Cory Gerlach: Harvard PhD leaves and pursues life as an adventure as a sailor and a writer.

Cory Gerlach is a writer and ocean sailor currently living on a sailboat in Guatemala. With a Harvard PhD in  biomedical science and years of government work, he decided to pivot towards a life filled with self-discovery.

He wasn't a sailor when he started. In fact, Cory Gerlach was on a successful path in a stable, government job. But 10 years in, his question was not just about his career choices, but about redefining success and embracing an adventurous life. 

He wanted to live a life aligned with his values. And he knew it wouldn't be easy.

In this episode, we’ll explore Cory’s journey from a secure federal job to sailing across the seas, uncovering insights on courage, resilience, and the beauty of living authentically. 

He shares how he planned his exit ramp, what went wrong, and how he's resiliant because he expects things to be hard. 

His essays on Substack, "Radical Paths," explore the challenges and joys of living a life true to oneself.

Substack: @RadicalPaths

LinkedIn: @CoryVGerlach

EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION is produced by Courtney Kaplan.

Website: Iconic Leadership Coaching.

Follow me on IG @iconic_owl

Connect on Linked in @courtney-kaplan 

Music by Midwest Got It (IG: midwestgotit)

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to Evolution or Revolution. Evolution or Revolution is a podcast about making the change in your professional life. I guess give us the insights about how they did it. We have the origin stories, the winds, the challenges, advice that helps you out there. I'm so glad you're here. I'm Oregon Catholic. I'm a coach and the founder of Economic Catholics. And I've always been fascinated by these kinds of transformations. Thanks for listening. Welcome to Evolution or Revolution. And today I have a very special guest. I'm so excited to have my guest here today. And before we even introduce him, I wanted to read something that he wrote recently that I think is such a perfect introduction to our conversation today. So here we go. When I told my mom I was quitting my federal job at 38 to become a writer and ocean sailor, she went silent. I know that silence. I've earned it many times. When I came out as gay, when I told her I needed to go to drug rehab, when I became her first kid to move out of state, when I started community college after three failed attempts, when I finished my Harvard PhD in biomedical science and pivoted immediately to government work instead, every time cricket. She wanted me to be safe. She watched me take swings my whole life, and she loved me too much not to be scared. Today she texted me after reading my latest stories about sailing from Bahamas to Jamaica. You are so brave and we are so proud of you. Her silence never meant what I thought it did. Welcome, Corey Gurla.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Thank you, Courtney, for having me. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah, Corey, I I've been a follower of your Substack writing. You have a Substack called Radical Path. And I invited you on the show because your essays sometimes written from the middle of the ocean include so much transparency about kind of building courage and the clarity to make a radical life transformation and also capture some of that unglamorous, honest work of dismantling one life and building another life. So I'm going to read from your subspect again. You said, and this made me laugh. Some of you are here because you're standing at your own crossroads. And some of you just want to see what happens when somebody actually does the thing. And um I love that because I think there are a lot of folks either in active life transition and life is changing very fast right now, or they're just curious to see, like, wow, if I dared to dream, if I dared to take action. So uh welcome, Corey. Would you do us the honor of giving us a bit of an introduction of who you are and um we'll get into some questions?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Um happy to. So um I am now just uh talking to you from the Rio Dolce area of Guatemala, and I'm currently sitting on my sailboat. I've been living aboard for 10 months with my husband and our cat. Um, and we have sailed over 4,500 miles to get here. Uh before we started sailing, we didn't have much experience at all. I had zero sailing experience. My husband had only sailed very small dinghies in the Boston Harbor, not the types of sailboats you live on, really. They were just enough to offer some of the basics and um and some of the like understanding of the of the fundamentals of sailing. Uh, but we decided to choose this life basically because we knew it was going to be hard and we knew that it was gonna lead us to something completely unknown and unpredictable. And that is exactly what we were after after um I mean more than 10 years of building our careers and and doing the things that a lot of people in our um age range and like socioeconomic status had had had been kind of working toward, where they had like uh like built more stability in their lives and and a little bit more predictability um so that they can do the things that they wanted to do or thought they wanted to do. And um when we had um the opportunity to buy a house in Denver, Colorado, and we considered having kids and all this stuff, and we found jobs that we really loved, you know, we kind of thought that that was our future too, that we were gonna