Adventure as an Attitude, Adventure as an Action

At the end of my first week at NeuroRestore, I attended the regular lab meeting. Andrea Galvez presented her plan for the Brain Spine Interface, discussing the pros and cons of ECoG vs EEG, signal processing techniques, the communication stack, and metrics for the clinical trial. Needless to say I was stunned at the ambition of the work, both from a technical standpoint and from the immediacy of the work.

But G had just one comment to make. "We have to craft the story." The conversation shifted from filtering and SNR to what that would actually mean for the "test pilots".

Fast forward a few years and Gert-Jan Oskam is walking alongside Anderson Cooper from 60 Minutes, nodding and answering questions as he walks. The story had unfolded, the Brain Spine Interface could restore "natural" walking and it was simple and reliable enough that recipients of the system could walk and talk at the same time.

Storytelling as Sense-making

More than logic and laws, I find I need stories to make sense of the world, to motivate me, and to keep me on the right track when otherwise I would get lost in details and fears. So what story is it to be? Tragedy, comedy, or romance? More than anything else, adventure calls me.

What works about the story of adventure is how it encourages growth. To grow, we need to challenge ourselves by taking on something uncomfortable. Do this right and you might even be able to achieve flow. (Here for the original manifesto, here for lived experiences in adventure sports) It's easy to think of such acts of learning as "answering the call to adventure" and venturing forth into the unknown. It's an attitude one can take to feel courageous when facing uncertainty. Adventure as an attitude ensures maximal growth against the odds of whatever life may throw at you.

But that alone does not make for a compelling story, merely a useful one. An outside observer may remark that a person is adventurous for tasting spicy food, but they would hesitate to say that they are witnessing an adventure as they watch that person dive, red-faced, for a jug of water. To be perfectly and brutally honest here I don't consider people attempting to summit Mount Everest to be on an adventure for the most part.

Where to set the bar then? A simple exercise is to take the question, the call to adventure, and remove the I. Practice a little ego death! This is actually endorsed by the flow manifesto already linked: read it now if you haven't already. Csikszentmihalyi noticed that overly individualistic people struggle to achieve flow: it seems to me that if your only reason to try is you, and entering flow dissolves the self, well then the wind will drop out of your sails just as you achieve it. So turn that "Can I summit Everest?" into "Can Everest be summited?". We know the answer to that one, and knowing that, Everest is thereafter just a very dangerous tourist destination. The storyteller has to work a little harder then. Perhaps "can it be done by someone like me?" is genuinely compelling, provided there are people who relate to you. This is why Blue Origin's constructed story of "the first all female space flight" fell flat. I found my own marathon story uncompelling until I made it to the starting line, and found myself staring at a full-back tattoo which read "callous the mind". Fuck that, I thought, I'm gonna run this marathon, and I'm gonna be damned well happy while I do it. Can we succeed in our goals without making ourselves miserable, or numb, in the process? A joyous marathon experience therefore became my first step in a bigger adventure to try to answer that question, and things started making sense again.

The Reckless Abandon of Wim Hof, or When to Come Home

Wim Hof: the Iceman. An extremist; a shaman; a man of magic: what else should he be called as scientists scramble to keep up with his exploration of what is humanly possible. His story starts at the lowest point many of us could dare to contemplate, struggling to cope with the death of his wife, he plunged himself into a cold dark lake in the middle of the night.

In the final episode of "Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof", Wim is standing on a bridge sounding every bit the mystic elder. He whips himself into a frenzy, preparing the participants to jump, calling them to begin their new life without limits and just as his voice reaches fever pitch, the sort intended to turn fear into elation, the last man refuses.

When asked why he chose not to complete the bridge jump, he explained that he felt he would only be doing it to save face — and that he cared more about not putting his life in danger now that he had a baby son. He said:

My fear is not coming out the other side…if I jumped off the bridge I was doing it for the sake of doing it, I wasn't doing it for myself or any reason, I really didn't want to let go.

Freeze the Fear, series finale

Nothing to prove, and no one to prove it to.

I had the misfortune once to hear a motivational speaker's own Everest story. He knew he couldn't make it, and when he turned around, he found he didn't have the strength to make it back either, so he resigned himself to die (how very Stoic of him). A call was arranged, and down the phone his daughter spoke to him, reminding him that he had promised that he was coming home. Had he lost himself in the "adventure", or had he only been thinking of himself? One thing is for sure, his story alone had not been enough to sustain him. So craft your story carefully. ◆