It’s a shame how many people don’t like to hear about reality. Everything is romanticized nowadays from thought leaders on every side of media. Social media influencers, politicians, and celebrities are the guilty parties who love conjuring up emotions in pursuit of social media engagement. The disconnect between what we see on our screens and what we experience in our real lives, day-to-day, has never been wider. We consume a diet of daily distractions that consistently steal from our ever-decreasing attention spans. The majority of the content we view breeds divisiveness and feeds irrationality to the most irrational species of them all, us humans. Everything is either black or white according to our screens and nothing is grey area or nuanced, like it is in reality. The issue is nothing is engaging about being in the middle. Nothing is engaging about our day-to-day real lives. So its hard to fault media and social media influencers for focusing on entertainment when all of their metrics are based on getting viewers to "engage”.
Our reality a year ago was to continue making $2,000/month with $3,000 in savings while sailing south from the Tortugas on a boat that we just funneled close to $50,000 into fixing up. Our other option was to take another leap of faith after thriving during the first 1,000nm of our sailing experiment and design the boat of our dreams while focusing more on our pursuit of financial independence. If we continued south from the Tortugas our series would’ve sailed down the usual entertainment route. We would have had the need to be cranking out fluffy, weekly content in order to survive - living in a mindset of scarcity. By this point in time, you'd be seeing videos of us on the hook probably in the Caribbean where our content would be 95% entertainment and 5% useful, actionable content. Simply put, we’d be adding to the entertainment overload that got us pissed off enough to start sharing our lives on the internet from the get-go.
An email from Jim (pictured in middle) asking for an AC update is prompting me to write this. We miss ya Jim!
My mindset over my short 28 years has been shaped into that of an entrepreneur. So before I start anything, I write down a mission statement. No, I don’t treat AC as a business, clearly, but these are tenements ingrained in me that shape my decision-making for everything I do. A mission statement serves as a lightship for when you’re reacting to the daily chaos that is running a business. Abandon Comfort’s “mission statement”, if you will, is to provide an actionable guide to living a great adventure. So you tell us what’s more actionable? Us sailing our $75,000 sailboat romanticizing our lives to a camera daily for you to drone out to after finishing another workday or us building a rental portfolio that allows us to not have to produce entertainment-based content while traveling on a $25,000 sailboat producing content to help you to accomplish your adventure dreams. Don't get me wrong we started watching YouTube travel channels as an escape from our unfulfilling 9-5s and theres a ton of merit in producing entertainment based content like most do on YouTube, but thats just not us. Nor will it ever be.
Eventually we’ll be back on the ‘tube with a whole new layer of financial transparency and a boat that defies all conventional old-salt wisdom for a third of the price of our previous boat. So trust in us that we have your best interests at heart and are always thinking from the viewer’s perspective. That is assuming you’re watching because you’re like us - fed up with the norm and realize you aren’t made to pay bills for the entirety of your life while saving for a 10-20 year retirement that you might be lucky enough to survive long enough to enjoy.
For now, our social media cleanse will continue. As will us abandoning comfort and embracing freedom. We have a handful of blog posts to put up when we get breaks from renovating our rental property/slowly working on our Falmouth Cutter so be sure to subscribe below to receive our posts via email. We’ll see you in 2020 with a couple of income-producing rental properties and our tiny sailboat that can take us anywhere!