Bias Towards Action: The Adventure List(s) | Ep 572

What It Covers

Emily W and Emily C, who met through ChooseFI meetups in 2025, share frameworks for building intentional adventure into daily life. They present the Adventure List with four travel levels and Little Adventures for local experiences, demonstrating how constraints enable experimentation and self-discovery while building meaningful FI friendships through vulnerability and consistent action.

Key Questions Answered

• •Four-Level Travel Framework: Level one involves visiting destinations to see attractions. Level two adds classes or retreats for deeper learning and connections. Level three extends stays to months with self-directed exploration, creating mental maps and routines. Level four incorporates work or volunteer commitments where time becomes structured, leading to authentic relationships like wedding invitations. Each level offers different textures of experience without hierarchy, allowing travelers to match adventures to current constraints and desired depth of cultural immersion.
• •Little Adventures List: Maintain a shared Google document cataloging local activities discovered through Atlas Obscura, community Facebook groups, city newsletters like Axios, and friend recommendations. Document completed adventures to visualize accumulated experiences over years. This removes mental load from planning spontaneous outings, enabling planned spontaneity where any free afternoon can become memorable. The list grows as interests emerge—discovering enjoyment of bungee fitness leads to adding trampoline parks, rage rooms, aerial silks, and ropes courses.
• •Friendship Acceleration Through Vulnerability: FI community friendships deepen rapidly by skipping surface-level conversation and embracing vulnerability immediately. Extend invitations once without pressure—suggesting coffee after meetups signals openness regardless of acceptance. Send relevant articles or event invitations based on expressed interests to maintain connections. Accept that not every invitation succeeds; rejection provides information about compatibility. Emily W maintains daily text relationships with friends met at Camp FI two years prior through consistent, low-stakes outreach.
• •Unwinding Life Decisions: Emily C spent one year deliberately reversing major commitments that no longer served her authentic self, including rehoming four horses, selling truck and trailers after a concussion prompted reflection. This unwinding period involved significant grief but created space for three-week Portugal trips, Maine cabin stays, and month-long slow travel experiments. Recognize that entering commitments feels easier than exiting them, but removing constraints enables testing long-held dreams like working on dude ranches or international living.
• •Constraint-Based Experimentation: Emily C travels sixty to eighty days since July despite working full-time by stacking experiences—learning Portuguese while maintaining Brazilian client relationships, house-swapping with friends for four-week Florida stays, staying in hostels to meet people. Emily W travels one hundred ten days annually while building a house by hand, using Trusted House Sitters for twenty-five free nights and Hyatt points for twenty-five more. Constraints force creative solutions that often prove more enriching than unlimited resources.
• •Measuring Intangible Progress: Track adventure experiences with the same rigor applied to financial metrics. Emily C uses physical calendars to visualize social commitments and ensure adequate novel experiences weekly. The Little Adventures document creates accountability by showing accumulated memories versus intentions. Weekly check-ins, inspired by Jillian Johnsrud's Retire Often framework, assess whether daily actions align with stated priorities. What gets measured gets managed—apply FI community's tracking discipline to friendship, fitness, and adventure alongside net worth.