Last night I watched Super Size Me (2004), a film that follows a guy who eats nothing but McDonalds, three times a day, for thirty days. The film documents the drastic lifestyle changes the guy goes through, from his physical fattening to his psychological state of mind. Over the course of the movie, he samples every item on the chain’s menu at least once, and consumes an average of 5,000 calories (the equivalent of 9.26 Big Macs) per day during the experiment.

The film made me have nightmares, making me dream that my liver was going to burst with fast food accumulated fat, but it also made me reflect about the eating habits I’ve adopted in 2007. The conclusion I came to was this (mom, this post ends here for you):

I have never eaten so unhealthy in my entire life.

It started when I quit my job in April. I decided I needed to save enough money to go on our Pursue the Passion tour, and to do that, I needed to eat efficiently. When Jay, who was crashing on my couch while working as my college educated, minimum wage employee, found a food sponsor, we essentially began our own Super Size Me experiment.

The plan was to use the two hundred food vouchers to survive for two months until we hit the road. We figured if we varied our diets between frozen Hot Pockets, frozen pizza, frozen stir fry, frozen calzones, and frozen whatever else those coupons got for free, we would be alright. And at first, we were. Going down the grocery aisle with a choice constrained, yet unlimited shopping budget was like gumdrops falling from the sky. The cats and dogs danced in the street as our meals were microwaved three times a day.

But then something happened. Maybe too much sodium, maybe too much salt, maybe too much sugar. The wacky dietary imbalance that existed in our twenty-two year old bodies was not good. After a week, we were sluggish, working inefficiently, and the rosy colored world we had
been living in turned into uncontrollable visits to the toilet. And of course, discount FMV toilet paper was the product of choice.

After a month and a half, our bodies a chemical war zone, I stood up in the seat in which I sat and announced a pact between Jay and I. No more frozen food for us. Whatever money we saved during our period of personal punishment was not worth it. We had to eat right.

Apples and bananas replaced the ridden sodium infected frozen packages we were used to buying. Health didn’t exponentially improve, but our state of mind did. It was like a weight had been lifted. A week after the “f*** frozen food” pact, we found our title sponsor.

We were on our way out of the unhealthy mess we had gotten ourselves into, vowing to never again to eat as bad as that point in our lives.

I’m writing to give you a Pursue the Passion update, as things have been shaken up since the conclusion of our cross country roadtrip.

Jobing.com, our 2007 tour sponsor, has extended us an offer to acquire Pursue the Passion, and has offered us an opportunity to continue PTP as a speaking and internship program. They will also be the publisher of the book we’ll be writing, and are going to provide a much needed revamping of our website. As you can imagine, I’m pretty excited to have these opportunities, and I have accepted their offer.

I want to thank you for your support and help to get us to this point. I would have never thought that PTP would have ever come this far, and now it looks as though we have just scratched the surface.

A few months back we interviewed D’Wayne Edwards for a second time at Nike. At the end of the interview, Zach commented on his wristwatch. Looking down at the bright, round timepiece, D’Wayne noticed it was upside down. Laughing off his honest mistake, D’Wayne admitted that he doesn’t glance that direction too often. It was 1:00pm.

Tis the life of one who works passionately. Time has little meaning, if any.

As I headed out for the day this morning, I picked up my watch on my bedside stand. Feeling mischievous, I slipped the watch on my left wrist, upside down.

Working away in the coffee shop wasn’t the same without the nasty habit of glancing down every ten minutes. Things flowed. Things drug. It was all the same, except that my inner clock watching self was not present.

To work without constraint is free in so many ways.

I have been a fan of Kahlil Gibran since I first picked up the Prophet at age sixteen. Every once in awhile I pick up the book and flip through its pages. Yesterday I landed on “Reason and Passion.”

Here’s the opening passage on the topic:

“And the priestess spoke again and said: speak to us of Reason and Passion.

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

That last line sums up the last year of my life. Reason (aka my risk averse accounting job), was my force that confined. My passion (aka the four month tour that I dreamt about executing for a year and a half) was unquestioned by anyone. Therefore, as the trip progressed, the end goal that I had in mind (a resource for people to turn to for career guidance) fell short of my expectations because it was driven by passion alone.

Which puts me in a unique situation now, proceeding forth with a book and documentary. If our crew approaches it with reason and executes with passion, I believe that we have the rudder and sails to lead us to land.

