Author: seanv
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What are you waiting for?: The Hidden Costs of Delaying Adventure
A couple of summers ago, I paid good money to sit in freezing cold water in the middle of Spain, breathe in ways that made me look mildly unhinged, and bond with a group of strangers over shared suffering. Standard Tuesday, really. The trip was a week-long Wim Hof expedition, ice baths, breathwork, the works,…
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Climb Higher: Using Maslow’s Hierarchy to Plan Smarter Adventures
We don’t travel just to move. We travel to feel something — freedom, connection, clarity, awe. But too often, the details we obsess over when planning a trip — which hotel, what flight, what to pack — feel disconnected from those deeper goals. We plan the logistics and hope the magic shows up on its…
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Adventure as Art: On Intent, Ritual, and an Unexpected Canvas
A Canvas and a Question I started painting as a COVID activity. I wouldn’t consider myself particularly good, but it is a fun activity that produces a final, tangible product. I don’t keep my paintings; I give them away. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I started painting little pictures and leaving them…
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The Adventurizer Matrix: A Framework for Finding Purpose in Every Journey
Not all adventures are created equal—and that’s the beauty of it. Some journeys push us to the brink of our physical capabilities. Others allow our minds to rest and wander. Some challenge the way we see the world, while others simply invite us to breathe and be. But with so many ways to travel, how…
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How do I use my PTO? Part 4 – Calendar of Adventures
In the first three parts of this PTO optimization journey, I dwell on the mathematics of some optimization problem that would tell us which trips to take and when. The burden of this approach is data. Not only do we need data regarding our pool of trips, we need data on how we would assign…
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How do I use my PTO? Part 3 – Bundling Trips
In Part 1, we laid out the most basic optimization problem formulation for choosing which trips to take given a large set of trips. An implicit assumption in this problem formulation is that the trips we choose amongst are standalone. We don’t really account for the interaction between two different trips. For example, let’s say…
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How do I use my PTO? Part 2 – Math to Code
In Part 1 of this series, we sketched out our decision problem of choosing which trips to take given the amount of PTO days we have as a (barebones) optimization problem. That’s great and all (I’ve always like just looking at mathematical notation), but we should be able to solve this problem to get an…
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How do I use my PTO? Part 1 – Problem Definition
For this series of articles, I want to do something related to a more practical problem we all have… deciding how to use our PTO days. If you’re like me, you have way too many trips on your list that your tiny amount of PTO days can’t possibly support in a year. The best we…
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Goals, goals, goals
We adventurize, and thus grow, by making the opportunity for risky endeavors. We invite risk by having goals. Without goals, risk is just meaningless uncertainty. Imagine playing the lottery if you had no goal of increasing wealth. With no preference of how much you win, losing the lottery and winning the lottery are equally…meh. However,…
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Hello, Future Adventurizer
The term adventurize was coined, as far as I know, by the controversial YouTuber Bald and Bankrupt (aka Mr. Bald). In his series of videos, Mr. Bald travels the world with purpose. Exploring Soviet mosaics across the former USSR. Traversing the Darian Gap to experience what migrants around the world go through to reach the…