Roz Savage

Have you heard of Roz Savage? I hadn't until the other day I saw in a list of CNN articles: "The woman who's rowing across the Pacific." That caught my attention and I checked it out. Which prompted me to visit her site, rozsavage.com. She's already crossed the Atlantic alone in a rowboat. Now, she's tackling the Pacific in three separate stages; stage two is almost complete.

She had been a management consultant in London and decided in her mid-thirties there had to be more to life than "four grey walls," as it says on her site. Apparently, per CNN, she wrote two obituaries at the time, one describing her life if she stayed on doing what she'd been doing and another as if she'd taken a jump and followed her dreams, doing what she'd always wanted to do. From there, she made a break with her old life and pursued adventure.

She ended up rowing because it achieved a number of objectives: it was environmentally friendly, solo (to test her capabilities without relying on someone else), challenging (so she could grow as a person), unusual (so she could make a living writing and talking about it) and physical.

Right now, on this leg, she's on day 104 at sea, has traveled more than 3,000 miles and rowed more than 1.2 million oar strokes.

I find her story inspiring. She had thoughts of "is this all there is to life?" She used those thoughts and her two obituaries as a way to trigger a new path. Obviously, the path she chose to find more meaning in her life was quite extreme, but I can learn from it to enhance my own life.

On the "Inspiration" page of her website, it recounts sample themes from her speaking engagements. To (almost) quote (for some reason, I couldn't highlight the text on her page to copy and paste here), she says:

• Make the connection between present action and future outcome. If you repeat the same actions 365 times, will you be where you want to be in a year's time?
• No matter how big your goal, you can get there if you make a plan and execute it with discipline, determination and dedication. One stroke at a time
• Don't waste mental energy asking yourself if you can do something. You won't know until you try. Just do it - you may surprise yourself.

I have plans for our future, but I can honestly say today's actions are not always consistent with achieving them. What I take from this is you can set big goals, even ones that might seem crazy from where you're sitting today. But, once you set those goals, you need to execute on them and make your actions every day help you achieve them.

Time to get a little crazy and start thinking "out of the box" I've got myself in. I need to start imagining all sorts of different futures to see which one is the one worth driving for. A purpose-driven life is a far more appealing life than the static, routinized one I find myself in today.