follow, even though we're a same-sex couple, we were gonna follow a lot of the contours of what people really strive for in our society. Um, and and then slowly it kind of started to lose its luster for us. Um, and so we decided probably three years ago now, um, to not have kids. We looked into adoption really seriously and we thought that that was going to be our next chapter. We had been saving for it as well. And we decided just after doing the research that that just wasn't what we wanted. And so we went through a little bit of an identity crisis, like figuring out, okay, well, what is our life about now? And we kind of decided to just double down on our careers. And, you know, that was like the extent of what we thought was possible in a lot of ways. Um, and then we had uh a big wake-up call that just made us uh start to reevaluate what we wanted. And that was when my husband lost his stable job. I put it in quotes because you know, it feels stable. You know, the life feels stable until something unexpected happens. I've described it before as like a meteor falling from the sky um and you know hitting our world or rocking our world. And I remember one of my first Substack posts actually wasn't even about it was trying to make the point that the the meteor wasn't the job loss, it was actually what happened after when we asked ourselves what else is possible to miss. And that was like this revolutionary thing, actually, because like I said, we were kind of on this autopilot sort of um thing where we we we had everything that we could want, you know. Um, and it wasn't even that it was bad. That was like that's the secret that uh I want to also try to convey is like it wasn't like we hated our lives or we were miserable or anything like that. Or, you know, it was more just that we started to wonder what else was possible. And once we started to ask ourselves that honestly and reflect on what was important to us, I call like values-aligned life could look like uh that vision became way too alluring to pass up. And so, and we knew it would be hard. We knew it would be super hard. We like, you know, I kind of went backwards and now I'm going forwards, so I hope people are following me because this is an experimental way to tell my story here. But uh basically, um, you know, we knew it would be hard, but the what we decided we wanted in our future was more freedom as we defined it. Um, you know, freedom in the sense that we didn't have to ask permission to do what we wanted, freedom in the sense that we could like live according to the way we thought was important to us, freedom to live according to like our own definition of success, which was never money or prestige or material items anyway, even when we were in that old life, and then adventure, really just like doing like novel things that that pushed our sense of what was possible in the world and you know uh piqued our interest and curiosities and things like that. And and really the third thing was beyond freedom and adventure and also just the idea of exploring the unknown. The idea that um if we chose sailing, we felt like we wouldn't we couldn't even imagine, like we've talked about this a lot together, and we we felt like we couldn't even imagine what a a what life would look like a year from now, you know, and that excited the hell out of us actually after having this other track where our lives were actually pretty predictable. We both felt like we could just close our eyes and basically predict what the next 10 years would look like if we stayed on that old career track, and that bored us. And so the idea of sailing this crazy life where we'd have to learn something completely new, it could take us to all new places, we had no idea where it would go. Um, that that was so exciting. And and I'll just say the last thing here in my little um intro or introduction, you know, and by myself is that I had we had no idea we'd end up in Guatemala 10 months later. Like we thought we were gonna probably end up somewhere in the Caribbean islands, like Grenada or something. Um, but never Guatemala. That wasn't even our radar. And so even just reflecting on that whole journey that we have actually led to we have ended up in somewhere totally unpredictable, but like the fact that we have actually manifested this totally unpredictable life and that it's it has it has been worthwhile is a validation of that whole hypothesis, you know, that we started out with.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

So amazing. Amazing. I you know, I appreciate that there was a chapter of your life where you kind of took on the defaults, right? Of get a good job, you know, maybe buy a house, start a family. There's a lot of default expectations that it's like you said, it's done pretty good and it's fine. You can even be really happy or you know, it can be good enough in a lot of ways. So as a coach, a lot of times my clients come to me and they say, hey, I've been doing this for 10, 15 years. I can't do it for another 10 or 15 years. And these days, you don't know if it's gonna be a job in 10 or 15 years. And there's a real fear of that unknown future. So could you maybe take me to the back when you were kind of realizing, okay, we're not gonna adopt, we're not gonna, our jobs are kind of more of the same for the next 10 years. Was there was that a slow dawning realization, or what when did you come to a moment where you're like, we don't want this? We could do something else.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

