Fail Hard: Falling UP to Success

Musical Inspiration: An addictive beat with a beautiful hook. “When the rain is falling, down on me, every drop could make me feel complete. Now good days are coming. Come with me. It’s today.” Enjoy. 🙂

This post coming to you from: New York (yes, still…and yes, the travel twitch is getting strong)

I have a masters in failure. Give me a couple of years and I’ll be claiming it to be a PhD. I’ve failed to land campaigns to the desired result. I’ve failed to get jobs and clients with whom I really wanted to work. And recently, I found myself staring down the barrel of yet another romantic endeavor gone awry. What was interesting to me, though, was my realization in the moment of its destruction: I was not left with a feeling of despair but rather one of further understanding and dare I say it, confidence.

After all of the failures, after being knocked down more times than I can count, the biggest way I have continued to embody the life and practice of Cosmic Trust Fall, is to keep getting back up. To take what I can from what has happened, but then let go and allow myself to fall again.

I’ll warn you now, for those looking for inspiration on how to gain the mental and emotional fortitude to keeping falling into those cosmic arms, it does not get easier. Instead, what happens is you get stronger, more resilient, and more capable of catching yourself rather than being reliant on someone else to catch you.

I am not worried about whether or not I will find love in my life, or even “the one” to spend my life with, because I have already surrounded myself with those people. And I continue to embrace risk in much of what I do, but in love especially. I open myself up to the possibility of once again failing because I know that regardless of the outcome, I will become a better and stronger person for having had that experience and that presence in my life. I will have shared adventures, moments of laughter, and intimacy. I will have learned new lessons in communication and how to interact successfully (or unsuccessfully as it may be) with another person. And if I’m lucky enough, even in romantic failure, I will have still gained friendship.

I love finding beauty amongst the destruction, and this is the life that failure begets. Failure is not something to fear but rather something to accept fully into life as the beautiful mess that truly makes a person (or company) who (or what) they were always meant to be. Thirty years in, I have discovered that I really love how this has shaped me. Mess and all. I love my curiosity and my sense of adventure. I love my ability to find the silver linings on the darkest of clouds. I love my desire to connect with people, and the emotional intelligence I have gained as a result of a lot of self-discovery through both successful and unsuccessful relationships and business ventures of all kinds.

Does this mean I don’t feel the awful pain of loss or the disappointment of another let down? Absolutely not! In fact, each time these failures occur, I have a habit of going into a spiral of questioning everything. And I mean everything. (Hey, analytical over-thinkers, how you doin’?) But the way to pull up from that, the way to find growth while seemingly lying in the muck of the latest mashup, is to focus intently on what learnings have been given. In every failure, those are the gifts. Those gleanings, however small, are the moments of clarity for which we can always be grateful. They aren’t always displayed outright. Sometimes they require a bit of digging around to find, and in some larger cases, the real clarity doesn’t come until years later when, after yet another failure, correlations can be made.

This is the beauty of constant and consistent failure. Those correlations and true discoveries of the self aren’t found in moments of elation alone. They require failure for them to be fully revealed. Because, as the saying goes, how can we know the sweet without the sour?

The tough part is that failure, unsurprisingly, can make you feel like, well, a failure. (“What do we have for her Johnny?!”) It’s scary and raw and uncomfortable. It exposes your mistakes and represents an outward display of the less-than-shiny bits. Why would anyone be eager to experience that? Truth is most aren’t. They sit complacently in comfort because, in all honesty, it makes the most sense. But it’s not how you learn. It’s definitely not how you grow or achieve real success. So you want to be Richard Branson? Go fail 500 times. Seriously.

There was a great article written by Mark Manson appropriately on the first day of the new year which challenged people to instead of asking the question, “What do I want in life?” to ask the question, “What pain do I desire in life?” The answer to the former tends to be the same – “I want to be happy.” “I want a good career.” “I want to find love.” Blah, blah, blah. But when we ask ourselves what pain we desire to have in our lives, that is when we truly see what we are willing to endure.

Failure is pain. It is struggle. It is not fun. But by God, if it isn’t necessary. Learning to love failure, learning to embrace it and to really take it on with a gusto that screams, “Say WHAT again!” those are the loins from which real success and growth are born. But you have to really be willing to open yourself up to it.

So the CTF challenge to you today is to go out and allow yourself to fail at something. Anything. Bigger the better. Scare yourself. Push to your limits. Take the dive off the cliff. Because here’s the beauty of failure – once you fail at the one thing, you can learn how to never fail at it again.

