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Emily
Who are the people that you are closest to? Chances are the way you became close to them was by going through something together. Today, we're going to talk about how adventures can create deep connections. Welcome to the What Could Go Right podcast. My name is Emily Orton and I.
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Erik
I am Erik Orton.
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Emily
We are the parents of five children and we lived on a sailboat with them for a year, which is where we learned our template for just facing, having big adventures and getting the most out of them and making our dreams come true, basically. So we started this podcast to help you make the most of your mid life so that you can thrive as a person, a partner and a parent.
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Emily
And today we're talking about adventures. But before we get into that.
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Erik
I just want to throw out a few things that are happening as we come up on Fezywig Day, which is our family holiday. Fezywig Day is the name of our boat that we lived on and we moved aboard board on February 8th. And so as we approach February 8th, we're doing a few things to celebrate.
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Erik
For the first, we have discovery calls where we help you discover the dreams, goals, hopes, islands, as we call them, that you want in your your life that feel impossible. And we help you work through the framework that we've come up with to actually make it happen, to make it inevitable. And so we want to get on the phone with you for 30 minutes and just help you get started.
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Erik
And for the first ten people that sign up for a discovery call, we're going to send cinnamon rolls directly to your door. Why cinnamon rolls? Because we celebrate Fezywig day by eating cinnamon rolls wherever we and our kids are in the world. We eat them. Sometimes we make them, sometimes we buy them. But cinnamon rolls are our.
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Erik
That's our love language on that day.
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Emily
Fezywig Day. So just a little bit of fine print that is to the continental U.S. And by when do they have to sign up for a discovery call to qualify in the first ten?
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Erik
Well, the first ten might just go flying out the door. So but we will stop delivering. We will not be delivering.
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Emily
Prior to.
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Erik
Cinnamon rolls after Valentine's Day. So schedule your call.
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Emily
Gives you a call before Valentine's Day.
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Erik
That's right. That's right. And it's tricky because one week in the middle there, I'm going sailing in the Bahamas with a group. And so there will be a time when the calls will not be available. So there are going to be limited slots, but we want you to get cinnamon rolls. So go to the awesome factory dot NYC forward slash discovery, sign up for a discovery call and cinnamon rolls will arrive at your front door.
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Erik
It's gonna be fun. Okay, so what are we talking about today?
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Emily
We're talking about the how effective adventure can be in creating really deep connections and you know, when you first had the idea that you wanted to live on a sailboat as a family, that isn't the first thought that came to mind. The first thought that came to mind was everything that we were going to be giving up where we were living right then in New York City, our friends and our current situation and, you know, I realized as we had maybe slightly different motivations for going, but once I realized that this could be a chance for our family to really connect and really deepen our relationships, I got a lot more excited about going on
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Emily
this trip. And when we got home from that, that's exactly what had happened. Like our shared experiences and the memories we made together and the inside jokes and the stories that nobody else had, you know, that were just between us and just the all the ways that we grew together really transformed our connection. And it transformed how we proceeded through life after the adventure.
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Emily
And I think the benefits of that year at sea have just continued to unfold old in our lives. And it's just crazy how one, you know, that one season in our life continues to be so impactful even now, ten years later. And I know we're not the only ones. We just we just came across an experience like this.
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Emily
This week that kind of was so beautiful and really surprised us.
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Erik
So the thing that happened this week is we got a text from one of our daughters, got married in December and somebody special came to the wedding reception, was a mentor of our new son in law and who they were texting just this past week. And he's like, hey, do you know, can an and it turns out that that's my dad.
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Erik
And we're like, yeah, you know, because he described like Ken Orton gave his age. He was a photographer in this part of California at this time all this sort of stuff and like, yeah, that's definitely my dad. You know, our daughter was like, yeah, that's my grandpa. And so we're talking to him and he's like, yeah, he would always take us on these backpacking trips in the Sierra mountains when I was a young man.
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Erik
Turns out my dad was a scoutmaster. His dad died when he was six, and so he was always looking for.
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Emily
His father for.
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Erik
Guidance in life as a man, you know. And he ended up finding that a lot of that in the in the Boy Scouts and with through his his leaders there and the young men leaders in our church. And so he really wanted to do all my dad wanted to do all these fun adventures. And so to kind of give himself a little bit of cover, he would be like, I'm going to take the Boy Scouts to do it.
