need to be ready to catch the wave as it comes.

So. what are we going to do with that curiosity?

One of the things that I’ve really noticed since logging off social media for the year is that it’s at lot easier to be in the mindset and mentality to create things: whether writing projects, business ideas, date ideas, songs, anything. With that time reclaimed, there’s time to explore new things… to be curious again. So if you haven’t made a decision about your social media use for this year, maybe I’ll gently encourage you to do the same.