I’m slightly surprised that the Travel Library series has not yet included a book by Al Humphreys, given that he’s one of the adventurers I look to whenever I’m running low on ideas. I’ll be making up for it – during the plague years, he explored a single OS map, his local one, and I took inspiration from that, although I didn’t cover mine in nearly as much detail. Anyway, that project is becoming a book and I seem to remember him saying recently that it was pretty much finished and almost ready to go (although I can’t find the social media posts on the subject anywhere!), so I’ll definitely be reading that. But today we’re at Ask An Adventurer.
This isn’t quite like any book I’ve ever read. I’m not entirely sure it’s necessarily about adventuring, either. It’s a kind of extended Q&A about how to make a living as an adventurer and 90% of it could easily apply to any kind of non-conventional, non-9-5 life. It’s a lot more “how to grow an audience” and “how to decide to give up your mainstream job” than “how to gain the skills to have an adventure”. He’d probably be furious at the very idea, but this book could probably just as accurately be titled “How to become an influencer”.
That’s what it’s mostly about. It’s not so much about having adventures as about making that into a viable career – the whole round of blogs, books, podcasts, talks, newsletters, films, videos, getting your name out there, getting your face out there. Going from the vaguely unsatisfactory lifestyle of a steady job and a regular salary to making a living from something you love. In this particular case, it’s about adventure but it could just as easily be about having a vast beige wardrobe. If that sounds kind of critical – both of Al and of the kind of influencers who live in these beige sacks – you might also say that this is me pointing out that it would only have taken a few minor changes to increase the potential audience for this book tenfold.
I happened to be idly and slowly reading my way through it when I went to Camp Wildfire. Something I probably didn’t mention in that post – because there was so much going on that weekend – was that I attended a talk by an adventurer, one Andy Bartlett. He followed a similar theme – how to get more adventure into your life and how to redress the work-life balance. I liked him but he did say something outrageous, even to the middle-class Camp Wildfire audience. “How do you find time off work to have these adventures?” Now, Al Humphreys would say “I find time because it is my job” and that’s a perfectly acceptable answer. Andy Bartlett replied “I’m self-employed now and I make sure that for every day I work, I take three off”. Oh, the stunned silence! Three days off for every one day you work! On the one hand, here’s the reality, that most of us do still need to work while, even as professional adventurers and I liked that. On the other hand, no one can just take three weeks off out of every month! So in a way, Al’s approach of “this is my job” is the more realistic.
On the other, other hand – Al Humphreys is an Oxford-educated married man with a wife, kids and a mortgage. He can go off adventuring because he’s got more of a financial safety net than some and he’s got a wife holding his life together back home. I think he sometimes forgets that. From the talk he gave, I think Andy is a single man (the mentions of “Oh, yeah, another ex-girlfriend”), giving him a certain amount of freedom, and also with a large financial safety net, having sold a pretty successful events business in 2015. It was big enough to hold a Game of Thrones premiere at the Tower of London. That’s going to sell for a pretty penny and I think he underestimates what that allows him to do. I have the twin financial safety nets of living with my parents, and saving an astonishing amount towards my house deposit by not travelling or going to comedy shows for two years, and I’m not in a position to just leave my job and my life and have a big adventure.
Anyway, between the two of them, they inspired me to race through Ask An Adventurer and to start putting some more thought into how I can do that sort of thing more, with a vague aim of at least being able to reduce my 9-5 days down to maybe three a week – maybe even two! – without taking a pay cut. That’s where Ask An Adventurer excels. Not in the adventure aspects, but in the “how to make a living” aspects.
For example, even if I’m not brave enough to start sending it out, I’ve figured out three or four potential talks I could give about my travels and adventures, depending on what kind of point you’d like your motivational speech to have. I know what soft skills you pick up from solo travel, ie independence, problem-solving, resilience. I know what soft skills you pick up from volunteering ie leadership, safeguarding, event planning, firelighting. By ordinary-people standards, I live quite an adventurous life – I can definitely do a talk on how to get more adventure into your life and therefore how to feel more fulfilled. I guess that’s why I’m not feeling any need to attempt to make travel and adventure both my life and my full-time career – I have enough going on outside of work that I don’t feel wholly unfulfilled. Next will be to actually write those talks and put the presentations together.
Second, for the sake of getting my name and face out, I’m going to really make more of an effort with YouTube. I’m halfway through editing the Summer of 2023 Iceland series. I want to do them and by the time that’s all released, one week at a time until late November, I want the Finland and the Winter in Reykjavik series’ edited and out. That takes me up until about February so if I can film a couple more trips as I go along, I’m on the track to having enough to look like “someone who makes YouTube videos” rather than “someone who makes YouTube videos occasionally“. If there’s one thing I’ve got from this blog, it’s that being consistent and persistent will get you noticed eventually. And remember, I’m not really after making this my job so I’m not looking to be 2014-Zoella levels of noticed.
Third, I’ve started a newsletter. I’ve not started collecting email addresses yet – no point in that, really, until I’m fairly sure I’ve got enough to say to be worth sending one but I’ve got some thoughts together. Many people, especially when Instagram went down a while back and since everything that’s going on with Twitter, are beginning to see the value of having your own place on the internet that isn’t dependent on a particular platform.
Fourth, finish the Iceland book! This spring, I thought it was more or less done and just needed tidying. Driving around the Ring Road over the summer taught me that I need to make some bigger edits than I’d realised and so, somehow, I’ve been inclined to put it off. I think that’s my ultimate goal – even if I never earn more than the £15 I made from my first book, I’d like to have a shelf of adventure & travel books with my name on the cover. Even if no one reads them except Tom and his mum, my biggest cheerleaders.
Fifth, and this will never actually happen – I’ve been pondering a podcast. I don’t even really listen to podcasts so the chances of me starting my own are slim to non-existent. But I read the book and he made it sound kind of appealing.
Yes, I made Al Humphreys’ book all about myself! But that’s the point of the book, really. It’s not a tale of adventure, this one, it’s a guidebook to doing it yourself. If you read it and go “Huh, that was good” and then never think about it again, then maybe it’s not the book for you. Ask An Adventurer is a call to action, you’re supposed to read it and be inspired to do some of the things it suggests.
So I guess that’s the review. If you’re after adventure, there’s not so much in this one. Try one of his others. If you’re after adjusting your work-life balance, it probably is for you, and if you’re looking to escape the 9-5, it probably is for you too.