- Lukas Mann
- Posts
- how to craft your life story.
read time: 3 minutes
High camp in the Karakorams.
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
I was a total nerd growing up… especially when it came to reading.
I had glasses by the age of 6 because I used to sneak my books into bed and read with the lights off, just so my parents wouldn’t take my books away.
I take zero credit for it - I didn’t have much else to do. My parents banned TV in our house, so we either read or played outside.
(Life hack… if you want your kids to read, don’t give them a phone at the ripe age of 11).
I read everything I could get my hands on.
But, time and time again, it was the stories of grand adventure that never left my mind.
Tales of…
Ernest Shackleton and his crew, surviving over nine months on the ice floes of Antarctica
The Endurance.
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first men to summit Everest
Summit of Everest, May 29, 1953.
The Wright Brothers, the inventors of the first motor-operated airplane
The first prototype of the working airplane.
As a young boy, these stories had a profound effect on me.
They were real people… living real lives.
Their world didn’t seem like the same one I lived in. But I desperately wanted it to be.
Fast forward 15 years, and I still often feel the same way as that little kid I once was, hiding my Everest book under the covers in my room at night.
Human beings are born with an innate desire to explore.
Exploration is fundamental to the human experience.
From the moment we take our first breath, we are explorers. Every sight, sound, and experience is all brand new.
Have you ever watched the eyes of a baby? They’re soaking up information at a rate that’s almost unimaginable to the adult brain.
From their first steps to their first day of school, children move through life with a built-in desire for the unknown.
This need to break free and experience new things doesn’t stop when you hit puberty.
That same instinct runs deep within the human spirit. Why do so many teenagers rebel and leave home?
And yet, something happens to most people, usually once they hit their early 20s.
We become complacent.
There’s never been a time in human history where we’ve been surrounded by more comfort.
Fast food, heated seats, streaming on-demand… our world is chock-full of luxuries that our great-grandparents couldn’t have even dreamt of.
But more than just the comfort… think about our entertainment.
We have ceased to fill our minds with the stories that matter, and instead we’re content to sit on our couch and binge the latest Netflix drama that Hollywood pushes.
The modern world has saturated our minds with garbage.
We’ve forgotten the real stories - the stories that define our history as humans on this planet that we call home.
“The only thing you absolutely have to know is the location of the nearest library.”
Take air travel, for example.
The Wright brothers’ first flight was in 1903. Chances are your great-grandparents were alive then. It really wasn’t that long ago.
Fast forward to today, the skies are filled with planes that would exceed the wildest dreams of the Wright brothers. And yet without them, we’d be nowhere.
How many kids today are growing up with these stories in their mind?
Embarking on a grand adventure is really just crafting a story. Every footstep, every campsite, every summit, every failed mission… it all tells a story.
James Cameron, one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time, said this.
“I'm a storyteller; that's what exploration really is all about. Going to places where others haven't been and returning to tell a story they haven't heard before.”
Read books. Fill your mind with stories of grand adventure. Surround yourself with people who challenge you.
There’s an Ira Glass quote I love that goes like this:
“Great stories happen to those who can tell them.”
Your life is a story. You’ve got the pen in your hand, and a stack of blank paper sitting beside you.
And don’t fool yourself… your story will gradually start to look like the stories you fill your mind with.
Whether you like it or not.
Don’t take that lightly!
Lukas Mann (aka @exploromann)