Constant Stimulation

I good friend and colleague said something to me a couple of months ago when I was discussing my general career path. “Peter,” he said, “you’re the kind of guy who needs constant stimulation.”

His words stuck with me, and I’ve had a chance to come to terms with their truth in the interim.

One of the reasons I love travelling so much is because it is the ultimate in the constant stimulation game: when you wake up every morning with a blank slate, ready to attack a city, find a new place to stay, figure out how to make train reservations in Spanish, and so on, it’s like a pure adrenalin rush all day long.

The last week has been, for me, like coming down off a high: it’s a rough landing making the transition from constant stimulation to the workaday pace of normal static life.

I used to describe my goal as being to create a “vacation-like life.” Most people, when I told them this, thought it meant that I wanted to laze around by the pool a lot. What it really meant is that I wanted, in my daily life, the same sort of Gatling gun of mental stimulation that being on vacation affords.

If I can somehow work to combine the camraderie of summer camp with the frenetic pace of the moving vacation with the focus that the market demands, I will have attained the charmed life I seek.