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Erik
And so he really wanted to do this ten day backpacking trip through the Sierra Nevadas or the the Sierra mountains from California into Nevada and mapped it out. And it was this kind of epic trip that none of these boys or their parents had really done anything like this. And I grew up hearing about this trip all the time.
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Erik
And my dad had pictures of it because he was a photographer. And there's this kind of classic shot where he's kneeling down and there's all these boys, scruffy boys, young, scrappy boys with their framed backpacks that were disproportionately large to see them. And anyway, turns out that this mentor to our son in law was one of the boys on that trip.
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Erik
And when we realized that, we just flipped out because we're like, my world, my goodness, the world is so small. And so we when we found that out, we created a little Zoom reunion between our son in law's mentor, who's now retired and my dad, who is in his eighties. And last night. Yeah, last night we got on and we just set it up so that the two of them could meet and they just talked and reminisced and and swapped stories.
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Erik
And we just got to listen. And so, you know, listening to that conversation, I mean, what were some of your observations.
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Emily
Some of the things that I took away from that were, first of all, that your dad created an opportunity for adventure, something so big that they weren't sure if they were actually going to be able to do it or not. Yeah. And those boys went on the trip and they had a pivotal life experience on that journey that sort of shaped the people they became and the friendships that they maintained.
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Emily
And so then when one of those boys grew up, he became the mentor to the young man who married our daughter. And we thought, how beautiful it is that grandpa's influence on this young man then turned into an influence on the young man that married his granddaughter, our daughter. So that was one of the connections. But then hearing about this guy who had gone on the adventure, who was one of the backpackers, he's stayed in touch throughout his life with one of the other backpackers, and he actually had to leave the trip a little bit early.
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Emily
And so he went back later, picked up the trip where he left off and continued it and finished it with some of those guys who weren't who had to they had to leave early for football practice or something like that. And so just and and then one of the other young men who was on the trip, we found out that he has continued to use that exact same backpack for his entire life, even though he's also now like in his 60, you know, like from 16 to 60 me, like, no, I'm using this.
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Emily
This is my backpack of choice.
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Erik
And like, his family keeps trying to buy him a new one. And he's like, No.
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Emily
No, no.
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Erik
I'm using the same the same old scruffy backpack.
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Emily
And just that it meant so much and it helped them really forge those connections and it helped them see that they were capable of more and it helped them have to rely on each other. And it just expanded their view of themselves and their view of the world. And for many of them, they've just continued doing things in the outdoors and then taking other young people and saying like, we're going to introduce you into the wonders of the outdoor lifestyle, you know, and things that can that you can learn from the outdoors and from being with a group of people in the outdoors, whether that's to recognize, there are people who know more
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Emily
than me and if I will trust them and sort of borrow their homework, I can move through some of my challenges a lot faster than if I try to figure it out all by myself.
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Erik
So just to double back to what we were saying at the beginning about how adventure creates bonds. In some cases, those adventures just come at us, you know, surviving a natural disaster, surviving a, you know, a financial reversal or, you know, all kinds of what I'll describe as negative adventures, like things that we that that just happen in life.
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Erik
And we don't want them to happen. But when we go through them, you know, you hear this all the time about prisoners of war who were in captivity together and how close they are because they went through something so galvanizing together.
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Emily
Well, I remember you said something to me as we were preparing to move aboard a sailboat with our five children. You you talked about how you used to do the musicals in high school. You used to participate in the musicals, and you were so close to the other people who were in the shows because you had gone through something together.
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Emily
You had worked really hard and created something together. And along the way you made a lot of shared memories and it solidified those friendships. And you said you wanted to have something. You wanted our family to go through something together.
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Erik
Well, yeah, And I think you can choose the adventure. You know, it's going to find you some way or the other. If you don't choose it, a negative adventure will find you. Or you can pick the kind of adventure that you want.
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Emily
Probably get a smattering of both throughout your life.
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Erik
Going to get a little bit of both. But but if you know so nobody chooses to be a prisoner of war, but it changes you and you can create amazing connections. But you know, you can choose to be in a show. You can choose to be on a sports team. You can choose to go on a backpacking trip.
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Erik
You can choose to start a business, or you can choose all kinds of things that will help you to grow. And when you go through things like that together, in fact, it makes me think of Jason, who was on our podcast a couple episodes ago and going through his is I think it was an MBA program, you know, the way he bonded with this guy and he like and he went to his wedding in India because they were so close, because they had gone through something together.
