Did our primal experiences of adventuring create modern day entrepreneurship?
Ashe Oro: Welcome back, Liberty Nation. Welcome to the Liberty Entrepreneurs Podcast. I'm your host, Ashe Oro and today's guest is Derek Loudermilk. He's the host of The Art of Adventure Podcast. He's a high performance coach and the author of the forthcoming book Superconductors which promotes the idea of skill stacking, how to acquire a set of skills that makes you more rare, valuable and irreplaceable in the marketplace.
Ashe Oro: Derek, welcome to Liberty Entrepreneurs.
Derek Loudermilk: Ashe, it's a pleasure to be here.
Ashe Oro: So, fill in the gaps here. Who are you and what are you passionate about?
Derek Loudermilk: I like to call myself professional adventurer and I have been traveling for the last four years. I think you and I have actually wound up in some of the same places. I was traveling solo and now, I'm traveling with a family. And wherever we go, countries around the world, I like to both go on adventures, find some wilderness area to explore but I'm also talking to entrepreneurs in each country that I go to and I'm learning from people like co-working spaces but also local entrepreneur, people that own fruit stands and tour guide companies and things like that.
Derek Loudermilk: I'm really trying to get a pulse of the state of entrepreneurship in each place that I travel to and mixing that with going on adventures and spending plenty of time outdoors and in the wilderness.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, so what is it about adventures specifically and just what are adventures and why do you feel like this is drawn to you and what does this have anything to do with being an entrepreneur?
Derek Loudermilk: Yeah. So, I've come up with this definition of adventure. There's three parts. One is that an adventure is called an interesting or remarkable experience in the dictionary, which means to remark about something means you tell a story about it. You leave an adventure with a story. There's some element of risk to adventure. The word adventure comes from the French "aventure" and it's the same as venture as in venture capital and that there are some element of risk whether it's real or perceived risks of physical danger or maybe it's just you feel like you're taking a risk socially or something like that.
Derek Loudermilk: And the third is there is some element of change that happens to you. As you complete an adventure, you come out of it as a new person. It leaves its mark on you that you bring to your following endeavors, that you bring to the rest of the world that you can share with your friends. An adventurer, maybe and the most common types are traveling to a distant place. It's easiest to have an adventure when you go to a new country or when you go to the wilderness because you're physically changing so many things in your surroundings.
Derek Loudermilk: But adventure can happen on a much smaller scale any time you have those elements where you are taking a risk and you're going through something. It could be buying a house for the first time as some type of adventure or a relationship or there's any number of things that can fall into that adventure framework including starting a business.
Ashe Oro: Right, hence, the tie to entrepreneurism. Are you an adventurepreneur?
Derek Loudermilk: I am. Actually, I love to tie in adventure. The podcast that I host is The Art of Adventure Podcast and I recently held a retreat for entrepreneurs called Adventure Quest. And one of the things we do is we actually go out on big adventures like jumping off waterfalls or climbing giant volcanoes or surfing waves. And there's lots of analogies like, "Oh, entrepreneurship is like climbing a mountain." Well, we went and climbed a mountain to see if it really was a good analogy for entrepreneurship.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, I should say we're currently recording in Bali, in Indonesia and as you're talking about mountains, I can almost see Agung, the active volcano that's just a couple of miles from our house right now.
Derek Loudermilk: Every morning, I look out my window, and I give a report to my family, I say, "It's erupting today. It's not erupting."
Ashe Oro: It erupt like two nights ago.
Derek Loudermilk: Yeah. With a little poof.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, I saw the pictures. But let's get you on with the mountain and hiking up the mountain metaphor because I think it's really good and I know that, so you hold these adventure quests which is part of your business where people from around the world, I assume part of your community since you've written a book previously. You're currently writing Superconductors, your upcoming book. And you've had a podcast for how many episodes?
Derek Loudermilk: We're about 230 in right now?
Ashe Oro: Wow, 230, congrats. I think we're only in the 80s here but what have you learned like when you bring these people from around the world, they basically buy your service of let's mix ... Let's get a group of people from around the world together that may probably don't know each other and I'm going to take them on adventures that are going to challenge them how?
Derek Loudermilk: Generally, the way I structure it is a mix of physical challenges followed by business-specific workshops where we have this nice villa. We do our workshops in the villa and so we're resting physically on the days we're doing the workshops. But part of these physical challenges and part of any adventure is this question that people have of do I have what it takes when the chips are down? And how will I be when I'm faced with some great challenge, when I'm faced with the peak moments of my life, who will I be in those moments?
Derek Loudermilk: And when you are thinking about rappelling a hundred feet off a cliff, it's very confronting and you have to use courage. You have to practice courage. We also have to deal with all these things that come up for you like people are still worried about their physical safety even though it's theoretically a safe activity. We've got protection in place.
Derek Loudermilk: There's all kinds of great analogies between climbing a mountain or going canyoning or rappelling to business in the sense that, okay, I'm taking these people out to the canyon, right? So, I'm a guide. And in business, it helps so much to have a guide and we hire even local guides who are more expert at the terrain. You can translate that hiring specific people to help you with specific things-
Ashe Oro: Like microcoaches.