Happy Falling (and failing) CTFers.

Love Me for Me, and Other Bullsh*t

Musical Inspiration: Coming to you from those lovely peeps known as A R I Z O N A is this ‘oldie but goodie’ …because as those of you who have been loyal to CTF now know, I can’t help myself when it comes to a dubsteppy, methodical beat. Enjoy!

This post coming to you from: New York

Editor’s note: What follows is a post which diverts slightly from the core themes of travel and entrepreneurship that CTF tends to focus on. However, as healthy relationships (with ourselves and others) are so core to being a successful traveler, entrepreneur, or just human being in general, it felt in-keeping with the overall goal of this website. Enjoy!

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The biggest line of bullshit in human relationships right now is that we should find partners, friends, co-workers, whatever, who “love and accept me for me.”

Here’s the thing: in today’s gloriously digital world, “me” is an ambiguously defined moving target. We put one image out on Facebook because “that’s just for people I’ve actually met and consider to be friends.” Then we put another out on Instagram because “that one is public for anyone to see.” And then yet another out on Twitter because “that one is public and demonstrates my news/quippy one liner side.” And then of course yet another on LinkedIn because “that’s my professional image.” And just for kicks, how about the one that we create on any number of online dating profiles because “of course I’m cute, sexy, fun, smart and well-traveled…duh!” 

And that doesn’t even take into account the personal websites, about.me pages, blogs, and any other number of forums in which we are participating and infiltrating with our “personal brand” on a daily basis. 

So when one of those articles or memes gets posted about finding someone who will just love you for you, I am always sat there questioning, “Well which ‘me’ am I really expecting them to love?” Or maybe more extreme, am I meant to find people who can somehow sift through all of the mess that has been put out there over the now 10-15 years that I have been participating in social media and the online world, and through that determine exactly who I am and what I’m all about…and then love that person?

Holy shit, am I suppose to do that for everyone I meet?!

Look, I love a good bit of research as much as the next person, but let’s be honest, “ain’t nobody got time for that!” So when I hear the advice that we should be looking for the people who love us for who we are, I’m hard-pressed to believe such an audacious concept. Rather, as the curators of all our life’s publicly-consumed content, isn’t it our individual responsibility to clarify who the “real me” is? Right now. Right here. How do I define myself, and what am I about?

Which means, in reality, if you want to find people who really love you for you, you need to figure that shit out first. You need to come into the relationship knowing who you are, what you want, what makes you great, what makes you kinda crappy (don’t lie), and what is still a work in progress.  

I mean, be honest, how do you expect someone else to see you if you can’t honestly see yourself? People are busy, and have their own array of shit going on in life. Adding to it with a “love me for me…and please while you’re at it, figure out who me is” …again, I say:

Romantic relationships especially – being in one, loving someone else, choosing to commit to one other person in a world full of “right swipes” – that’s a tall order. So if you’re going to do it, if that is what you are saying you want, then you need to start with you first. 

Understand you.

Nurture you. 

Meditate.

Talk to a therapist. 

Talk to a friend, your sister, your parents.

Read books.

Go see a hypnotherapist. (Don’t laugh, 90% of our decision-making capability comes from our subconscious… so unless you have some magic subconscious accessing method or device, open your mind to alternative methods.)

Meditate some more. 

Talk some more. 

Read some more. 

I think you get the point. Self awareness is a process and it is going to take some time. But the alternative is that you keep bouncing around losing friends, lovers and business relationships because you “just didn’t connect” or “he just didn’t get me” or “she kept trying to change me” or “I just wasn’t happy” or…I mean honestly this list just goes on, but it all comes back to one key factor – do you really know you?

The best bit in all of this? Once you get to a point of knowing you, you will begin to realize that the definition of “me” is still a moving target! Tada! So the real focus becomes less on finding people to “love you for you” and more about finding people who are interested in going on a journey with you, and with whom you are interested in exploring, as you each continue to learn and define the ‘me’ for each of you – as individuals and as a team. 

So here’s my request/suggestion/radical idea: let’s stop asking for and recommending that someone “love me for me.” Because one more time, “ain’t nobody got time for that.” It is an impossible task for anyone other than you yourself to possible live up to. You can love you for you, and for anyone else, find people who are excited to discover what defines your ‘me’ continually, everyday, in an ongoing effort to build a relationship.

