Back in March in the midst of a near-magic trip cruising around on scooters, watching sunsets, and exploring Mexico’s Pacific Coast, I sat up on the roof of this Mexican mansion one night to connect with my friend Peter for a podcast-style interview on his wellness cross-training platform Empowermend.

A short documentary of WONDER WANDER 2023 by Kevin Ufnal.

Once a year, I host ‘WONDER WANDER,’ an experiential potluck with creatives, adventurers, and all other sorts of fascinated-fascinating humans out in nature. We share, we laugh, we hike, we stargaze, we philosophize, we dive deep, and relish in this crazy experience of being with one another.

WONDER WANDER 2023 took place September 15th - 20th, 2023 in a hilltop hacienda among New Mexico's Rocky Mountains.

A highlight reel of WONDER WANDER 2022, by Paul Shelton.

From October 13th to 18th, I hosted WONDER WANDER 2022 — my blog's annual gathering and experiment in co-created community, this year among the high desert surrounding Arivaca, AZ.

Books did not just change my life, they saved it. Not in an “I would have died without them” way, but in a way even more important to a temporary, living, breathing being: I can honestly say I have lived because of books.

Below are the fifteen books that have most changed my life thus far. They are listed in the order of when I read them because, in my experience, reading is akin to waking up. These books were stepping stones on my way to doing so. Looking over the list, I realize every one of them was not just a profound read, but helped to solve a problem or question I was wrestling with at the time. In a way, they plot my growth and direction across time, which says much about their power, effect, and influence.

We are each viewing the world through a lens. This lens is difficult to notice, though, because it doesn’t exist.

Rather, this lens is a collective conception of influential intangibles: culture, beliefs, values, awareness, and all sorts of other ingredients we each picked up in our past. Together, these ingredients amount to a figurative lens — a lens that sits between the world external to ourselves and our internal experience of it — focusing our awareness on particular details.

Through books, writers with minds and prose superior to my own brought this lens through which we are each viewing the world to my attention. Had I not copied a few of their particularly profound passages into my Commonplace Book, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it:

I love podcasts—not quite as much as books—but they accompany daily tasks from driving, to cooking, to working out in the most engaging, fruitful of ways.

As but one human, I’ve only listened to a tiny fraction of all the podcasts ever recorded. However, I’ve scoured the web for quality conversation for half a decade now, and for perspective alone, consider each episode below well worth the time investment.

I could write about how valuable podcasts are for expanding awareness, allowing one to choose their influences, and how this list is just as much as a study of my own choices, but these things are easily inferred.

Let’s dive right in.

Today I’m releasing Man Bites Dog! a downloadable PDF guide to raising a ridiculous amount of money for charity through creative endeavor.

Over the summers of 2013 and 2014, I raised over $100,000 for charity with two attention-demanding, audacious undertakings. First, my brother and I pedaled bicycles 4,450 miles across the USA for the children's hospital that saved my life. The following summer, I backpacked 200+ miles through the Sierra Nevada mountains to “summit” both type-1-diabetes and the highest mountain in the contiguous United States with my younger sister.

Mostly thanks to an article on Bicycle Touring Pro, I've been privately advising others on the process since. Two years ago, I thought it worthwhile to write down my formula to distribute on a larger scale. After picking up and putting down the project a couple of times, reworking the structure, and putting more time into these fifty-six pages than I’d like to admit, and it’s finally finished!

Sometimes, people ask if that illness still affects me.

“Not that I notice," I usually reply, "except that I live more for now, as I don't know if I'll have later.”

Most people respond in defense of later.

“You can't just ignore the future! If you do, you might end up in a situation you don't like.”

Does it have to be one way or the other, though? Can we not divvy our focus between the two? Perhaps what I should say is, “Before the illness, I was focused primarily on the future, with an eye on the present. Today, I focus primarily on the present, with an eye on the future.”

Inspired by two books I read this spring, I started a philosophy discussion group in Silver Gate, Montana this summer.

My first encounter with the idea came from Shantaram, an incredible chronicle of an adventure in which the main character is swept up from the slums of Bombay into the city's all-powerful mafia. His first encounters with the mafia leaders occur at their monthly philosophy meetings. The second encounter came in Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, where I learned of Franklin's Junto, a weekly discussion group composed of a dozen rising tradesmen and artisans in Philadelphia.