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Erik
So they're all kinds of adventures that you can go on, but it it bonds you. And we have experienced this, obviously, as a family. But to see it between my dad and this mentor to our son in law and how over the decades, you know, these guys are 20, 40 years ahead of us, you know, 20 lots, multiple decades ahead of us.
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Erik
And just to see the principle continues to work. It's a law. I'm convinced it's a law of eternity, that when we go through things together, we become close. And so I guess I'm getting on a little bit of a soapbox here, but I just want to say, like, choose an adventure. If you want to feel connected with somebody or you want to strengthen the bonds with people that you care about.
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Erik
Find something challenging to do together. Yeah. And and it will. It will bring you closer.
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Emily
Yeah. Go through something together. In fact, that was something we did deliberately when. When we chose to live on a sailboat. I keep hitting that one. But any of the other adventures we chose. But that was the the real initial impossible dream that we attacked as a family. And part of the reason I wanted to do it was I said, look, life is going to throw all kinds of things at us.
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Emily
And if we can learn these principles, emotional resilience, communication, gratitude, having a good sense of humor, all of those things, as we go through an experience that we have chosen and we like really build that stamina and those emotional resilience muscles, then when things come at us that we are not expecting, that we did not ask for and that we maybe aren't that excited about, we're going to be ready to deploy these these skills that we've learned and will be able to manage together and I think I mean, that obviously really happened with us on our sailing trip towards at the beginning we were all deer in the headlights and my gosh, what have
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Emily
we gotten into? This is way over our heads. Fast forward towards, you know, the final chapters of our sailing trip. Our boat was actually sinking and.
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Erik
Plot spoiler.
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Emily
Plot, spoiler. Ruby did not die, but in that moment when it was like middle of the night and we just woke our kids up and said, Hey, here's what's happening. And everybody started bailing and singing together. Like we're like, All right, let's do this. We have each other's back and we're doing the best we can. And and that would definitely not have been us, you know, ten months prior.
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Erik
So we, like, swim for it.
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Emily
Yeah, it was just it was just such a, a a stark contrast from, you know, how we worked together from the beginning. And we, you know, we started as a happy family and we just came back so, so much stronger in all of those ways from going through that adventure. And we we like you said, we see it through everybody else's adventure, whatever it is.
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Emily
And people have the coolest ideas of what they want to do. It's not always it's often not a travel adventure. Sometimes it is going to school for another degree or further training or starting a business or a nonprofit or whatever it might be. There's so many different things. I just read about a guy who, like, left his stable, high paying job to become a corn maze designer.
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Emily
You guys like your dream is not crazy. Your dream is not. Your dream is not crazy. If it's in you, it's in your heart. It's a special way that you want to contribute. It's probably an adventure that's so big. It's it's not something you're going to be able to pull off by yourself, you know, get that freight train moving and some other people will jump on board with you and you are going to connect and bond with them.
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Erik
How's this for a, maybe we can end with this. Yeah, let's do it as a reframe. If you are going through something hard, which I'm going to guess that most of you are.
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Emily
Everybody, most of the time.
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Erik
If you're going through something hard, what if you say, Hey, instead of like this is really crummy? So this is this is my chance to connect with the people that I'm going through this with. This is my opportunity to come together and and enjoy relationships that are going to be better and stronger because of it. When we come out on the other side of this, we're going to be better together.
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Erik
And so you can you know, you can apply that right now to whatever challenges you're going through. And then also, it's kind of fun to pick the kind of challenges that you want as you go forward and go through it together. And so if there's somebody that you do want to connect with, go on an adventure together.
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Emily
I love it. What could go right?
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Erik
What could go right? Hey, before we sign off, I just want to say real quick, remember the awesome factory dot NYC forward slash discovery sign up for a call. The first ten people that sign up in need in the continental United States will get cinnamon rolls delivered right to your door. So happy faces. Big day. And if you want to go sailing with us this year, go to the awesome factory dot NYC forward slash sailing 2024 as some info there and I would love to see if you being crew on one of our trips would be a good match because we're doing some deep discount stuff this year and it's going to be fun going
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Erik
to cool places.
00:17:44:01 - 00:17:56:01
Emily
You should be able to find that in the links and if those links or anything you heard on this podcast is something that you would like to share, please do. So we we'd love to keep the conversation going.
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Erik
All right. Thanks for listening.