As always, Happy Falling!

The Real Terrorists: How First World Nations are Destroying Our Collective Humanity

Editor’s note: The post that follows was written prior to the shooting in San Bernardino, California at a center for the developmentally disabled, and prior to the shooting in Colorado at a Planned Parenthood facility, and just after the attacks in Paris and Beruit. The sad fact is that the notions put forth in the below are not only relevant around these sad and tragic events, because for starters, these events are happening on such a regular basis now, that we are seeing #prayfor[____] posts up just about every other week, if not every week.

It is a sad state our world finds itself in, and what is written below presents some very frank, #rawtruth that some might find offensive, or overtly controversial or even harsh. This post is not here to make friends. It is here to slap you in the face with a reality check, and maybe more importantly, a gut check.

Most of you reading this will be doing so from warm homes; from places where you participated in events like Black Friday or where you will enjoy meals surrounded by those you love and have leftovers. Leftovers. Food that no one in your huge group of people sitting around a table could possibly finish because you all are so stuffed with food that your bellies are literally bloated.

There’s your first taste. This is not going to be a nice post. It is going to force you to take a hard look at things we all take for granted everyday and really question, in no simple terms – what the fuck?

Read on if you dare…

Travel Confessions: Sex vs. the Art of Making Love

This post coming to you from: the only city to every fully capture my heart and soul, my #home – NEW YORK

“What’s been your favorite part?” they ask. It’s as though their inquisitive minds seek some sort of release, satisfying a curiosity and in most cases, an underlining thirst to understand the conscious mind of a traveler.

I talk about the beauty of the shores of Australia, the culture and art in Melbourne, and the pristine beaches with the crystal blue Thai waters lapping at their shores. I describe my exploits, stories with new friends, and amazing meals which added as much to my soul as it did my hips. I share music and wistful memories gone of nights staring at a falling sun, followed by an outstretched blanket of twinkling lights illuminating a sky untouched by a city’s glow.

But here’s the #rawtruth, what I am describing to you is the equivalent to describing a one night stand. You’ll get the logistics, you might get a tasty tidbit about the location, I may even show you a few photos of what I ate (mind out of the gutter!). My favorite parts, however, never actually break silence, because those are the intimate moments that I will only ever share with my lover, my soul mate – the world. My favorite parts are things that can’t be described with just words or even in a picture. They are so deep rooted in me that only my private recollection can offer the rediscovery of the moments that truly expanded who I am. My favorite parts are and will only ever be for me to remember.

As travel writers, we seek to inspire others with our movements, with our destinations, with our descriptions. We seek to draw people out and give them their own desire and then hopefully courage to take that step and visit a new destination, to experience it first hand.

David Brooks writes in his book The Social Animal,

“For ninety thousand generations our race has been exploring landscapes, sensing dangers and opportunities. When you explore a new landscape or visit a new country, your attention is open to everything, like a baby’s. One thing catches your eye. Then another. This receptiveness can happen only when you are physically there.”

I can tell you about discovering my own weightlessness through diving, and the freeing feeling of floating amongst an array of creatures, simply existing together. Or I can tell you about the smoky release that escaped from a tiny metal capsule, infusing my nostrils with a hickory breath and then my taste buds with a creamy and yet tangy mackerel morsel. I can even tell you about falling in love on a tram car, something so simple as a kiss transporting me to a place that felt as weightless as those moments in the sea.

I can recommend things to do, places to go see, people to meet, but your experience will never be what I had. And that is the true beauty of travel, the allure of making love to the world. It is different for each one of us.

We read blogs and articles, and hear stories from fellow travelers and friends back from distant lands. We live vicariously through these recounted memories, and in our most ambitious of moments, plan trips to go make our own memories.

It isn’t, however, until you actually find yourself immersed in that new land, in that new experience, surrounded by new people and a new way of life, that you will finally be able to realize the full power and enlightenment behind the words that were shared with you. And even then, your experience will still be your own, yours to discover, yours to share (or not) as you please.

What I would implore you to do is to seek those first hand experiences, rather than the vicarious moments from another’s lips. Seek that knowledge, beauty and escape for yourself. Let it be a week. Let it take a month. Give your life to travel. However you choose to do it, give yourself that opportunity, give yourself that right, to really feel those places as you can only do when fully immersed physically in them.

“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of Life.”

