Trade Comfort For A Compass: How To Lead An Adventurous Life – Year 2 – Meeting Quinn

(This is a continuation of the article series “Trade Comfort For A Compass: How To Lead An Adventurous Life”. If you found this portion first and would like to read from the beginning, click here: Trade Comfort For A Compass: How To Lead An Adventurous Life – Year 1 – It Begins.)

At some point during that first year I realized that I could have really used a mentor – to learn how to be my own adventurer from, well, another adventurer. Unfortunately, nobody I personally knew fit the bill so I came up with the idea of creating one of my own from scratch. It was a wild idea at the time…but, hey, the whole project was wild, I thought.

Additionally, I knew that I needed to tap into a strong source of inspiration in order to stay the course. I had to figure out how to stay motivated, especially when it would get very difficult.

Now, through my treasure hunt adventure design business I’ve created adventures where I lured people into causes to fight for – people to save and ‘wealth’ to find. I had them save the world as spies or local villages as vampire hunters. I saw that people really did get behind these adventures when they allowed themselves to believe that maybe there was something bigger at stake.

So, I gave MYSELF something bigger.

I began toying with the idea of designing an adventure that I would go through myself. I then created a movie/story plot about a guy who was just like me, entitled Keeping Up With Quinn. All types of adventurous things would happen to the main character that would propel him into a different life. I had the freedom to DESIGN his transformation based on what happened to him in the story. I was then able to play the role I created in my own movie and act out every scene. I didn’t always feel like I wanted to do some of the things that I NEEDED to do to shoot the video footage, but I found the motivation for the sake of the ‘movie’ if that makes sense. It was an amazing, and challenging, experience.

Writing the script was easy. As a treasure hunt adventure designer I’ve created literally 100’s of themed adventures over the years ranging from hunting for werewolves to killing dragons. I ended up deciding on a story about a 50 year old guy who gets a strange stone sculpture from an old friend of the family whom he hadn’t seen since he was a teenager. This old friend’s name was Quinn and he was now dead (in the story.)

A bit of an important back story on Quinn in the real world: In 1995 when my company, Quest Experiences, was first launched, our logo was a letter “Q” with a man inside holding a torch. For fun we named him Quinn, honestly believing that one day it would matter. Twenty five years later, it proved to matter. Quinn has been with me all along the way, even embroidered on my hat while I facilitated large adventures for corporate and private events. He was always with me, but he never had a story. Now, in this video series, he was FINALLY getting his own story told.

Although I won’t go into the very involved story here, I can say that in each episode the main character was faced with traveling all over the state (US) and beyond, collecting clues and puzzles on several different treasure hunt style adventures. In the story, Quinn was entrusting me to do it. Throughout the series, my ‘character’ was asked to take on increasingly more challenging tasks (including camping, canoeing and traveling to other states) and it pushed him far outside his comfort zone (not unlike most adventure movies with initially reluctant protagonists.) It was ME having to live out what I WANTED to happen to me!

I knew nothing about video and hated even getting my photo taken (never even took a selfie before in my life.) However, I was comfortable with computers and technology so I learned what I could and sweat awkwardly through the rest. I do have a strong background in theater performing, so the acting portion was the least of my worries. Canoeing in alligator invested waters and kneeling in poison ivy were much larger concerns while ‘on set.’
As the ongoing story took shape, so did the creation of the QAS – The Quest Adventure Society (a fictitious society that Quinn helped found.) Within the story, the QAS was created by a few anonymous individuals who saw that people, young and old, stopped looking to the mountains and the seas for Adventure and instead became glued to their phones and tablets. The desire for real world adventure was being replaced with addictions to leveling up and tiny lights on a screen. So, they set out to change all that. By writing the story, the QAS began to feel real to me. So, I created it. I’m currently it’s only official member (at the moment) but my dream is that one day the QAS will become to others what Quinn became to me…although fictitious, an inspiration to push myself further than I’ve been but in the direction I’ve always dreamed of going.

While shooting the hours of video footage I overcame a lot personally, mostly fears of inadequacy, discomfort and an overall fear of ‘screwing up.’ I visited a Bigfoot Museum, dug for crystals at a Crystal mine, climbed a frozen waterfall and even canoed down a river with alligators only feet away. It was all in any effort to get the video footage…and the video footage was all in an effort to get me to do things I wouldn’t have done otherwise!

I now know now that I need Quinn – and I’m hoping that the QAS will one day grow into the “Quinn” for others -that personal resource to become that Adventurer that’s inside of others if they feel the call. Once the series was completed and all of the amateurish editing was done, I was reinvigorated to shift gears back to my own personal journey. I had a much clearer focus now having completed the movie project (which took nearly a year to complete.) It was in the middle of the night that I would get my next big idea…THE idea that would structure the rest of my progress to become that adventurer I longed to be. I developed the Adventure University…

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE – Trade Comfort For A Compass: How To Lead An Adventurous Life – Year 3 – The Adventure University
CLICK HERE TO GO BACK – Trade Comfort For A Compass: How To Lead An Adventurous Life – Year 1 – It Begins