Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
—HOWARD THURMAN
Leanne
Dad had a saying: “Don’t major in the minors.” He was a big-picture thinker. He believed that we should look at the overall view of life, that the choices we make should work toward a greater goal. (Yes, this can even apply to decorating. When I’m telling someone to make a change in their house that they’re uncomfortable with, I’ll think to myself and then remind them: “Don’t major in the minors. Does your choice suit the greater good of your house? Look at the bigger picture.”)
Though he’d say it often when we were growing up, college was probably the first time Dad’s favorite motto really registered with me.
I went to Ohio University. It was a beautiful, tree-lined college with brick roads and brick buildings. I wanted to live the life of an artist. Early on I knew this. But I also wanted to be an artist who was business savvy. I was thrilled when I found out about the bachelor of specialized studies program. It allowed me to create my own degree program, one that was tailored to what I needed to learn to follow the path toward what I wanted to do. You literally make your own curriculum. I decided on the classes I wanted to take, then wrote up a syllabus and explanation for why. I named my major integrated retail communications.
I took all the advertising, public relations, graphic design, art, and retail classes I could find. I designed my own line of clothing, MessAndMod (“messed with and modified clothing”), and I treated it as if it were a business. I created a catalog and a fashion show concept. I even made a website for it with the help of a friend. And let me tell you this: making a website was very ahead of its time, considering we were still listening to all our music on Napster.
I was into it! And I was motivated! I was in charge of creating my own path. This program was a huge platform and jumping-off point for me.
A lot of people go to college and take the kinds of classes that make their parents happy. They take the classes they think they’re supposed to take. Or they think, Is this what’s going to make me the most money? And maybe that works for them; maybe that’s what they want. But a better question would be: Is it going to make you happy? Otherwise it will be a short-lived career, I’ll tell ya that.
I remember my girlfriends in college being so stressed out when they were trying to figure out their majors. I remember thinking, You’re eighteen years old! Pick something you love deeply. (It’s probably going to change anyway.)
I didn’t have a clear path either, by the way. I was excited to learn. I was excited to create. Your brain doesn’t necessarily have to color within the lines that life has told you to stay in. It doesn’t have to be this clean little zone. Your passion can look different than you expected, different than what you started with.
So many people have asked me how I got into interior design and what I went to school for. I went into college thinking I was studying public relations! (And then had many other zigs and zags, which—don’t you worry—you will hear all about.) I’m very quick to tell people I did not go to school for design. Would some of those skills have helped me if I had? Absolutely. But they’re not always necessary.
What you do need is grit and experience.
Experience is crucial, so I added the requirement of an internship to my school curriculum. I knew I needed field work—hands-on experience. And I knew I wanted to be in New York. I knew I wanted to be in fashion, even if it seemed incredibly unrealistic. I started applying for internships.
A lot of creative jobs pay very little, by the way. On the outside, creative jobs often look like glamour jobs because of the clothes, because of the location, because of the type of people surrounding them. But it seems that the reality is that the more creative the job is, the less glamorous it actually is.
I called my parents, as one does when one needs some sound advice.
“Dad, I’m going to get into pharmaceutical sales. They make $100,000 out of the gate,” I said. “I’ll just buy cool clothes instead of make them.”
But my father didn’t flinch.
“Don’t major in the minors,” Dad said. “Think big picture. That is not what you went to school to do. This is a temporary problem, Leanne. In twenty years, do you want to be the head of a pharmaceutical sales company?”
In other words, make sure that when you get to the top of the corporate ladder, you don’t look down, and look over, and say, “Oh shoot. Wrong ladder.”
Steve
When I was in my twenties, I wanted to snowboard all the time. So I came up with a plan that I thought was a great idea: become a ski patroller.
I started at my local resort, Seven Springs Mountain Resort. I got a winter job there as a ski patroller while I was still in school. I thought it was perfect: I could ski patrol (which by the way, is a very hard job) and also snowboard. It would keep me on the mountain, which is what I wanted, because I loved being outside.
