Become an Experience Junkie

Your mission

So you want to become an experience junkie? Great! Welcome aboard. Your mission is to get out there and embrace life. Change one thing today. Yes, today. It doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be a giant leap, but it should be exciting, and perhaps a little uncomfortable. Change often is.

Try taking a different route to work, order the strangest item off the restaurant menu, or even better buy an exotic ingredient from the supermarket and make a meal around it.  The trick is to challenge yourself and freshen your perspective by foregoing habit. Step outside your groove and mix it up. And if you’re nervous take another on the ride with you and share in the experience.

Whenever possible immerse yourself in the experience, fully. Bathe in it! Ask yourself how can I push myself (even just a little) to become more involved – do more than simply observe, right through to stepping into another’s shoes and getting your hands dirty. It’s exciting. It’s scary. But don’t let fear hold you back. Acknowledge it – ignore it if you have to – and do it anyway!

Keep practicing and you’ll become more daring, more creative with time. Challenge is a subjective thing, but if you find yourself out of your comfort zone you’ll know you’re on the right track!

The Experience Junkie on the road

An experience junkie is not a ‘tourist.’ He is the next evolution, the next notch up from ‘traveller,’ but not an adrenaline junkie.  This isn’t about “extreme” anything. Challenge is personal and subjective. Overcoming fear or expectation is also.

Why travel?

These past two decades have seen an unprecedented access to travel yet despite more people travelling, less are “experiencing.”  We are seeing more and more people replicating their experiences from home, just doing so abroad.  Despite spending thousands of dollars to experience a new place, they are afraid or overwhelmed or just reluctant to try new things.

As a newly inaugurated experience junkie you’ll work to adjust those habits.  By making the first move and travelling away from home, you are indicating that you are open to experiencing new things.  You are receptive to change and potentially to challenging yourself. It is my hope that by demonstrating how easy it is to fill your life with amazing yet accessible experiences, you will embrace all life offers, including travel, with a renewed sense of discovery and maybe, just maybe, together with opened eyes and experienced minds we can create the opportunity for greater understanding of our fellow man and his rich cultural history.

The Experience Junkie at home

Once the skills have been developed abroad, an experience junkie can apply them at home.  From the seemingly mundane to the locally adventurous, just take the 7 tenets and apply them to anything…to everything…and life experiences will open up in a new and enriching way.