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.

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.”

There are days when it all just makes sense. Today was one of those days.

We started off the day by heading to a rural part of Tennessee to interview a goat farmer, who, after fifteen years of accounting, just wanted to find something where she could be outside. Zach and I toured the farm, seeing as many as sixty goats, but none caught our eye more the fainting goat. The fainting goat actually faints, although the babies do not. The adults freeze up because of a sudden boost of adrenaline caused by fear. So when the Puppy (aka Zach) wildly chased a goat, it was no surprise that the goat helplessly fell to the dirt with legs stretched skyward.

Back in the city after our country experience, our next interview was with an articulate, environmentally conscious entrepreneur, who at twenty-seven year, just moved to Nashville from L.A. with his banjo playing fiancé. With eyes as green as his cause, this first time entrepreneur and former male model explained how he planned to put “sexy” into the worldwide green movement through the means of bamboo underwear. In stage one and a quarter of his business plan, his company will be called “Bambooty.”

Over beers that night we interviewed Chris Pandolfi, a banjo player with the Infamous Stringdusters bluegrass band. The Stringdusters have recently received worldwide recognition, taking home three IBMA awards this week in Nashville. Now 28, Chris has been playing the banjo since he enrolled in Dartmouth for environmental studies several years ago.

The thing that interested me the most about the interview with Chris was that when asked “what would be the one thing he would tell his twenty-three year old self,” he thoughtfully replied that he would like to hear what the younger Chris would have to tell him today. The reason for the answer was that the younger Chris played the banjo for fun. Today’s Chris plays professionally. With the territory has come pressure. Pressure to perform. To live up to expectations. To deliver. It’s a completely different feeling Chris derives from playing now compared to ten years ago, so much so that he has begun to play the drums on the side to regain the innocent sensation he once had when he first picked the strings of the banjo.

The number one answer interviewees respond with when asked the question we posed to Chris is to “take risks.” Or “believe in yourself.” As interviewers, we’ve made the connection that although the question asks what an interviewee would tell their twenty-three year old self, the answer we receive applies to their current situation. So the question subconsciously reads, “what would you tell yourself?” And more often than not, their answer revolves around fear, and going back to the optimism of their twenty-three year old self.

Today we were exposed to experience and inexperience. We saw how fear, drawn from experience, can literally paralyze, like the fainting goat on its back with its legs stuck in the sky. Or how a lack of knowledge, like a first time entrepreneur, a baby fainting goat, or picking up drumsticks can afford that innocent sensation that the world is a clean slated canvas.

I canceled more interviews than I conducted while in Boston. That sucks. I was left with an empty feeling knowing what could have been had there been more communication, and better expectation management.

Cancellations trace back to communication. I learned a few months ago about the importance of laying it all on the table for the other party when I upset a potential sponsor for not informing them there were other interested investors.

Empty feelings can be a result of high expectations. A few weeks ago the PTP team attended a dinner party, where the host looked forward to a lot more than what we delivered. Our failure to meet the night her imagination had created resulted in a badmouth bashing on her blog.

These lessons reared their ugly heads last night when I heard the disappointment in Tracy Boyce’s voice after telling her we weren’t going to make it to Bridgeport, CT that night for an interview.

I had communicated through email with Tracy in mid-June when she submitted her story. She told me how she was a single mother of four, recently divorced, and working in a bookkeeping job to pay the bills. One day she asked her boss for a raise to match the workload she was undertaking, and was fired. She decided to pursue her passion because she had nothing to lose, and has now become New England’s premier Feng Shui practitioner.

When Tracy called me this morning to see if we were still on for tonight, I had to cancel. We weren’t due out of Boston until 3pm (we ended up leaving at 6pm) and we were going to take our Boston host (Mitch) to New York with us so he could catch a flight on 9/11. Tracy was in Connecticut, on the way to New York, but stopping would still put us behind schedule because Zach’s Mom’s friend was expecting us for a chili dinner. It was a sticky situation, and it was one that I hate being in.

This whole thing could have been avoided if I applied the communications and expectation management lessons from earlier in the journey. It goes to show that those lessons are not a one time thing. They’re an ongoing process, and have to constantly be practiced so these Tracy-like situations can be avoided.

Lesson Learned.

Have you ever seen a dad on a family vacation? It looks like punishment. The dad has his head down, frown on his face, objectively leading his family off to the next destination. The two kids with slumped shoulders drag their feet as they’re forced to go along to some attraction they have no interest in. The wife’s eyes deter to the windows of the shops she wishes to go in. But no one wants to detract the purpose driven dad from the path so they continue on.

Nobody is having fun, even though that is the whole objective of the vacation.

It takes a lot of planning to be disappointed. I had been planning our Notre Dame visit for weeks before our Friday night arrival. I had managed to finagle four press passes from the Notre Dame athletic department. I had marked the places on campus I wanted to see before the game. I was determined to park our RV first thing Saturday morning, at 7am, at a lot I had researched. I wanted to go experience the Notre Dame tailgate, see the football game from the press box, and of course, have fun.

On the night of our arrival we decided to go out to Corby’s bar and be a part of the Notre Dame alumni tradition by having a few drinks. As the night went on, the chances of executing my original plan seemed to get slimmer and less likely. Our host Dave and his roommate Lisa discouraged us from parking at the RV lot I had picked out, citing that we should party at their tailgate the next morning and hitch a ride with them.

This last minute idea went against the grain of my perfectly planned day, so when Zach woke me up at 3am to see if I really wanted to leave at 7am to park the RV instead of going with Dave, I said that I still wanted to stick to my plan.

Flash forward four hours and we are parked at the Notre Dame tailgate in between two RV’s adorned in Georgia Tech crap. Jay, Noah, and Zach are asleep, but wake up three hours later with a high priority to shower. Instead, three stinky guys began to cruise around the Notre Dame tailgate, being somewhere in the middle of looking like beggars and being mooches, until I was convinced by the other two that my plan sucked.

Needless to say, the plan that I had perfected in my mind had backfired.

That was until we actually got into the swing of things. Our South Bend host Dave Matthews showed up and invited us to a tailgate with a twenty foot inflatable Frankenstein. We picked up our media passes and picked grass blades off of the fifty yard line. We watched the first quarter of the game eating chicken and hot dogs from the press box. I watched the second half from the south end zone area on the field. We attended a post game press conference that featured Charlie Weis explaining the 33-3 ass whooping his Fighting Irish had just received.