This is making love. I can tell you all about how it feels. You can watch it in movies, or see images on a computer screen. You can hear others’ stories and experiences with it; read articles from those who have experienced it before you. But until that moment when you experience it for yourself – the rush, the intensity, the deep physically and emotional connection with another soul – you will never know for yourself what that place is really all about.

This is how travel helps you to evolve. And just as there are multiple people in this world with whom you might experience making love, there are multiple places through which you can experience the intense feeling of discovery. Each place holds something new to explore, and each time you allow yourself to be expanded in such a way, it changes the way your mind, body and soul view the world, it’s people, and the natural beauty that exists throughout it.

The more you are able to explore and experience new landscapes for yourself, the more educated your mind becomes. Stereotypes fall away. Understanding and acceptance are granted more easily. Love is given more freely.

And isn’t that after all what we all seek the most? Love. Beautiful, unbiased, soul-inspiring love. To be known through a touch. To be seen through a gaze. To be found through a serendipitous moment.

I have fallen in love with this world because travel truly was my first love. I love its natural beauty. I love that parts of it that are scarred, messy and seemingly dangerous. I love how it protects and heals me. I love how the more of it that I explore, the more in love I fall.

Giving yourself the explicit permission to fall in love with the world, gives you the opportunity to make love to it, to know it intimately. As with any relationship, intimacy is key to making it last. And with this love, it is the least selfish love you will ever find: when you give into it, it gives back tenfold. All you have to do is open yourself up to the exploration, and then prioritize it, and I promise, the world will reciprocate your love in more ways than you can imagine.

So the next time you’re inclined to ask, “What was your favorite part?” understand that the answer will be a limited reply. It will only be a mere glimpse of the surface of what actually exists in the place being described to you. CTF will continue to do its best to inspire, to motivate you to seek your own blossoming love with the world, as will the tens of thousands of other travelers roaming the planet. Just bare in mind that we are ladies and gentlemen of the travel world, each of us a soul mate to this exquisitely beautiful Earth. And a proper lady never kisses and tells.

As always, Happy Falling!

Musical Inspiration: The ever-sensual “Light” from an all-time favorite, Odesza

Global Citizens and the New Face of Patriotism

(Musical Inspiration now appears at the bottom of the post…check it out!)

This post coming to you from: London, UK

Patriotism is an interesting thing. As I’ve traveled the world – having now lived in five different countries, four U.S. states in each of the regions of the country (North, South, East and West), and under three different work visas – hands down the most common question I get asked is, “Where are you from?”

Being an American by birth, I sometimes hesitate when I answer this question. Americans tend to be the butt of a fair number of jokes and insults in the international population.

“Oh Americans actually travel?!”

“But you don’t seem loud enough to be American.”

“Say something like a New Yorker.”

Having a US passport can sometimes come with some real barriers. And before you go all #firstworldproblems on me, hear me out. Whether or not I agree with it, saying I am an American usually invokes a few key topics to be breached, mostly of the political nature. For the most part – and despite the American perception of “We are the best country in the world! #MURICA – the international community could not GAF about America. No, really. Sorry (not sorry) but there is bigger shit going on in the world for the international community to worry about the latest piss up of a political or celebrity scandal being deemed “news” in America.

Exceptions being, a) when their country has the American powers-that-be playing a political chess game with their livelihoods, and b) when they are presented with a traveling/expat American in front of them. And then most feel it their duty to express their opinions of the current state of the union, or request that I express mine – almost as if to test whether or not I am socially conscious enough to fit into a larger international culture alongside them.

Leaving all that to one side, though, my gut instinct has still been to reply with, “I’m a New Yorker.” It’s the closest I’ve gotten in my life to considering a single destination to be Home. It’s where I have family and a good chunk of my best friends. It’s where I feel revived and re-energized every time I go back. But maybe most of all, it’s where I feel, in all the world, most comfortable…which can be both a good and bad thing. But that’s a story for another day.

The more I travel, however, the more I have begun to realize that the answer to that infamous question – “Where are you from?” – can no longer truly be just a single place. It’s not that I’m not patriotic to my birthplace. I am, and more so, I am grateful for the amazing rewards that I was born into: democracy, the option to be granted entry to 140+ countries (now including Cuba! #bucketlist), the right to not be mutilated due to being a woman, and even the opportunity to continue to pay taxes when I haven’t held a residence in the country for over three years. You know, all those joys of being a first-world, western expat. God love us.

