Eureka moment:
It's a moment of clarity, a defining moment where you gain real wisdom - wisdom you can use to change your life. Whether big or small, funny or sad, they can be surprising and inspiring. Each one is unique, deeply personal, and we think, worth sharing.
I perfectly remember that feeling, like an enlightenment, the awareness to send all the balls down the holes at once. The line linking all the dots, giving them all a shape.
It was 2013. I had been an online poker player for a few years, and a few months ago Pokerstars had started sponsoring me. A leading company in its field, I was representing their brand doing my job at the virtual tables.
My duty was to tell what it was like to be a professional poker player, in a passionate way, trying to show the technical, studio-oriented side for the ‘pros wannabe’ and the most joyful side for the ‘recreational players.’
Yet something was missing in my story, something general, not peculiar. Maybe there was something missing in my approach to life as a professional. I had hit the limelight after accomplishing a Herculean task playing lots of hands and games in a relatively long time. I had become completely immune to the effort of a complex job, maybe the most stressful one I knew.
In my first post I wrote about the non-result oriented approach poker taught me, which I applied in many other contexts of my life: do your best, try to make the best possible choice available, who cares about the outcome, positive or negative it may be. Yet dealing with working days where, despite all the commitment and weariness, I couldn’t get blood out of a stone was still hard to me. Monetary loss give way to despondency, turning bad working days into nightmares. Add the fact it may happen for weeks in a row and you have the worst possible time out of what should at first sight look like the best job in the world. A random, alternated nightmare.
Every time I wrote about my job it was somehow natural to me to act like an old wise man and warn people about the difficulties of such a job, “the most beautiful job in the world,” up to the point of wondering whether it really was that way. All those efforts to perform at best had outshone the most important reward poker was giving me: freedom.
It was stressful, I needed to study a lot, I could undergo months of losses knowing there was nothing I could do about it… but I could do it wherever and whenever I wanted. It was only my laptop and myself. I was not exercising the power to be free and I was locked in a doorless room.
That’s how Allin Around the World was born.
My challenge was simple: to travel the world (literally), 100.000 kilometres in 100 days, trying to pay expenses with my gaming (I failed, net profiting -5K...but still...)
I chose all the stops that were missing in my experience organizing a world tour, something all around the four comers of the globe. At the same time I had to think if the thing was merely feasible. I needed a good, at least decent Internet connection wherever I went. A ‘backpack journey’ or crossing an unexplored desert on foot were out of the question. My office would have been anywhere - a Starbuck's in Toronto, a honky tonk near Machu Pichu, a small bar in Bora Bora, up to look for a statistically unlikely 3G connection to play a hand along the Great Chinese Wall (yes, it happened!)
Freedom at the highest level, something intoxicating. Maybe it was not the freedom of thought we all should aim for, and its purity was somehow invented, programmed, a fruit of technology, Internet and low cost flights. But I was doing the job I liked, whenever and wherever I wanted. For real. The dreaming eyes I saw as I told my experience somehow made me understand that was everybody else’s dream, or at least had many features of it.
Just like poker for me, Steemit can become someone’s passport to liberty. Not for everyone, though. Travelling is something serious, not to be mistaken with tourism.
‘Tourism is a sin. Travelling on foot is a virtue.’ W. Herzog
A journey is almost all the time a small parenthesis in people’s lives. Those who professionally travel tell their journeys for others and cannot give vent to a new way of travelling and tell that journey.
Steemit can be the ideal medium for that.
Travelling and make a living out of telling the journey itself is of course a dream too many people have and only a small percentage of them have what it takes to do it. I was thinking about announcing a contest here on Steemit: the Steemit All Around the World Challenge.
There could be a section where people can present their travelling projects and the background for people who should support the capacity to tell. Film photographers, heavy writers, professional dreamers and students of chaos will surely be the favourite ones. The journey will have to be unique somehow. We will prefer races against time, the search for the past, love escapes towards someone who doesn’t exist, secret investigations of ourselves and more.
The task of the social network will be supporting and voting only those unique attempts, the extraordinary initiatives and their respective stories. Steemit will select and sponsor the spokesmen of such discoveries, so that we all could enjoy experiences which we will never deal with or that we will never be able to tell and see with those eyes. All through the eyes of the real travellers.
I am not sure I will produce a challenge of mine, it is not an easy task and it takes an idea for a journey and a story that must really be an outstanding one. But is this post will be appreciated, I will keep the #SteemitTravelChallenge category translating my stories from allin around the world into English, adding the related pictures.
It would be really fantastic if Steemit could stimulate our fantasy and will of conquer, allowing us not to stumble on the most dangerous thing for a human being: to stand still.