There was, you know, mixed with the fact that my husband had lost his job, we went basically with the idea that we would he would just get another similar job and he would just interview with, you know, for similar roles. And sure, thankfully in his field, that was a viable track. He's a mechanical engineer and you know, he has extremely uh good skills and experience. So the assumption he would just find something else, you know. I I say that we were able to predict what we're lives would be like 10 years from now. That made some assumptions, I guess, that I wasn't laid off as a federal worker and that you know AI didn't replace my husband's work in the next whatever years or whatever. But, you know, I we didn't no one knows, right? And you know, for us, um we we knew that in a changing world with so many things outside of our control, that resilience was gonna be a skill to to build. I knew enough about how to do hard things um that that it's really a s a skill that you learn, and that when in the past I've had fears or when I've had something uh really terrible going on in my life at one time or another, that it is something you you work through and um and you do gain more resilience over time. And the idea of sailing, it was just clear that there would be need to be a lot of resilience building, um, because that um isn't the full the the sunsets and the you know cocktails or whatever, that isn't the full picture at all. And um and the reality is that life is is very precarious a lot of times. You know, you are liber literally living on the water, waves and winds change, uh, you have to, you know, go across scary uh bodies of uh of water to get where you need to go and the weather can change and all this kind of stuff. I knew that it was gonna be really hard to to do it and um and that I would we would have to figure out something financially as well. You know, that like when we quit our our jobs, uh we we didn't have an unlimited amount of money. We weren't able to retire. We knew that we had about a year of runway that we could comfortably spend after we bought the boat in order to fund this lifestyle, and then we'd have to figure out a way to be sustainable. And again, like that excited me a lot actually to just be like, okay, in this changing world, it seems like a good skill to have, actually, to to be to be really focused on like what I do have, you know, the basics. Like we have we live on a really small boat, we have but we have water, we have food, we have a place to lay our heads. Um, you know, we have when when there's wind, we capture it in the sails. We have a solar energy that powered the boat, and um, we get fresh water when we can, when we're on shore, and we have each other, like and our cat and everything, and these are our basic needs. Um and there is something also about like getting in touch with that and just like really um like feeling like that's enough. That that that really felt uh like a like a like a worthwhile um use of our energy and our and our our focus. So um so yeah, that yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Corey, I have a question for you. I think a lot of us grow up wired for approval from our parents, obviously, even my opening reading of yours, you know, wanting our parents' approval, then teachers' approval, then getting into the right school, then good grades, because that marks something than getting the right job and promotions or recognition at work or what have you. And it sounds like um would you say that you're a person who is more self-directed, that you have less emphasis on the thoughts and cares of and approval from people around you?

SPEAKER_00 13:31

It's something, it's a good question, and it's interesting actually, because I think it's something I've had to practice. I, you know, I was talking about some of the troubles that I've had throughout my life, and one of them was uh really deep addiction issues. And I went to rehab when I was 20, and um and I I was about a week sober, and I met someone who would become my first sponsor, and the first thing that he pegged me as is like he said, I can already tell two things about you. You're a people pleaser and you're an overachiever. And like those are like those are two like totally fundamental things to me. You mentioned that I appear to be someone who maybe doesn't need approval. That's actually not the case. It's something I've struggled with a lot where I I really don't like to disappoint people and I really like to be a yes person. Um, I really hate to inconvenience anybody, like even um, you know, this and this manifests in a lot of different ways. Like even me quitting my job uh before I before I chose sailing life was a real struggle. Like we were always trying to like plan only a month at a time. Like while we were rebuilding the boat, it took about 10 months before we got the boat to a state that we could actually live on it and sail. And we always took it like a month at a time and all that stuff. So I would but we knew that we were building I was building tour, probably quitting my job pretty soon. And that scared me, and not because of just the finances, um, but also because I was afraid to disappoint people, like my co-workers and my boss, and like my you know, my I was a really good performer at work, and I would have conversations with my bosses about my future all the time and like what it would look like if I was at the agency for, you know, logger. And um, I was in the middle of a really big project. I had just been staffed on a really big project about maybe a month and a half before I put in my notice. Yes. And so I knew I was probably working into up to like quitting, but that was uh and that was hard to be like, you know, to be staffed on a job and to do the thing where it's like, yeah, I'm like excited to be to be working on this project with you. And you know, we were planning on things we were gonna do in August, and I was like, I probably I might not be there, but like I had to keep that to myself, you know, and but the thing is that I just was like at the end of the day, I had to put my values first, and um I had to put my priorities first, and I had to put um like my definition of success first. And um, and none of that had to do with pleasing my boss, you know. It had to do with um connection and like I have a moral component to my values as well. And it took me a little while to actually come up with like, how am I gonna actually quit? How do you quit your job? Like I never I've never done done that in like a professional setting, and thought I thought out the way to do it. I talked to actually a friend that kind of helped me work through it a little bit. Um, you know, so I become up with the order of people I was gonna talk to first. Yeah and everyone to a T was like so happy for me.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Which was the crazy part, you know? Because like I I thought there would be like someone trying to talk me out of leaving. Um, one person in like 20 people who I had direct conversations with about leaving, one person tried to like walk me back a little bit and just made me think about some other options instead of leaving. She was like, maybe you could take a leave of absence or something, you know, and you have to quit. Like, that's crazy, right? I was like, Yeah, it is, but that's what I want.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