In both books, these discussion groups seemed a vital ingredient for success, communication, and organization of both character's communities. I simply thought, "Why not try to start my own?"

I just returned from 4.5 months in New Zealand. I added up all my expenses to find that I only spent $21 per day backpacking around both islands!

Among travelers, New Zealand is known as an expensive country, but approach it right, and it can be surprisingly affordable. Over 136 days, I spent $2,875 including flights and a week-long stopover in the Cook Islands.

In this post I'm going to lay it all out for you—what I did, why it was so cheap, and some tips for getting the best out of your own venture into "the land of the long white cloud."

I don't know anyone who thinks there's too much time in a day. It's rare that we accomplish everything we hoped to. We begin the day with great intentions but, come the end of it, finish with tasks we intended to but didn't reach.

The problem is that the tasks we don't get to are often the most important ones. We don't hesitate to begin what's urgent or easy, which often leads to putting off the more difficult and important things later in our day.

As a writer, my hardest task to accomplish is, paradoxically, writing. For me, writing is difficult, deliberate work. When I think about beginning, everything else on my "to-do list" becomes very attractive. I spent months relying on sheer discipline to write for The Living Theory, until eventually discovering something much more effective: eliminating less important ways I spend my time.

This is not an article, it's an experiment. It takes about ten minutes. It will make you think about how narrow-minded we all normally are and will leave you with a profound, overwhelming sense of possibility.

Interested? Grab headphones, a pen, and a blank piece of paper. Not grabbing said ingredients? Don't bother reading on.

Earth Day was last week and got me thinking about this short documentary. It's about something called "the overview effect," which describes the cognitive shift that occurs in astronauts when looking back at Earth from space.

It's an absolutely profound 17 minutes that will change how you think of our planet.

We humans get wrapped up in economics and politics. We worship convenience. Changing how we treat "Spaceship Earth" might not be easy, be the most viable fiscal option, or play to the favor of our political hand, but what's infinitely more important is that we'll still be around to grapple with these issues in the future.

This post won't get much viewership for my site. It might even alienate part of my audience because of the politicization of taking care of our planet. But if a dozen people actually watch this documentary and experience "the overview effect," I know it will stick with them like it has with me. And that would be more than worthwhile.

Our most important tasks are often the hardest to accomplish.

They're often undertakings that require focus and active thought. Or maybe wield a paralyzingly large impact on our lives. They're easy to avoid starting in favor of easier, more mindless pursuit and even harder to actually successfully finish.

For me, my focus intensive, important work is writing. I'll have a great idea that I get excited about, but actually producing an article about it is difficult. I have to fully grasp how I want to present it, outline the article, and then write the rough draft which I often proceed to heavily edit and rearrange. It's a difficult process and easy to put off when less important tasks arise.

I've been writing consistently for a bit over four months now. I've come to realize it's important to cultivate the right mindset to do this difficult and focus intensive work. When I'm inspired to work and in a state of mental clarity, what I end up producing often comes out faster and better.

Welcome to your life
Time is spent inside
Life between four walls
From the unknown you hide.

No trials or trepidations
All is safe and swell
But life between the walls of your room
Builds you a regretful hell.

Last week, I read an eye opening book called Growth Hacker Marketing, which outlines the principles that successful startups (Dropbox, Uber, Facebook, Twitter etc.) used to effectively grow their businesses. It's a short read, but it's loaded with principles I'm looking to apply to an online business I'm co-founding. It was critical for me to extract the pertinent information from the book and apply it directly to our business, which I believe now has a much better chance of success.

I used a simple, effective system to mark and apply everything I felt was important to our business. You can use this system with any book you're trying to learn from, to apply it directly in your life. It rocks.

Humans are naturally lazy.

A long time ago, laziness was evolutionarily important. Our ancestors didn't have seemingly endless supplies of food at the supermarket. Cars did not exist, there was no electricity, and water didn't exactly come out of a faucet in their kitchen. Our ancestors had to walk everywhere they went. If they were cold, they had to gather wood for a fire or kill an animal to wear its fur. Food had to be hunted or gathered, and the closest source of water was much further than the kitchen sink.

The point is – resources weren't easy to come by. So when our ancestors weren't in need of anything of importance to their survival, they wouldn't want to expend much effort and energy, otherwise they would need more resources. Back then, laziness was an important survival mechanism.