It is important to celebrate the things we do — the spectacular and the mundane. When things don’t feel that great, look back. Something to be proud of is there. It will inspire your next steps.
Here’s my list of neat things I’ve done, hopefully many more will appear on this page:
- Walked across England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea.
- Saw both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at dawn from Mt. Chiripó in Costa Rica.
- Lived with a wonderful family in Minas, Uruguay as a 16-year-old high school exchange student. This experience truly changed my life.
- Climbed to 20,000 ft in Arequipa, Peru.
- Went on safari in Kenya and saw lions, giraffes, elephants, monkeys, rhinos… oh my!
- Built Craftsman furniture by hand from original Gustav Stickley designs.
- Rode a camel through the Sahara desert.
- Crushed grapes from the backyard and bottled wine. Unfortunately I was in 6th grade and didn’t sterilize the bottles beforehand so couldn’t enjoy la cosecha.
- Jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet.
- Ran with the bulls in a pueblo near Ciudad Real in Spain.
- Studied Fourier transform spectroscopy on high-school scholarship at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a nuclear research facility, as sole representative from my home state of Iowa.
- Visited my family’s stavkirke in Norway where my great-grandmother was baptized.
- Acted in a movie.
- Survived a harrowing bus accident in the mountains of South America.
- Joined the Polar Bear Club.
- Chatted with Václav Havel, intellectual and first President of the Czech Republic, in a pub in Prague.
- Tutored recent arrivals in English as a Second Language (ESL) and worked in a bilingual 7th grade classroom with Haitian-speaking students.
- Read a novel from cover to cover in one sitting (Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany), an undertaking which lasted ALL DAY AND THROUGH THE NIGHT AND INTO MORNING COFFEE.
- Started my own business.
- Attended a political rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
- Swam naked in the Adriatic Sea.
- Rode my bicycle over 500 miles from Minneapolis to Chicago.
- Received a patent (US Patent 6,308,188 Issued on October 23, 2001).