But for now, we’re at mid-sea.

Whether I like it or not, I have been influenced by living in a RV for the last four months. In the RV, I had two overhead compartments for clothes and books, and one drawer underneath the refrigerator to store shoes. I learned to live simply.

When I returned home to Phoenix a few days ago, I did four loads of laundry. I stuffed clean socks into an overflowing, bedside drawer. Boxers poured out from the drawer below the socks. The closet did not have enough hangers for the new t-shirt additions I had picked up from various stops around the country. The simple lifestyle I had assumed on the road did not roll over to life at home.

So yesterday, I decided I needed to make the changes to live simply. I canceled my cable TV, leaving a desolate, 50 inch TV in the living room. I cleansed my closet, donating a hundred and nine items of clothing to goodwill. The products that took up space in the cabinet below the bathroom sink are long gone. Today, the daunting tasks of the garage and kitchen loom.

What started as a way to avoid reflecting on what happened over the previous four months actually turned into my first realization.

That realization is that I can, and want to live simply. And that we shouldn’t take up more space than what is allotted.

“We Americans have so many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism…” Forum, 1894 “What Americanism Means.” Theodore Roosevelt. In, EM 480.

After giving my copy of Atlas Shrugged to Zach a while back, I stole his copy of The Rise and Fall of Theodore Roosevelt. The biography, by Edmund Morris, is wonderful, accessible and eloquent. In the context of PTP, Teddy Roosevelt was a wanderer, answering the call to adventure constantly throughout his distinguished life.

He was also an egomaniac, but seemingly selfless in his contributions to society and his family. It is that selflessness that has struck a chord. This trip, driven by its characters, would not have succeeded save for selfless acts by all parties involved. Zach sleeps anywhere. Brett is a flexible scheduler. Jay is incredibly generous.

In the building of fraternal relationships it is important not to lose sight of man’s individualist tendencies. For four months, with varying complexity, individualism has been all but abandoned, replaced by a collective mind, happiness and sense of accomplishment. This is something Teddy never grasped.

For a man who considers himself independent, I have come to rely entirely on the three men around me. I see myself in the reflection of their eyes. I hear my thoughts in the context of what they say. I live my life only as they live theirs, sharing in success, failure, elation and sadness. In understanding my companions, I have lived this trip four times, infinitely more than a man-as-an-island could.

Recently, someone noticed that I have yet to drive the RV. In my own defense, I consider myself entirely too crazy to spend long hours under any kind of stress; I have what some call delicate sensibilities. Driving hunched, white-knuckled and blind in a New Jersey thunderstorm is best left to a person of stronger mental fortitude, more competent during six-hour, nervous, self-assessment.

But Zach and Brett (Puppy and the Captain) have become entirely comfortable behind the wheel, carrying our crew through Oregon, Delaware, Georgia, Texas and now, home. I am so grateful to them, for ensuring our safety and for taking the responsibility so willingly. Without drivers, we’d be in Phoenix. Whatever my contribution to PTP, it holds not a candle to what they have done.

I write this without pretense of humor to say just how much I have come to love and respect my fellow travelers. Brett, Zach and Jay have made this trip a once in a lifetime experience, that no one can ever take away from me. I appreciate them so earnestly, for everything they are and are not, and for everything they’ve allowed me to be.

Cheers, to wisdom, strength, courage and virtue, and the defeat of ignoble pessimism. Cheers to the fate that brought me here, and to those with whom I have been brought.

xo
Noah Pollock

by Noah Pollock

Although our journey across the nation comes to an end, in Tucson in 5 days, our most difficult journey has only just begun. In collecting the information we have collected, in experiencing what we have experienced, we learned to take things for what they are. In examining the trees throughout the forest, and minding not the forest itself, we learned to leave over-analysis behind.

It was not always so. Pursue the Passion set out to find what makes people passionate. Perhaps youthful arrogance led us to believe ourselves capable of distilling conversations to their passionate roots. The first leg of the trip, through mid-August, we faithfully executed our original plan. As we continued, our insecurity in the project’s simplicity grew. In retrospect, to believe that we could meet someone for an hour, cut their passion into a two-minute video, then progress to our next meeting, was a serious overestimation of our own abilities.

