EP82: Being an Adventurous Entrepreneur Bali Edition
Channel: Liberty Entrepreneurs Podcast
Date: 06/09/2018

Ashe Oro: 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.


Podcast Resources:

Superconductors: Revolutionize Your Career and Make Big Things Happen:
https://amzn.to/2NKQ4br
Website: http://derekloudermilk.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DerekLoudermilk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DerekLoudermilk/