Derek Loudermilk: ... in business. Absolutely, or just your council of wise elders that gives you the advice you need when you need it. There's also the group aspects, these adventure trips. I have this motto that the wisdom is in the group like these are all high-level entrepreneurs. They all know a lot and they're still looking to uplevel themselves and it's not just me that's the coach or the leader of the adventure but each person in turn will probably support the rest of the group throughout a week on trip. And they all have different experience of business that they can add to each other.
Derek Loudermilk: Partly, it's about bringing together the right people which is my most important role is to just get the right coaches, the right activities, the right people in the right location and magic is going to happen.
Ashe Oro: And I'm really curious what you think happens to these entrepreneurs when you get them out into the wilderness for instance. And part of this answer, I'd like for you to talk about your trip up that mountain like literally hiking up and down that mountain, but what do you think it does for these entrepreneurs who oftentimes live up in their brains rather than down in their bodies?
Derek Loudermilk: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, this is such a theme. Great question because we are biological entities. We're large mammals and we spend all this time thinking strategically going through all different parts of businesses. It's often cerebral and our bodies have all kinds of knowledge that is untapped. Intuition is such a powerful tool that successful Silicon Valley CEOs are really learning to tap into and if we can access body knowledge and energy and motivation in addition to our cerebral, then it's a huge advantage.
Derek Loudermilk: Just walking in the woods will put you back into your body because you're using your body. You're using your physical sensations and you're feeling the wind on your skin and all of these things and it goes so far into getting you out of your head and reducing stress and all these things but also improving the way you utilize the discussion between your brain and your body. And it also really helps in the communication between two people because so much of our communication up to 93% is non-verbal.
Derek Loudermilk: There's lots of benefits just to moving your body and getting in touch with that.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, and what do you think it does for the brain to be able to not shut off but almost like delegate some of that decision-making to other parts of the body because I'm guilty of this. I don't move my body nearly as much as I say that I want to and I stay up in my brain a lot and that's because I've had a lot of success being up in my brain.
Ashe Oro: I built successful businesses. I've made money and it has been a safety zone for me to protect what I think is myself. What do you think it does for the people that join your adventure quest and get challenged not in the regular entrepreneurial sense like, "Oh, I've got to set up this PayPal and I got to set up this bank account and then I need to connect it to my website and I need to make sure I'm following my clickthrough rates and check on my Google analytics and all the ... My email marketing list," and all these things that entrepreneurs know they need to do. But what does it do for them whenever they come on an adventure quest where maybe they're not using their brain even half as much as what they would typically?
Derek Loudermilk: Yeah, and so everybody had a good idea when you're in the shower, some epiphany moment, the common like I have a great idea in the shower is ... It comes from because your physical body is occupied by the sort of routine movement and that lizard brain part of you is busy scrubbing the soap around. And so you have a more direct connection to your cerebral cortex and you can actually access your good ideas better.
Derek Loudermilk: Some of my best ideas and throughout history like people like Einstein come up with their best ideas while walking because it increases blood flow to the brain and it occupies the physical body. It's a great creative resource, first of all. So, physically moving but it also spurs people to action, climbing a volcano and being in the present, you're climbing over a set of roots or you're dealing with whatever and it forces you into the present.
Derek Loudermilk: It forces you out of the past. It forces you out of like wondering what is going to go wrong in the future and it forces you to deal with the solutions that are right in front of you getting around these obstacles, sliding down this muddy slope, dealing with my heavy breathing, whatever it is and it forces you into the present and into a solution-oriented mindset which all of that, getting into action produces results. But it also builds your confidence because you can see the direct results of your actions.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, and I love that term that you keep using "action". One of the main reasons, if not the sole reason that I created Liberty Entrepreneurs because I was tired of just the idea of thinking about freedom and I was tired of all the libertarian theory and the anarchist theory and like all these ways that things could be and when I look back on my life, the thing that was most important was the actions I took.
Ashe Oro: It seems very common to what you're saying about not only being an entrepreneur taking action but being an adventure and taking action. When did this idea of the adventure mindset come to you and when did you start to realize that it was so closely aligned to the entrepreneurial mindset?
Derek Loudermilk: Yeah. That's really interesting. We are wired to be happier when we are adventuring, when we're solving problems, when we're creating new businesses. Imagine an ancient tribe of people and they sort of utilized all of their resources in their valley and they sort of expand their population to the point where they're being low in food and it's up to a few adventurers to go over the mountain range and explore to find the next fertile valley to expand then.
Derek Loudermilk: Our evolution has wired us to seek solutions, to give us a surge of dopamine which is a happiness chemical when we're solving problems. When we're out adventuring, there's any number of random problems. When we're creating new businesses, it's the same dopamine surge that we're getting into the adventure mindset of taking action, of trying things, of testing things out. And failures have been part of adventure like there's a lot of things that don't work out. But you keep persisting in adventure until you get to your destination. You keep persisting in business trying things and it's an enjoyable process like let's see if this works.
