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CoolWorks is the most badass, awesome job board on the internet. Employers are screened beforehand with the requirement that they offer "cool jobs" or jobs in "cool places." Opportunities are listed for national parks, ski resorts, cruise ships, rafting companies, summer camps, travel companies, beach towns, ranches, and an endless variety of other uncategorizable cool gigs.

There once was a city with a big mountain in the middle. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people climbed the mountain every day.

When the sun went down, though, a funny thing happened. The top of the mountain became the most beautiful place in the entire city, but nobody knew because nobody climbed the mountain in the dark.

People didn't climb the mountain in the dark for a couple of reasons. One reason was that everyone believed hiking was meant to be done in the daytime. The second was that the city decided it was too dangerous to climb mountains in the dark and would fine anyone caught a large sum of money.

So when the sky got dark and the spectacular electric grid of the city turned on, stretching for miles and miles and miles in every direction from the top of that mountain, nobody climbed up to look.

I'm two weeks into a road trip around the South Island of New Zealand. In my two months here leading up to it, I've been dedicated to reading, writing, and The Living Theory, but the past two weeks I've tried to do the total opposite—to just let go.

I'm naturally an organized, stick-to-the-plan kind of guy. But in the name of adventure and bending against my nature, I've let go of structure, plans, and literary ambitions for a bit. Not just for a break from a year-round focus on doing what I love, but to allow myself to drift in an unusual direction and see what I might discover. Instead of steering, I'm just enjoying the ride for a while.

Maybe once a month, or even less frequently, I have these moments. Moments that last anywhere from five minutes to an hour. They're sublime moments—moments of elation, verging on ecstasy. Moments when I find myself utterly moved by my surroundings or by an experience.

I had one of these moments today.

Rain was falling all day and after spending one too many hours inside, I needed to escape. I grabbed headphones, pulled my rain coat on, and stepped out into the cool, heavy air of late afternoon. Grey clouds hung overhead and as the Interstellar Soundtrack eased into my ears, I walked west out of a small New Zealand town into farmland and pastures.

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.

When you get away from it, it's easy to forget. And as long as you're away from it, you can never remember. But when you return—ah, when you return to it!—once again the truth is as clear as day and greets you as if you'd never left.

I landed in Christchurch, New Zealand last night. And I'm now sitting on a bus, winding through green valleys and rolling countryside dotted with countless sheep. After time away from nature, bathed in advertising, money, and status, such things tend to infect one's thoughts. Remarkably, though, I'm an hour into this bus ride and my compass has already realigned to true north. Take away the television, advertisements, and social proof of collective priorities held by those with constant exposure to such an environment and replace them with lush green, fresh air, and places that beckon to be explored, and the mental poisons of a consumer society quickly denature.

Life is full of paradoxes. One of them is that only when we don't have something do we truly appreciate its value.

A few examples:

• When we’re sick, just being healthy is a cause for joy.
• Only when we lose someone do we fully understand how much they meant to us.
• If we sleep on the ground for a week, returning to bed is like floating on a cloud.
   

The absence of something reveals its value. And the opposite is also true: having something causes us to lose sight of its value. Following this train of thought, if we have everything all the time, then we can appreciate nothing. And contrarily, if we have nothing, then we can appreciate everything.

This is my second annual review, a sort of yearly glance at the map to better understand where I've been and where I'm going. Looking back at last year's review, it seems I hit seven of the eleven goals I set for 2016, which I'm quite happy about. If I'd fulfilled all of them, I think that would mean the bar was set too low.

This post is a bit more of a plot summary of my life, rather than lessons or ideas taken from it that I usually share. However, I tend to enjoy a bit of background information on who writes the things I read. If you do too, read on.

We all have goals, ambitions, and dreams we'd like to reach in life. We think about them often. We imagine ourselves as masters of this or creators of that. But how often are we just dreaming instead of doing?

I was paddling around in a kayak the other day and realized kayaking is the perfect metaphor for our ambitions in life. In a kayak, paddling is everything. If you want to go somewhere, you have to paddle to get there. Without consistent strokes of the paddle in the direction you want to go, you're merely drifting at the mercy of your environment. You'll never get to where you intend to.

In a kayak, wishful thoughts of your destination might keep you going, but will not get you any closer. The stroke of the paddle is all that counts. Life works the same way. If you know you want to go in a certain direction, master a skill, or pursue anything, it takes consistent, deliberate action.

I'm jet-lagged and have to run to catch a bus across the south island of New Zealand soon, but I want to pin down a beautiful thought that's been bouncing around my head the past couple days.

In the history of humanity, traveling has never been so damn easy. Think about it: you could be almost anywhere on the face of the earth in a matter of a day or two. This weekend, you could snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, walk the Great Wall of China, or drink a Guinness in Ireland.

This might seem normal to us, as we were born with this privilege, but looking from a larger perspective, it couldn't be further from usual. For hundreds of thousands of years, we humans could only travel as fast as we could walk. Eventually, we figured out how to tame and ride animals that were faster than us, which sped things up a bit. We built ships, and bold explorers crossed uncharted oceans with wind power. However, nothing comes remotely close to the ability to travel we have today.

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.

Nobody can hand you your pot of gold. There is no magic pill, no trump card we can play in life that wins every time.

Every once in a while, I pick up on a certain dissatisfaction in readers, readers of this site and other sites that I read. They're dissatisfied because they want the answer, not a way to go about finding it. In their search, they encounter ideas, strategies, and guidance, but all they want is the end product. The solution to their predicament without the work. No matter where they search, nobody seems to be offering it.

On such a quest we may look to carbon copy others' successes, only to find that what worked for someone else doesn't work for us. Unlike Steve Jobs, it's no longer the 1970's, and we're not friends with a Steve Wozniak who's building an electronic device that could revolutionize the world. Unlike Tim Ferriss, we don't have a bestselling author like Jack Canfield to advise us in writing and promoting our first book. I've been told that I'm lucky to have almost died at sixteen years old because it gave me such a powerful story for my cross-country bicycling fundraiser.

At the age of 20, Hunter S. Thompson wrote a friend in response to a request for life advice. While rejecting the idea that one can tell another specifically what to do with their life, Thompson's general guidelines for deciding how to answer such a monumental question for ourselves are remarkably profound and useful.