Retire The Old Self
Living an Asymmetrical Life · The Road of Trials
One Port at a TimeDirection Over Speed
From cruise ships to cruise missiles, from routine and drill to moments of terror: a field report on perseverance, decisions under uncertainty, and the discipline of staying pointed toward the right horizon.
Documenting a life in pictures has the added advantage of making it true. The evidence forces you to tolerate contradiction, revisit your assumptions, and see the same journey from more than one deck.
Expedition history should not belong only to Magellan, Edmund Hillary, Lewis and Clark, and the officially extraordinary. It also belongs to regular people who leave the familiar map, circumnavigate their own limits, and report back in what I have always thought of as literature in a hurry.
No matter where I go, there I am. The moon follows into another hemisphere. The stars rearrange themselves but remain ours. Diane Ackerman called it the ricochet wonder of everything being in cahoots with everything else. Travel changes the angle, then asks you to notice what never changed.
This post is one of those field reports: sea service, war-zone training, uncertainty, gratitude, technology, luck, and the strange privilege of realizing that the present is the only port from which any voyage can begin.
Expedition History for Regular People
Literature in a Hurry
The great journeys are not made smaller when ordinary people record their own. They become more complete.
Pictures do not let memory become too elegant. They keep the awkward angles, the improvised routes, and the moments when the story contradicts the identity you thought you had. That is their value. A life without contradiction is usually a life edited too soon.
I wanted to travel around the world as far back as I can remember. The desire sounded enormous. The method was almost embarrassingly small: one contract, one watch, one port, one crossing at a time. The invisible became visible through repetition.
What good is having a belly if there is no fire in it? Wake up, drink your passion, light a match, and get to work. Enormous outcomes are rarely enormous while they are being built. They are usually a sequence of unphotogenic steps taken before anyone knows the ending.
People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things. Edmund Hillary
Cruise Ships to Cruise Missiles
Clarity Under Pressure
The uniform changed. The service ethic did not. Both worlds ran twenty-four hours a day, but one made the cost of unclear language impossible to ignore.
"You worked on a cruise ship and now you are working in a war zone?" Yes. From cruise ships to cruise missiles. In both places the language of service remained: yes ma'am, yes sir, at your service. Both were twenty-four-hour operating environments. Only the customer changed.
In Afghanistan, aviation English stopped being an academic subject and became a life-support system. The measure was no longer elegance, accent, or grammar for its own sake. The measure was whether the right person understood the right instruction before the situation changed.
That is where my left brain got good at telling my right brain what to do. Procedure and intuition stopped fighting for the wheel. Structure made improvisation safer. The hard room did not eliminate uncertainty; it made the signal impossible to ignore.
The safest-looking route can become the most expensive one when it quietly trades away capability, aliveness, and time.
Perseverance · The Long Game
Direction Over Speed
A strong engine on a random heading is expensive drift. A clear heading turns even a small step into progress.
If you are pointed in the wrong direction, it does not matter how fast you are traveling. Speed only compounds the navigational error. Inversely, when the destination is aligned, all honest progress is positive, no matter how slow it looks from the shore.
State it and create it was never magic. It was orientation. "I want to travel around the world" became a heading strong enough to organize years of small choices. The destination appeared before the route. Then the route answered one port at a time.
The long game is not waiting. It is repeated contact with the chosen direction. Routine is not the opposite of adventure; it is the infrastructure that makes adventure survivable.
You are not required to move fast. You are required to know what your speed is serving. Field Doctrine
Decision Science
Every Decision Is a Bet
Life is shaped by the quality of our decisions and by luck. Wisdom begins when we stop confusing the two.
There are two forces that determine the shape of a life: the quality of our decisions and luck. Progress requires decisions, and every meaningful decision is made before the future becomes certain. I call those decisions bets.
A bet is a decision about an uncertain future. Treating decisions this way made it possible to find learning opportunities inside unstable environments. It helped separate process from outcome, reduce common decision traps, and keep emotion from rewriting the evidence after the fact.
Invite your future self into the room. Let that version of you examine the present decision without demanding a guaranteed result. Gratitude helps because it changes scarcity into stewardship: the future is not owed to you, but the next decision is still yours.
Judge the choice using the information available when the decision was made, not the information revealed afterward.
Good decisions can lose. Bad decisions can win. Do not let a single result become a counterfeit teacher.
Convert the outcome into a better filter, a clearer trigger, or a stronger operating rule for the next uncertain moment.
The Earth School
Press Play
We spend too much time in fast-forward and rewind. The present is the only setting where a life can actually run.
The Earth School kills all of its students. That is not pessimism. It is the cleanest possible deadline. You have two lives, and the second begins when you realize you only have one.
I was an early adopter of the iPod in all its iterations, and the device eventually became a useful metaphor. We live in fast-forward while worrying about the future. We live in rewind while ruminating on the past. We rarely press play.
In fact, we have no usable future until it becomes present. What an awesome gift the present is. You can get anywhere from here as long as you are actually here.
I am a time millionaire: hours of routine and drill, followed by moments of extreme terror, wonder, risk, laughter, and complete attention. Time wealth is not an empty calendar. It is the experience of owning your attention while the day is happening.
No matter where I go, there I am. The map changes. The moon remains. Expedition Note
Visual Field Notes
Ricochet Wonder
Perspective is what happens when the mind stops insisting that the first interpretation is the only one.
Still thinking about ships. Sometimes the mind sees what it has been trained to see: an aerial view becomes a cruise ship, a tear in a leather couch becomes an ocean wake, a basketball hoop becomes a reminder that taking the shot is how possibility enters the record.
The image is not the lesson. The shift in perception is the lesson. A curved line, a strange angle, or a visual mistake can become a new signal when the old story loosens its grip.
Companion Stories
The Selves That Built the Next Self
Four earlier field notes from the teaching years: Saudi Arabia, aviation culture, Hawaii, and the recurring problem of making English useful under real conditions.
Companion Story 01
The Majik Kingdom
Before the war-zone doctrine came Saudi Arabia: defence contracts, aviation English, compounds, cultural friction, and desert classrooms where language already carried more consequence than the lesson plan admitted.
Read The Majik KingdomCompanion Story 02
Top Guns: Enjoy the Ride
The aircraft are only part of the story. The deeper subject is the culture surrounding them: precision, confidence, risk, speed, and the discipline required to make complex performance look effortless.
Read Top GunsCompanion Story 03
Math Atheists in Hawaii
Numbers can illuminate performance, but they can also create false confidence. This teaching story asks what happens when measurement becomes a substitute for judgment instead of evidence that supports it.
Read Math AtheistsCompanion Story 04
A Pain in the English
Long before “We Speak English or People Die” became the title, the central problem was already visible: English was not merely a school subject. It had to cross accents, cultures, authority gradients, and operational pressure.
Read A Pain in the EnglishThe Return with the Elixir
Turn the Route into Doctrine
The sea years supplied the horizon. The war years supplied the stakes. Decision science supplied the language for uncertainty. Presence supplied the only clock that matters. Writing gives the journey a form that another traveler can carry.
The route does not become meaningful because it was unusual. It becomes meaningful when the experience is converted into something usable: a question, a principle, a warning, a field exercise, a better decision.