Adventurers, Explorers, and Entrepreneurs

A few weeks ago, I was interviewing K.R. Sridhar, the founder and CEO of Bloom Energy—a company that has developed a solid-oxide fuel cell that it believes can bring reliable, affordable electricity to people around the world, without the need for a power infrastructure. It’s a big dream, but Sridhar is used to dreaming big. The technology for his fuel cells stems, after all, from work he did with NASA developing oxygen generators for a planned mission to Mars.
K.R. made a comment, in the interview, explaining why he’d thought the oxygen generating technology was so exciting and important. “We haven’t really been explorers in space,” he said. “We’ve been backpackers.” When I asked him to explain, he said that in all of our space exploration, we’d brought all the supplies we needed with us. That’s what backpackers do. Explorers, on the other hand, are gone for such a long time, with such an uncertain sense of when they’ll reach civilization again, that they have to live off the land as they go. In order to transition from backpackers to explorers, we had to find a way to live off the “land” in space … hence the importance of oxygen and water-generating technology.  
It’s an interesting thought and distinction. I’ve had many physical adventures, but in retrospect, most of them fit into the backpacking category. Not literally. But whether it was kayaking the Na Pali coast of Kauai, hiking in the Himalayan mountains, or flying relief supplies for a month in Africa, I always brought my own supplies with me. If not physically, then through the magic of a credit card. And while there was certainly risk and challenge and uncertainty involved, I also knew when I was returning home again.
But that’s not to say I don’t know anything about the life of an explorer. Because more than once, I’ve also had to learn to live off the land. When I was 19 years old, I left college and went to live in New Zealand for six months. I arrived in the country with no job, no contacts, and only $500 in my pocket. True, I did some backpacking while I was there. But the big challenge of that time in my life was figuring out how to survive while I explored what I wanted to be when I grew up. I sold advertising, worked as a temporary legal secretary, lived on a farm, and labored in a corrugated cardboard factory. Whatever it took to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach.
It was good training for being a self-employed writer and entrepreneur. Because being a creative artist or an entrepreneur, unless you’re fully funded or are financially independent, is far closer to the challenge of the explorer than the adventurer. While part of you is pursuing this wonderful dream or unmapped territory, another part has to be concerned with how to survive long enough to reach the promised land … with no guarantee of when that might be. 
Self-made entrepreneurs and creative dreamers have to learn to live off the land as they go. Which is why, for example, No Map. No Guide. No Limits. contributor Emily Branham has to balance work on her beloved documentary with paid commercial video gigs.
In hard times, of course, everyone becomes an explorer, because everyone’s backpack is empty. My brother David and I were talking tonight, in fact, about our grandfather Dwight Wallace, who was an architect in Chicago in the 1920s. He was successful enough that when he married my grandmother, they purchased all they needed to furnish and decorate a 7-room apartment in a single afternoon. Then the 1929 crash happened, and nobody had money to pay an architect. My grandfather had to shut his business, which couldn’t have been an easy thing to do. But he had a family of four to feed. So he buckled down and got creative about how he might live off this new and uncharted land in which he found himself.
One of my grandfather’s clients was a university in Chicago that agreed to give him free housing in lieu of the money they owed him, which they couldn’t pay. He then thought long and hard about what business might be able to be successful in a nationwide depression and decided that he’d go into business selling linoleum. People always needed flooring, he reasoned, and linoleum was the cheapest and most durable kind of flooring there was. He focused his sales efforts on the Catholic churches in town, because the Catholic Church still had more money than most people. And he thrived.
My grandfather didn’t stay in that business all that long. He went on to work for the Chicago World’s Fair, RCA in New York, and Curtiss Wright Aeronautical, managing plant operations. But he kept a roof over his family’s heads, and he found new and intriguing worlds and experiences wherever he went.
Perhaps that’s where I get my perseverance.
But whether the venture is chosen out of passion, or forced by external circumstance, the difference between an backpacking adventure and a true explorer’s journey is an important one, I think. Both entail risk and challenge, but exploring takes more patience, because an explorer can’t just focus solely on the dream or the goal. Other tasks and priorities have to balance in the equation, as well.
As a director friend of mine once said of the creative entrepreneur’s life, “Sometimes you get to make art. And sometimes, you have to make soup.”
On the other hand, because an explorer’s focus can’t be so all-consuming and narrow, they may see or learn things along the way that a backpacking adventurer might miss. Including the knowledge of how to successfully live off whatever land they’re in. And while gathering or growing food along the way may delay an explorer’s journey somewhat, the good news is, it also gives them the ability to explore far longer and further than someone whose freedom lasts only as long as their original food or money holds out.
 
Lane Wallace is the Editor and Founder of No Map. No Guide. No Limits.