I love ingenuity, how it makes adventures of possibility available to everyone.

Now, right where we are, we can identify an adventure.

It doesn’t matter that we’re not somewhere else, that our education is what it is, that we own various have limitations and responsibilities.  We can innovate for ourselves and for each other.

The adventure or quest, Chris Guillebeau suggests, has the following marks which set it apart from a project: there’s a clear goal, it’s measurable, it has a sense of calling to it, and it involves great effort.*

At the end of 2013, I had an idea to blog every day in 2014 because I was already journalling every day – a 365 day adventure.  To add more of a challenge, and being inspired by Hugh Macleod, I decided to post only if I could add a doodle – the challenge being, I’d never doodled before.  With this, a project turned into a quest.  I bought the same pen as Hugh Macleod – a 0.2 drawing pen – and began to doodle on the back of business cards, as he had done.**

What is your “right where I am” adventure?

This is the practising part I engage in everyday.

I’m so glad that I didn’t stop on the 31st December 2014, though.  When I set out, I’d no idea where it would lead to, which is the unpredictability part of this.  There’s a randomness to where doodling has taken me.  Which means there are other things that haven’t happened, but I’m oblivious too.

I’ve mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell identified how 10,000 hours of deep practice develops remarkable skills in the world of measurement.  Practising unpredictability, however, is about exploring how hours of questioning and openness can lead to remarkable skills in the universe of possibility.

I realise now, answers haven’t led me here – questions have.  Questions and openness have allowed life to become what it is, which, to connect this with my opening thoughts, is a lot more than we often think.

Questions are like a long lever to pry open what remains closed to short answers.

‘In most situations, the rules of the game change all the time.’^

Each of us has an adventure waiting to be started:

‘Obsessively specialise.  No niche is too small if it’s yours.’^^

(*See Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(**Enjoy Hugh Macleod’s Ignore Everybody.)
(^From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)