From Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin, to Oscar Wilde and Ralph Waldo Emerson, great thinkers throughout history did more than read the books they picked up. Many wrote and stored the most useful, profound passages in something called a Commonplace Book—an easily review-able collection of wisdom and ideas for their personal use.

We humans forget much more than we remember. The Commonplace Book was a sort of outboard memory, a way to keep and revisit our most insightful insights. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these collections of wisdom were so popular that "commonplacing" was an actual term for the act of writing in your Commonplace Book.

Somewhere along the line, Commonplace Books retreated from popular culture, yet thankfully, never disappeared completely. A year and a half ago, I discovered and began to build my own based on the index card system of one of my favorite authors. Today, I'm 56 books in and have over one thousand index cards comprising my Commonplace Book. I recently filled up my first "shoe box" of index cards, a milestone that inspired me to finally write this article.

Leopold Huber is the founder Hippohelp—a new, totally free, map-based work trade website that can help you travel the world for a fraction of what your journey would otherwise cost. I absolutely love this site, it's navigable map feature making it the easiest work trade site to search for volunteer opportunities wherever you want to go.

Browsing the map on Hippohelp, I chanced to encounter Leopold's own farm in Guilin, China! Fascinated by this young entrepreneur turning his own soil in the Far East, I wrote and asked if he'd like to share a bit about his life and Hippohelp with readers of The Living Theory.

We all know some things are so small that we can't seem them. But what we often forget to consider is that some things are so huge we can't seem them either.

I would like to point out one of the latter to you.

This was a discovery years in the making. I encountered a piece here, a piece there, wondering for a long while what they meant in relation to each other. The first piece I picked up about three years ago reading one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In all the books I read, I circle passages that I find useful or profound and write each down on a 3x5 index card after finishing the book. I have well over a thousand of these cards now. Most are useful or convey remarkable insight, but one particular card from this novel pointed to something mysterious, something I wrote down in hopes that I might one day understand:

Stop, just for a second, and ask yourself: "When's the last time I did something I had never done before?"

Really think about it... Do you have an answer?

Back in May, I went for a run in the heat of a summer afternoon in Phoenix. The sun cooked me as I coaxed myself along a six-mile route I'd run many times before, but never in such oppressive heat. Halfway through, I became woozy, increasingly unsure I could keep lifting my feet. I slowed to a walk, feeling like I might faint and immediately my face and hands were overcome with a tingling sensation of pins and needles. I staggered along for what must have been a couple minutes until the feeling subsided, then finished running the last few miles. It was the closest I had ever been to overheating. I've gone for a thousand runs, yet I'd never pushed myself that hard. I'd never experienced anything like it before.

In life, it's often your darkness that defines your light. The binds imposed on an individual's soul become the most satisfying to escape.

My dad's childhood took place in a rotating cast of apartments. Growing up he had to tread lightly, turn the volume down, and find somewhere else to play the drums out of respect for those living around him.

He dreamed of living in a house—a place where he could blast the stereo, where he could wale on his drum set, where he could live without constant filtration of his experience out of concern for others. While working full-time, he attended night school to become a mechanical designer. And after a couple years of work, he and my mom got their very own house.

They bought that house in 1989 and still live their today. He loves it.

While backpacking New Zealand earlier this year, I met a constant stream of new people. More than daily, I had those get-to-know-each-other conversations where topics of discussion circled around where you're from, what you do, how long you've been in the country, and other acquainting question and answer dialog.

These get-to-know-each-other conversations are vital in understanding another human being. However, after a few weeks, a hunger for more meaningful conversation grew within me.

I began to see this basic, everyday conversation as outer shell conversation that masked the inner shell conversation that we could be having of things deeper and more representative of who we are.

In life, we each get a few shocking, external events that shake us. Life-quaking events that cause us to stop and question, that force us examine our lives from another perspective. It might be losing a job we've long held, the death of someone close, or dancing with death ourselves, but when tragedy strikes, awareness often results.

A good analogy might be swimming across a great body of water.

We put our heads down in the water to swim. Stroke by stoke, we move along. We focus on making progress in the direction we're heading. And maybe we are making great progress in that direction! The problem is, we can't see where we're going while swimming with our heads down.

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."

With no idea of what to expect inside, each of my last steps up to the rim of the volcano allowed my line of sight a step further down into the crater. The world revealed was glacial snow surrounding the milkiest blue lake, a waterfall pouring over its edge running on through ice caves and out the eroded far side of the crater.

Assuming the crater would merely be a hole full of rocks, I stood atop, utterly stunned.

All alone and in my element, my body tensed into a slight crouch, drawing power as I took a couple rushed steps toward the edge. It was as if I were taking a half court shot with a basketball, and all this energy and wonder and excitement came out in this wild, charged, “YHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWHOOOOOOO!!!” across this mammoth scene before me.

If you're looking for adventure and to fill up your bank account this summer, now is the time to apply for a seasonal, summer job on CoolWorks.

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.