Dreaming big is always an overestimation. As feelings of doubt in the project mounted, we surveyed more honestly both the task before us, and our own abilities. It was difficult to come to grips with, watching our initial ideal exposed as somewhat frivolous, but we found comfort in several things. We found camaraderie, on the trip, with each other and those we met along the way. We received emails from readers who found genuine inspiration in what we offered. We found an incredible life experience being lived everyday.

What we have found is broken monotony. We departed as overly serious, business minded adventurers, and return humbled by our experiences. As a group, we have grown to support and nurture each other in a way none of us have ever known. What we have to offer is an honest interpretation of our travels, without presumptions of conclusions, which can help to avoid, or break, the mundane working existence. There is no singular, universal passion. Rather, there is an open-mindedness, fortitude and confidence shared among all we have found that is passionate.

Showering. Something you probably take for granted on a daily basis. But after spending close to four months on the road, we consider the act of showering somewhere between an enjoyable experience and something you would sell your soul for.

We started off this journey comfortably. We showered at my mom’s house. We showered at the house Jay grew up in during our stay in Los Angeles. Things got a little more out of the ordinary in the northwest when we showered and stayed at my stepdad’s great aunt Pinky’s house. But we definitely weren’t roughing it when we were being hit with the naked, dual headed shower sensation in Cape Cod, or in a cleanly kept condo located thirty-eight floors up in Chicago.

We have roughed it, showering at a dirty truck stop in Hastings, NY while paying eight dollars a shower to do so. We’ve had showering situations some would consider humorous, like when we showered in Jay’s cousin Tony’s artsy house in Portland. His shower was located in a room that was like a melting pot. The shower was next to the kitchen stove which was under a bedroom loft, where Tony and his girlfriend Stephanie slept. That time when we stayed with five girls in Delaware was pretty good too. The PTP crew upped the total shower hungry twenty somethings to nine that Wednesday morning, with only one ill-pressured shower available for use.

And oh, we’ve gone showerless. But let me tell you something. Showerless in Spokane is nothing compared to showerless in Mobile. It is humid and sticky in the south. If you don’t shower, you don’t survive.

Our most recent escapade to find a shower involved meeting girls at a bar on Beale Street in Memphis and latching on to them like they were the fountain of youth. Yesterday, Zach managed to finagle four showers from the attractive blonde working the counter of Hard Rock casino’s health and spa in Biloxi, MS. Today in New Orleans, we shower in a tub surrounded by rubber ducky curtains belonging to Ben, a friend of Brian Conley, who we briefly interviewed in Philly.

Despite the uncertainty of where and when we will shower next, there are two things you can count on.

There is no such thing as a group shower for the sake of conservation. And we will always use your shower products.

This morning, as I lay in the RV on Dauphin Street in Mobile, Alabama, I read a few signatures sketched on the ceiling in Sharpie.

“Good job enhancing the power to thrive”- Coach Valerie, Los Angeles

“Thanks for the inspiration!”- Kelly Faulk, Jobing.com, San Diego

“Keep spreading the joy.”- David Kravetz, Founder of Fairytale Brownies

I include all of these signatures because they were within the first week of us being on tour. We hadn’t done anything with the tour, yet, these individuals felt that need to write something regarding our accomplishments.

Ever since we started the roadtrip, I’ve been struggling to put a finger on why people are excited about what we are doing with Pursue the Passion. I have emails each day saying what we are doing is amazing. We have press coverage all the time. And sometimes I just wonder why.

Right now I’m reading Atlas Shrugged, the 1,069 page book written by Ayn Rand. Throughout the book I have been intrigued by her writing style, but when I read a passage on page 216, I had found an answer as to why people are excited about Pursue the Passion.

Below is the passage.

“In the summer days and in the heavy stillness of the evenings of the city, there were moments when a lonely man or woman- on a park bench, on a street corner, at an open window- would see in a newspaper a brief mention of the progress of the John Galt Line, and would look at the city with a sudden stab of love. They were the very young, who felt that it was the kind of event they longed to see happening in the world- or the very old, who had seen a world in which such events did happen. They did not care about railroads, they knew nothing about business, they knew only that someone was fighting against great odds and winning. They did not admire the fighters’ purpose, they believed the voices of public opinion- and yet, when they read that the Line was growing, they had a moment’s sparkle and wondered why it made their own problems seem easier.”