But being a ski patroller isn’t necessarily the kind of job you want to have in your forties because—I’m not going to lie—it’s difficult to make money in that profession. It would be difficult to contribute to a family. Getting a management job at a ski resort seemed like the perfect job for me. But from what I saw, only a handful of people are able to do that. Plus, I was getting pressure from my family at the time not to be a ski bum. “Go get a job,” they told me. The big picture was getting harder and harder to envision.
Dad, like any good parent, wanted me to focus on a stable career, the kind of career that would help me afford to pay for the extreme sports that I loved, because that gear isn’t cheap.
I was trying to make snowboarding into more than just a sport that I loved. I was trying to build my life around it, which wasn’t easy. Though there was a time that I loved being a ski patroller, I slowly started getting burned-out. Being a ski patroller took the fun out of snowboarding for me. It took away the novelty of it because I was on the mountain every day, working very hard. In fact, I stopped snowboarding for a long time because of that experience.
Now I’ve turned something else that I love to do—carpentry—into a career. It took me a little while, but I kept striving toward the big picture. I don’t like sitting at a desk. I love construction work, as long as it’s creative. Of course, if you do anything long enough, it becomes a job.
Leanne
It’s worth noting here that Steve graduated with a degree in recreation. Yep. It’s just too perfect. Steve went to school to become a professional vacationer.
Steve
Leanne loves that joke. That’s exactly the reason I went for my degree in parks and recreation, because I knew I wanted to be outside! I knew that would make me happy, breathing in the fresh air. I even took it a step further; I bet you don’t know this, Leanne, but when I applied to colleges, I purposely applied to West Virginia University for two reasons. The first was the parks and recreation major. But the other reason was because WVU also happened to be fifty-three minutes from Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, which was one of the best places to white-water kayak in the area. It wasn’t that I wanted to skip out on school and be a full-time kayaker. (Okay, of course I did!) I graduated college, but having that outlet made school less painful to me.
I scheduled my classes two days a week so that I could kayak. I also worked at Immersion Research, a white-water rafting clothing company, three days a week. I got myself a job making clothes. My first job there was to hand stamp grommets on their shorts.
A huge part of focusing on the big picture is finding out what you truly love to do and then doing it. The world doesn’t need people walking through life like zombies, making choices about their lives just because it seems like what they should do. Life is short, so make it worthwhile and do what makes you feel the happiest and most fulfilled.
So while most college students arrange their lives around their class schedules and football games, I arranged my life around getting to the river.
Kayaking helped me build confidence. It was an adrenaline rush, and it introduced me to a new group of friends, many of whom are still friends to this day.
My parents had always encouraged me to play traditional sports, like baseball or basketball. But traditional sports weren’t my thing; I was more into rock climbing, skiing, and mountain biking. My dad had played basketball and baseball as a kid, so he was a bit crushed that I wasn’t interested in following in his footsteps. But I always appreciated that he wanted to help me find my own thing that inspired me.
And I did start to figure out what inspired me by the time I got to high school, though it wasn’t exactly something that my parents were all too happy about. My parents knew the risks involved in extreme sports.
I would hang out in this store called Mountain Dreams that sold knives and gear and backpacks. The kind of place you could really get lost in if you loved camping and outdoor gear like I did. Occasionally, I’d drag my parents in there, and we found out they had rock-climbing classes. I had already started talking to my parents about rock climbing because of how much time I spent at Mountain Dreams.
“If you’re going to rock climb,” Dad said, “let’s put you in a rock-climbing class so you can learn how to do it safely.” I’m sure they thought, Couldn’t he have been easier and just picked up a baseball bat? But they were always so supportive, so they sent me to rock-climbing school. Their thinking was this: We’re going to help you figure this out because we don’t want you to die.
