Jane’s Adventurous Vision

Jane understands the importance of control. She was a talented student who earned top-one-percent scores on her standardized tests and attended a competitive university, but she was also unhappy with following a traditional path from college and into a steady, well-paying job. Her vision for her life was more exotic. As an amateur athlete who once rode a bike across the country for charity and competed in an Ironman triathlon, she envisioned a more adventurous future. A copy of the life plan she sent me includes the goal of circumnavigating the world’s oceans and traveling without motor power across every continent: “Australia (by unicycle?)… Antarctica (by dog sled?).” The list also includes more eccentric goals, such as surviving in the wilderness “with no tools or equipment” for one month, and learning how to become a fire breather.

To finance this adventurous life, her plan calls, vaguely, for her to “build a set of low-maintenance websites that recurrently earn enough to support the pursuits on this list.” Her goal was to get this revenue up to $3,000 a month, which she calculated to be enough to handle her basic expenses. Eventually, she planned to leverage these experiences to “develop a non-profit to develop my vision of health, human potential, and a life well-lived.”

At first glance, Jane might remind you of Ryan and Sarah from Red Fire Farm. She recognized that gaining control over her life trumps simply gaining more income or prestige. Like Ryan trading in his diploma for farmland, this realization gave her the courage to step off a safe career path and instead pursue a more compelling existence. But unlike Ryan and Sarah, Jane’s plans faltered. Soon after we met, she revealed that her embrace of control had led her to an extreme decision: dropping out of college. It didn’t take her long to realize that just because you’re committed to a certain lifestyle doesn’t mean you’ll find people who are committed to supporting you.

“The current problem is financial independence,” she told me. “After quitting college, I started various businesses, and launched freelance and blog projects, but lost motivation to continue before substantial results came.” One of these experiments, a blog that she hoped to become the foundation of her empire of recurrent revenue generation, featured only three posts in nine months.

Jane had discovered a hard truth of the real world: It’s really hard to convince people to give you money. “I agree that it would be ideal to continue to develop my vision,” she admitted. “However, I also need money in order to eat.” Without even a college degree to her name, finding this money was proving difficult. A commitment to dogsledding across Antarctica, it turns out, doesn’t read well on a résumé.