In hindsight, being overwhelmed or in over our heads has never been a bad thing. The results we get from putting our heads down, embracing the suck and keeping the end goal in mind makes it all worth it. Short-term sacrifice for long-term gain is a trade off we will take everyday, especially in our 20s. Once again we find ourselves in this precarious - albeit, voluntarily precarious situation. How did we get here? Well, we first took on a boat that needed a lot of work with only half the year available to work on it (damn you winter). Then 6 months later we bought a 4 bedroom Airbnb investment property in my home city of brotherly love that required every ounce of cash we could muster up. We now have 2 massive projects on our hands, plus the most leverage we’ve ever had in our lives and are voluntarily overwhelmed.
Our end goal of being financially ‘free’ living aboard in the Caribbean and spending hurricane seasons in the mountains is as close as its ever been but for now it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This moment - a moment of building, a moment of being entrenched in the process is why we decided to share our adventure online. No one actually shows the building phase of their adventure, just the entertaining end result of sailing or traveling the world. This results in us as viewers keying up a number of biases in our own minds, like survivorship bias and inner dialogue that amounts to self-limiting beliefs about how we can’t do what these people are doing because of...you name it. We’ve personally fallen victim to these biases more times than we can count.
I don't think its by design or the fact that other travel and sailing YouTube channels do this on purpose. The truth is no one wants to film themselves going to their 9-5 for multiple years then spending weekends not drinking their money away or dumping 75% of their paycheck on housing. And unfortunately, the majority of viewers on YouTube don't want to watch that every week. Entertainment is what the masses want and clicks are what creators need so in turn you get content made solely for entertainment, 99% of the time. This is the most profitable route as a creator and the path of least resistance. We’d be lying if we didn’t say we felt this happening with our content once we started to cruise the Keys & Tortugas last Spring.
‘In the end this will be worth it.’ and ‘Who told you this would be easy?’ seems to be our go-to self-talk lately. Spending Monday-Friday ripping out crumbling lath & plaster walls almost 150 years old in our Philly townhouse and then spending weekends making slow progress on new Luci has been a struggle. But it’s a struggle of the best kind. A struggle in which we own, embrace and enjoy.
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Thoreau