Once I learned the basics of rock climbing, I got hooked. Some buddies and I started rappelling and free climbing on anything we could find over a few stories tall, including churches, towers, and bridges—basically, anything that had a roof. I also went to plenty of parks, like Cooper’s Rock State Forest and Seneca Rocks State Park in West Virginia—both fantastic places to climb. At Mount Davis, which is the highest point in Pennsylvania, we used to climb on the fire tower, where you could see five states from the top. My friends and I would climb up this one-hundred-foot-tall fire tower and rappel down.
In my town, we were a little more limited. When you’re in the city or the suburbs, and you don’t feel like driving over an hour just to climb, you climb whatever is nearby. On a school night, I couldn’t exactly head over to Seneca Rocks, so we’d find structures to climb. (All of this is very illegal, by the way. Kids, you should not try this at home!) As crazy as this sounds, I was very safe about it. The only time I felt scared was when we were climbing up the side of one of those old churches with big stones. We were doing what’s called “bouldering,” where you climb horizontally along a rock without any ropes. You scale it low because you’re going in a horizontal direction. If you climb above a certain height, you could really get hurt.
I accidentally climbed vertically—I guess I didn’t realize how far up I was because it was at night. Suddenly, I was too far up the side of the church to jump down. I had to make a decision to go up or down, and I was close enough to the roof that I decided to climb up. I ended up getting stuck on the roof of this church, which was not the plan. (Mom, I’m sorry!) Luckily, my climbing gear was in the car, so my buddy threw me a rope, and I rappelled about forty feet back down.
Rock climbing was just my first taste of extreme sports. Soon, I propelled myself into the next sport that would change my life: white-water kayaking.
I first saw people white-water kayaking when I was on a white-water rafting trip around the age of thirteen. The kayakers traveled down the river, cruising over waterfalls and bobbing in and out on the rapids. I thought, Well, that looks more fun than what I’m doing here, which is just sitting in a raft.
By the time I was seventeen, my friend and I made a pact that we were going to learn to kayak together. We decided to save money to make our dream a reality. I wrote down my goal of how much I was going to save, and I put a date on that goal. I knew that if I was going to accomplish something, I needed it in black and white. I was going to buy a kayak. I needed to save $500 so I could make that happen.
And that’s exactly what I did. I saved $500 working as a camp counselor. I was so thrilled. A couple of weeks later at the end of summer, I was ready to buy a kayak. I was pumped up.
“Let’s go buy these kayaks and get this going,” I said to my friend.
He gave me a confused look. “I don’t have any money,” he said.
“We made this goal to buy kayaks,” I said. “What did you do with all of your money?”
“Uh, what money?”
Needless to say, my friend didn’t save his money.
But I did. Nothing was stopping me from getting that kayak.
I drove down to Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, which is a great rafting town on the Youghiogheny River, with a number of rushing waterfalls, and went to the kayaking store.
“I’d like to buy a kayak,” I said. “I know nothing about kayaking. What do I need?” I had $500 in my pocket, and I bought all the gear I’d need: kayak, life jacket, helmet, paddle.
I drove down to a launching spot next to the river, got in my kayak—and I just sat there. I didn’t know a thing about kayaking! These were intense white-water rapids at Ohiopyle. One of the falls is an eighteen-foot drop that was off-limits most of the year. The waterfalls at Ohiopyle are no joke. I could have drowned.
A few guys came up to the launch area, and I happened to know one of them. So I figured I’d just put it out there and ask for some help.
“Can I go down the river with you?” I said.
“Sure, come on,” he answered.
Next thing I knew, I was going down the river with this group of guys. It was awesome and just felt very natural. Frightening too! I was out of my element for the first time, and of course, I had fears of getting hurt or drowning. But I went for it. I threw myself into that river and paddled my heart out.
Somehow I ended up having this ability that I didn’t even know I had. All the guys I was with ended up “swimming,” or falling out of their kayaks. See, the white-water kayaks have what’s called a skirt that goes around your waist and seals the lower half of your body if you flip over. You can release the skirt and let yourself out to swim if you roll over and can’t get back up. It’s fun to swim if it’s summertime and the water is seventy degrees, but you’re likely to hit the rocks or suck in water. It’s all great fun until you smash your head into a rock or get scraped on the bottom of the river. I didn’t need to do that, though—I didn’t fall out of my kayak once.