Ashe Oro: Right. It's like that curious nature. It's like, "Okay, what can I do? What can I accomplish? What can I build?" Do you think that's intrinsic to humanity or do you think that this is a learned behavior?
Derek Loudermilk: I think it's intrinsic to humanity but it's something that our socializing, our culture dampens down. I think people ... It's natural to worry about if we take a risk, what will people think of us? We lose our social standing. Social support is important, right? It provides us some safety. If we feel like if we get on stage and we bombed singing karaoke-
Ashe Oro: Which I always do.
Derek Loudermilk: Exactly. I might lose all my friends and I'll be a social outcast like that's like the logical extreme. I'm just like, "No, thank you." And this was me for years. I didn't sing ... I wanted to sing karaoke but it took me like 10 years to get up the courage.
Ashe Oro: I always sing Garth Brook's I've Got Friends in Low Places. But I hear you. I don't want to sing.
Derek Loudermilk: And so, we want to take these risks but there's all kinds of "good reasons" to not take these risks but that ... A lot of times these risks are perceived and not real and they're like the positive upside of trying something is much greater than the perceived risks of failure.
Ashe Oro: Yeah, and I love it because the adventure mindset is the entrepreneurial mindset because a lot of times, entrepreneurs find their niche or their opening in the marketplace by seeing something that other people either haven't done before or seeing something that other people have done but they know they can do a better job. Like that's why I started Liberty Virtual Assistance is because I saw what was happening in the marketplace and I knew that I could do a better job, and it is adventuring.
Ashe Oro: It's adventuring into the unknown. As my audience knows, I don't claim to be this like super entrepreneur. I'm not Elon Musk. Hardly, I'm a tenth of one billionth of 1% of what this guy has built but it's like having that adventure mindset to go out and just be curious about what I can do. I know that it's going to be risky but know that as long as you're able to take action that at least, when you take action, you're going to have more information to take better action later on.
Derek Loudermilk: And for you, like you had this insight like, "I think I can create this. I think it will be useful," and a lot of people wouldn't trust that insight like, "Who am I to decide to create this business?" Even CEOs deal with impostor syndrome. How do I know enough to be the one in charge here. And it's this confidence that you build through a variety of different challenges that like I know that I'm going to be able to deal with people well. I know I'm going to be able to learn things. I know I'm going to be able to manage this in the future even though I don't know what's going to be created.
Derek Loudermilk: I'm going to go ahead and give it a shot and create this business, this VA business or whatever it is. So many people take themselves out of the game because they don't have the confidence, because they haven't put themselves in enough situations to purposely build their confidence, to use courage enough.
Ashe Oro: I think it's story time.
Derek Loudermilk: It's story time.
Ashe Oro: Story time, and whenever you came back ... Again, Derek is currently my neighbor here in Bali, in Ubud, Bali. Once your adventure quest, your most recent adventure quest was done. You came back and you're telling me about this hike of this mountain and I'm sure you'll know the name of it but you said that you were actually surprised that everyone made it up and made it down.
Ashe Oro: And I'm really curious why that was and if anyone before you started the hike, if everyone is talking about the possibility of failing to make it to the top because I know it wasn't an easy hike. It is no walk in the park.
Derek Loudermilk: So, it took us 10 hours, six hours up four hours down. It's the second large volcano in Bali and you go through four different ecosystems as you go up, four different types of forest, rainforest, cloud forest and moist forest and then sort of pine forest at the very top. And people were coming up with like, "Oh, I have this old knee injury like I might not make it," or whatever. Everyone had their built-in excuses, their out if they had to turn around. But I knew that everyone wanted to finish the summit and make it back.
Derek Loudermilk: And in the first couple of hours, everyone is full of energy-
Ashe Oro: Chatting it up.
Derek Loudermilk: Chatting it up and all these things, right? And then it's like the volcano gets steeper and steeper and it gets hard. And then people move into their own like they're pushing their physical limits. They're breathing hard. It's steeper than a set of stairs for hours. There's slippery roots. There's leeches, just all kinds of things and I actually didn't realize it was going to take us so long. I was like, "We're fit. We're great. It will only take us like six hours."
Derek Loudermilk: It was harder than my own expectations and this ebb and flow like seeing people hit the end of their limit and be like, "I don't think I can make it," like, "Where is the top? Give me some palm sugars so I can get a burst of energy." Okay, the top is still an hour and a half away like, "Wow, what do I do knowing that I really just want to stop but I'm motivated to keep pushing."
Derek Loudermilk: And I saw people do things like start supporting other people because they didn't want to think about themselves so they became cheerleaders for other people, or I noticed when someone was hiking in front for a while, they got so much energy from leading and from being like they saw themselves as an inspiration like here they are hiking strongly at the front of the pack. That gave them energy, their own self-image.
Derek Loudermilk: And on the way down, like we're slipping and sliding over these muddy obstacles and people were really enjoying the chance to get muddy and dirty and giving themselves permission to get through this no matter what it looked like, how pretty it was. Women than normally like to be fashionable and-
Ashe Oro: Their fingerna