The truth is, the more I travel, the less patriotic I become to a single country, and the more patriotic I become to the world – the more I begin to associate as more than just a citizen of the country on the cover of my passport, but rather a citizen of the world.

“Home” has become a collective of the places which have touched me, enriching who I am, what I know and how I see the world and the people in it. It is the places which have provided me refuge, and given me an opportunity to reconnect with or expand my connection to all of those and that which I hold closest to my heart.

And why should it be a single place? We – as in all humans, all citizens of the world – have had it engrained in us for so long that patriotism is something to be proud of, to be worn as a badge of honor. “I’m an American!” “I’m British!” “I’m French!” The association with a particular culture or region rings out from our lips as though that somehow makes us inherently more of something. More powerful. More elite. More refined with our knowledge of art, culture, wine, whatever.

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t matter where you’re from, you’re not actually more or better than any other single person on this planet. Because guess what? That word – “better” – it’s relative. That definition of “more,” it’s relative too. And those words are certainly not donned a universal definition simply by the cover of a passport or the stamp on a birth certificate.

So what is this patriotism really getting us? Well, it does grant some of us certain levels of privilege that others are not granted. It certainly seems to provide some with a justification to run their mouths off or proclaim “facts” in light of their self-identified superiority. And it more often than not allows for, even if only in jest, a platform on which we establish a slew of stereotypes.

The danger with patriotism (yes, danger) is that it is also often the culprit behind broad scale justifications to put those of other patriotic backgrounds at a deemed lower valuation than oneself.

Amani, aged 12, is learning English, French and Arabic, and is also recieving psychosocial support to help her forget the conflict in Syria. Her family were displaced inside Syria for 2 years before moving to Lebanon six months ago.
“I feel so happy that I’m now learning again”, she says.

Take the Syrian crisis as a primary current world example. What makes you presumably “better” than those fleeing for their lives from a region rot with violence, death and destruction? What gives your country and its leaders the presumed authority to deny other people the ability to live? Literally. To LIVE. Is it because they have no “home,” because they are labeled Refugees and are therefore worth no more respect than you give to the homeless man begging for your change on the street? (Which is a whole other topic, equally if not more despicable given the condemnation of someone who shares your own patriotic chord. But for another post…)

What do you know about these Syrians? About their education or their skill sets? What do you know about their ambitions or their work ethic? What do you know about their families, their traditions, the values they teach their children?

We shy away from those of other patriotic alliances even when they themselves are no longer wishing to claim alliance to their patriotic birthright. And what does that get us? Does it in any way harm our own claims of patriotism if we let others in to stand beside us and shout a similar alliance? It’s as if each nation is saying that more voices shouting in unison their national anthem would actual weaken its resolve and stature. As if empathy and open borders equates to the downfall of a collective union of people. Two heads are better than one, except when it comes to adding patriots. In which case, half a brain seems to be the ultimate sign of power and strength.

The destruction of your world does not come from allowing more people to wave your flag, sing your anthem, or partake in your economy. It comes from denying those who have tried to call your Home, their Home. It comes from being short sighted to the fact that a patriot will defend his or her nation, but that does not mean that they only go to the defense of one nation.

I am patriotic to my birthplace, America. But I am also patriotic to Germany, the UK, Thailand and Australia. I stand in defense of any of those five countries proudly because I have found a Home in each of those places at one point in my life, and might presumably find a Home in them again in the future. That is part of what has made them special enough to be called Home – that feeling of comfort and pride in residing within their borders.

As globalization continues to change the landscape of our world, it is broadening the accessibility to and transfer of information at an exponentially rate; effectively fusing us into one super culture vs a mass of individual ones. With this, we must realize that the policies of the past, the ones which have seemingly protected a patriotism to a single nation, are no longer a protection at all. Instead their continued presence will be the hinderance to our collective future progress.

Therefore, what I will leave you to ponder as you sip on your tea imported from China, or coffee from Africa, while listening to music produced in Europe, and wearing clothing made in SE Asia is this:

We are all #GlobalCitizens. We always have been. Isn’t it about time that we all started acting in a way which represents the true power and possibility that comes with being patriotic to the world?

As always, Happy Falling!

Musical Inspiration: Comes from Global Citizen, which recently hosted a charity concert in NYC, during which Ed Sheeran performed his song “Photograph.” If you have a listen to the lyrics through a global lens, it takes on an interesting narrative around making memories through travel, finding love in various places, and speaking to those who wait for you at “Home.”