Doing your adventures with impact
Three principles for impact adventurers to enrich your experiences with purpose — and a vision about playgrounds for creative destruction.
For our current generation, it gets increasingly important to explore and learn about the world through adventures: hiking through the jungles of Costa Rica, connecting to tribes in rural areas in New Zealand, and wandering off the beaten tracks in Mexico. At the same time, we want to influence the world as we interact with it: volunteering in non-profit organizations, bringing our own ideas to other parts of the world and contributing to social issues like inequality, climate change and social welfare.
As an impact adventurer, you learn about the world by exploring it, while finding meaning in what you do and positively impact the people around you.
I made this experience while I travelled the world during my studies. But after the first excitement in the new country has ebbed away, I got bored and dissatisfied by just travelling without interacting with my new environment on a deeper level. I had the urge to immerse more deeply and convert my experiences into something tangible and useful. To apply what I learned and contextualize in a practical manner.
Luckily my curiosity and openness brought me to places few travellers have been to, meeting people I wouldn’t have met just following instructions in the Lonely Planet. And more, I considered it a challenge to combine the cultural immersion with my professional ambitions. So I ended up coding on a house bus in New Zealand, building a nature co-working space in an old mansion in Brandenburg, and visiting tribes and festivals of people working on social enterprises all over Europe.
By deriving three simple principles from my experiences and guided by a fundamental question, I hope to help other people to make similar experiences.
How can I enrich a particular experience (like travelling, doing research, going on exchange) with purpose and impact?
Impact Adventure Principles
- Discover your childish attributes: curiosity brings you to unexpected places and let’s you meet unconventional people. Question the obvious. Playing makes learning new things, uncovering the secrets of humanity and solving (life) challenge much easier and makes you more persistent. Don’t take things too serious and let 1+1 be 3.
- Destruct the status quo: disassemble known objects, concepts and ideas into their fundamental parts; learn how things function at a basic level and how they work in isolation. It makes you see known things in a new way and realize innovative connections.
- Construct something new: re-combine this knowledge and build something new. Looking at things a new way makes you want different things, create different experiences and come up with new ideas.
Who knows, maybe you deconstruct a toaster and router to create a new product which helps someone else achieve one of their own goals?
Creating playgrounds for Creative Destruction
Implementing these simple principles into your daily routines, projects, work or next travel adventures can already help you to change the way you experience things. This last section gives you a rough picture of what you could do with these principles in mind. And then one thing usually leads to the next.
Spaces: Create physical spaces a bit out of the ordinary. Imagine a makerspace in the forest, converted containers (or buses?) for your next workshop, outdoor spaces for your next retreat or sabbatical and greenhouses as places to drink coffee while working on your next big project. We can see cool hybrids of places which bring green back into the cities or you escape the city by going just a little out of town — away from the stress, hectic and noise.
Facilitation: transform traditional tools from business and design into new experimental approaches to achieve different outcomes. Can you make the business model canvas child-friendly? Can you think design without a whiteboard? Can adults and children work hand-in-hand on a project (business or social alike) and complement their ways of thinking? Can you leave a trace when travelling which is not litter?
Experiments: Start experimenting to learn. Destruct toasters and routers (remember the toolbox in your Dad’s workshop?), analyse their parts (how do electronic circuits work? what is a chatbot? what does all that have to do with incentives and mental models?), create something (maybe you can ask your wireless, self-driving toaster to bring you breakfast to bed?), make stuff (build your self-driving toaster with neat Lego add-ons and a Raspberry Pi brain) and share it on Medium.
Impact Adventures are for Everyone!
You might be a student working on a uni project or doing your sabbatical. You might be a school class who is doing their first own project or a teacher who feels like the kids should escape the classroom for a while. You might be a company team who wants to create something fancy for your client. You might be an employer who wants to offer for-the-job training and a new sweet benefit for their employees. Or you might be an artist or entrepreneur who needs space to develop and experiment.
What will your thing be as an impact adventurer? Or maybe you are an artistic entrepreneur?
