There exists a gap between the start of an endeavor and perceivable result. Between the beginning of a journey and the first signs of measurable progress. A kind of void. A void people don't often speak of while inside.

A month ago, I received a book in the mail called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Someone clearly purchased it on Amazon and had it sent to me. Who that was, I have no clue.

I was deeply intrigued by the mystery of not knowing who sent me the book, so it jumped to the top of my reading list and I read it a couple weeks ago. It was profound and full of parallels to my own life. I'll be adding it to the Bookshelf soon.

One part of the book particularly struck me. The author leaves the shore of a vast inlet in the Canadian wilderness in a kayak at midnight, bound for the opposite shore.

I'm not a big believer in setting rigid and specific goals. The best things often come from unexpected places or in ways we don't foresee until the future we're attempting to plan for has become the present.

However, as 2015 has come to a close and a new year lays unwritten before us, I think it's beneficial to reflect on the year past and consider how we might best use the time ahead of us. Not to chart a path and blindly follow it, rather more of a stopping for a few minutes to study the map, make sure we're heading in the right direction, and boldly continue on in our journey of life.

A couple days ago, I broke out a notebook and made a few lists. Lists of what I did over the past year, what went well, what didn't, and what I want to carry over into 2016.

Life implies death. The very fact that we're alive today means that someday we must die. A hundred years from now nearly every human currently walking this earth will be gone, cleared away for a new generation to come. It's nothing new. This change-over has gone on for billions of years and will continue to do so.

Most people can't stand this thought of death and try to bury it. It's understandable. Nobody wants to die and considering the temporariness of our existence can be mindbogglingly devastating. Pushing all thoughts of death away isn't going to help us live any longer though. Contrarily, we can use the thought of death to our advantage.

We constantly hear how important goals are.

To plan things out is synonymous with ambition and fulfillment in our culture. However, unnoticed by most, our obsession with goals in western society also has it's downfalls. Goals are a valuable tool for achievement, but are also a double-edged sword.

Here's an eye opening discussion of goals, between two of my personal heroes.

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.

There are dozens of credit cards that offer airline mileage bonuses to entice potential customers to sign up. For instance, I just picked up the Capital One Venture Card, which offers a 40,000 airline miles bonus if one spends $3,000 on the card in the first three months.

If you spend $3,000 in three months, you can simply make your purchases on the card, and receive 40,000 free airline miles. Just pay your credit card bills immediately after. The process won't cost you a cent. It's beautiful.

Last week, I went on a run, as I often do. However, this time I did something different.

I took a different route, at night, both aspects unusual for me. The usual warm feel of sunlight pressing on my skin was replaced by a brisk chilliness.

I rounded a street corner, about a mile into the run, and found myself within twenty yards of the freeway. Running, I paralleled the freeway, close enough to the passing traffic that I could really sense the surprising speed of each car.

I had a thought:

Over the summer of 2015, I spent 72 incredible days living on the Big Island of Hawaii. In a work-trade deal through WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), I worked 20 hours a week on a small lush Hawaiian farm in exchange for room and board.

Here's a list of everything I brought to the Big Island.

*If you don't plan on backpacking to remote sections of the island, you won't need most Backpacking Supplies.

If you play your cards right, Hawaii, and anywhere else really, can be extremely affordable. I spend a grand total of $669 while living it up for two and a half months in paradise. I wasn't living with a strict budge or anything either, I just made a couple of the right moves that made the entire cost of my stay, including flight, less than $10 a day. Simple.

Smart Move #1: The Flight

The first hurdle in economically traveling anywhere is transportation, which in many cases is a flight. The cheapest flight I could find from Phoenix, AZ to the Big Island of Hawaii was $676 round trip (which is more than I spent on the entire trip).

Flights can be one of the most expensive parts of traveling. Plane tickets cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars. Little do most people know, there's a resource to cover the cost of flights – credit card airline mileage bonuses.

For a couple years, I shied away from these bonuses. Credit cards are full of fees if you don't use them right and I prefer not to owe money. Who wants to mess around with a 22.9% interest rate, right?

Then, I ran into a website called The Art of Non-Conformity (now one of my favorite websites). The author, Chris Guillebeau, is a "travel hacking" extraordinare. He's set foot in every country on Earth. After reading about the millions of airline miles he earns each year, I decided to give it a try.

There's a surprisingly large gap between the small difference in prefix of nonconformity and unconformity. Both words suggest an opposition to conforming, which is to comply to the rules, standards, or status quo. The difference though, lies within how those rules, standards, and status quo affect an individual.

Nonconformity is a complete rejection of the norm. It's automatically taking an opposing stance towards rules, regulations, or what's popular. The idea is simple, reject the standard, because it is the standard.

Unconformity, on the other hand, is a refusal to let the norm influence one's decisions. Whether something is normal, popular, or not, has no effect on the decision making process. A weighing of one's options without factoring in what the mentality of the herd.

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.

As you may have noticed on The Living Theory's splash page, the background photo is of two skydivers. The photograph was taken this May. I'm in the upper left, in the bottom right corner is my grandma. Her name is Fran. Everyone at the skydiving facility seemed to think it was amazing that at 84 years old, she wanted to jump out the door of a plane from 10,000ft above the earth.

Everyone that is, except her.

So for my first interview for The Living Theory, I feel she's the ideal subject and her story, a perfect portrayal of what this site is about. Without further ado, my grandma, Fran Rice, 84 years of age and still young.

Before I launched this website, one question plagued me:

Is motivation from dissatisfaction better than complacency?

Let me break it down:

Someone is working a decent job. Their pay is above average. Their friends and family are happy for them. They feel they're on the right track. They don't necessarily enjoy the work, but hey, it's survivable.

Then they read an article on this website. They encounter the concept that some people's motivation for work is not money or social reasons, but genuine interest or love for what they do. They begin to wonder, “Am I really interested in this? Is this the work I want to spend my life doing?”

Today, I'm officially coining the term “adventure fundraising.”

Adventure fundraising is doing something extreme and/or adventurous to draw attention to a cause. It's going the distance, pushing physical limits, or doing something outrageous enough to make your fundraiser and cause stand out. I've had much success going the extra mile, with two fundraisers I've raised over $100,000 for two incredible non-profit organizations. I'd love to see more people do the same for a cause they are passionate about.