We had an incredible day on the river. Later, we drank beer and hung out by the fire all night. I thought, I want to do this every day.
In many ways, white-water kayaking sparked something in me. It was the ability to set a goal and achieve it. This sport, which was something I had never done before, was a challenge. I wanted to figure it out, and I did. It was the first time I really took initiative in something that I loved, and it was a good feeling. Yes, I took countless spills and took my beatings on the rocks, but I figured it out (and never lost my teeth!).
White-water kayaking is an extreme sport that gets you into nature and challenges you—physically and mentally. I did it, and I was a better person because of that. Sometimes you need to have some grit to achieve a goal. I knew that if I could take on this challenge, I could do anything I set my mind to.
Leanne
Steve tried to teach me to kayak. And it was all great until the first time I flipped over. I’d call it more terrifying than fun.
Steve
It can be terrifying! Don’t get me wrong. There were some hairy experiences too.
That winter, I went with friends who were really experienced kayakers. Up until that point, I had been doing well, and I was probably overconfident. There was snow on the ground and ice in the water, and I didn’t have the appropriate gear yet. Everyone else was wearing long underwear and waterproof dry suits; I was wearing a rain suit. I didn’t have the money to buy a real dry suit. And everyone was a little concerned.
“I’m not going to come out of my kayak,” I insisted. “I’m not going to swim. I’m going to be fine.” Again, I was a little overconfident . . . Okay, very overconfident.
The snow melt really affects the water level and what the river looks like; it can be completely different from one day to the next. I made it through every rapid, but just as I was going down the river in a choppy area, I flipped over. This is normal in kayaking, but this time I couldn’t get back up. I’d roll over, come up for air, and then roll over again. I kept missing my opportunity to get back upright. Three times in a row: I missed it. I missed it. I missed it.
I couldn’t zip myself out of the skirt because if I was in that freezing water, I would be in a lot of trouble. Hypothermia could set in in fewer than fifteen minutes.
I saw that there was a guy close to me, so I did what’s called a bow rescue, hoping to get his attention. I smacked my hands on the bottom of the kayak until he saw me, and then I was able to grab onto his kayak to lift myself up.
That experience taught me a lot—especially to have the right gear.
I had other treacherous moments kayaking, but I wouldn’t give up any of it. That’s how much I love the sport.
With kayaking, I went down to that river and said to myself, I’m going to learn how to kayak today. I took control of what I wanted out of life. Things worked out for me, I believe, because I was following an interest that propelled me. I arranged my life around what I loved. I had the confidence to go for it.
You can apply this to anything, really. It’s about being an active participant in your own life.
Even though I don’t make a living in extreme sports, both snowboarding and kayaking have become hobbies that I really enjoy again. They are a big part of what makes my life richer—what makes my life more than about working and doing what it takes to earn a living.
It was important to me to focus on those sports instead of taking a straight career path. I was much more focused on the “recreation” aspect of my life—not too far from my college degree! Which worked for me.
Not everyone knows exactly what they want in college or right out of college. I knew I liked to be outside. I knew I liked to be active. Not everyone is able to find themselves so quickly, like Leanne was able to. And I commend her for it! She has amazing drive and has always known what she wanted out of life. I did too—but it looked a little different. To be honest, I wanted to extend my childhood as long as I could. (Have you ever heard of Peter Pan syndrome?) So, while I didn’t totally follow Dad’s advice, it was something that was always in the back of my mind. I got there eventually; it just took a bit longer for me than most people.
WORKING ON PROGRESS
What’s the big-picture plan for your life?
What small details are stopping you from thinking about the big picture?
What small steps can you take to get going in the right direction?
What path are you on? Is it the right path, or do you need to take a few steps backward to get cruising on?