This week's book: "The River of Doubt" by Candice Millard.
"Far better it is to dare mighty things than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much."
Theodore Roosevelt
At some point, every adventure stops being an idea and becomes real.
For Theodore Roosevelt, that moment came on February 27, 1914.
Months earlier he'd left New York for South America, planning to do lectures and some natural history collecting. Then, in Brazil, the plan got dramatically bigger. The legendary explorer Cândido Rondon laid out several possible expeditions for him. Roosevelt chose the hardest one: to map the River of Doubt, a river so unknown that not even Rondon knew where it went.
That's the part that keeps spinning around in my head. The unknown wasn't a problem for Roosevelt. It was the whole attraction. A man at the lowest point of his life, recently shot, defeated, and depressed, looked at the single most dangerous option on the table and said, that the one!
Even reaching the river took months, hauling men, supplies, and canoes, hundreds of miles into the interior. When they finally shoved off, they had seven dugout canoes. Roosevelt described them plainly in his diary: "one was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky."
Think about what they were doing. They didn't know where the river went. They didn't know how long it would take, or what rapids, disease, or people waited downstream. They only knew they were heading into an enormous jungle, hoping the stream of water would turn into a real river and eventually carry them out.
Roosevelt had spent his whole life seeking hard things. Now, at perhaps the lowest point in his whole life, he'd found the hardest one yet. And he pushed off from shore.
I've been thinking about that a lot, because in a much, much smaller way, All Star Mentors is my own River of Doubt.
If I’m being totally honest with you, I don't know for certain this is a legitimate idea worth pursuing. I don't know where it leads, how long it will take, or what waits downstream. Most days I'm making the map up as I go. But I've stopped just thinking about it. I pushed off from shore. The idea became real, and now I'm on the water, paddling.
That's the thing about any worthwhile venture, a business, a book, a hard conversation, a whole second act. It costs you nothing to plan it in your head. You can stand safely on the bank forever, imagining the trip. The price only comes due after you get in the boat.
Something to try today
Think of the one thing you've been standing on the shore about, the idea you’ve been planning but have yet to launch. Ask yourself honestly what "pushing off" would look like. Not the whole journey. Just the first real, irreversible step that turns it from an idea into something real. Then take it or at least name it out loud.
What's the river you've been standing beside, working up the nerve to push off? I’d love to hear if you feel like sharing.
I'll go first: mine is this newsletter, and it still scares me a little every week. But I'd rather be out on the water not knowing where it goes than safe on the bank, wondering.
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Talk tomorrow,
Mike
Practical wisdom for the life you're building