It's so funny that there is that personality type of like the insecure overachiever that it's someone who really wants to achieve and not disappoint. And it's fascinating to me when people make that really difficult decision to leave their job, even if it's to start another job, right? Another they got another job. That conversation to resign is very anxiety-filled. How do I deliver it? And what if I disappoint people? And it's like, oh my gosh, I appreciate the concern, but you know, 10 minutes after you walk out of that person's office, they're gonna have a new job description up and start thinking about how they're gonna move people around on the team, you know, life will continue at work.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

I like that you connected the overachiever and the people-pleasing aspect too, because that is how it manifests for me too. Like I not only am like really good at my job, but I also want people to like me and I want people to have good opinions on me, and I want people to like hear about a tough problem and be like, hey, you should talk to Corey about that, you know, and like that kind of stuff. And like it's part of overachieving for me, is like that kind of um validation is important. But again, like the way I look at a lot of these traits that I have, um people pleasing, overachieving, it sounds those almost sound like a negative connotation, but they're also assets, you know. Like I'm also good with people, you know, and people like me generally. Once, you know, like I get some trolls sometimes online stuff, obviously, like anyone, but um, but yeah, and then overachieving sounds like a bad thing, but it's actually the reason I'm able to be sitting here talking to you from a sailboat in Vladimala. Like I'm an overachiever, and that's actually a valuable thing, it turns out, in uh making your dreams come true.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Uh so I have a question. When you so um you decide you're gonna go, were there any other options besides the sailboat? Did you you guys look at your values and say, well, we could do A or B or C, or was it really sailing was the the thing that had been percolating?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Great question. Yeah, we um we considered like three options. One of them was moving to a new American city that we had never lived in. And we uh liked the idea of maybe living in a more affordable city so it could at least like allow a little bit of freedom to move. I still envision a chapter where maybe I'm teaching high school or something, which sounds funny as like as a sailor, because I'm far away from that at the moment. Um that was some like, but living in a really expensive city that would have complicated things a little, I would have had to get a huge pay cut. I think now I'd be willing to do that because that's like part of the cool thing about sailing is once you do this, you're like, actually the pay cut is not a pro like you do what you need to do to live the life you want.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

Make it happen.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

Make yeah, make less money and figure it out. I know it's not that easy, but for myself like now that I've done this life, I'm just it is a little easier for me to imagine those roads to where I want because um, you know, we also considered like a digital nomad kind of thing, so like maybe moving to Thailand, you know, some like living in Bangkok or something like that. Sure. Um, but we also had moved around enough in our lives to know that that would have probably felt pretty routine within six months or so. Uh my me and my husband have been together a long time and we've lived it we had lived in four states by the time we had gotten to Denver. Um so like five different cities, four states. We knew what moving does, you know, how moving works for yeah, it's like super exciting beforehand and while you're new for the first yeah, six months, and then it becomes normal, you know. But at that particular juncture, the excitement of like the unknown and the uncertainty about what life would look like a year from now, um, like sailing just nothing beats sailing. And um, and so what happened how sailing even came to fruition was that we we cast a really wide net on like what was possible, like on per on purpose to try to like just like with the knowledge that we're probably not thinking of every option, like moving to a new American city, becoming a digital nomad, there's gotta be a third option or two or tenth or whatever, right? So um when we identified our the values that were important to us, which were like adventure, freedom, exploring the unknown, building resilience in new th with new challenges, those kinds of things. And so we found this like world of budget sailing where people even our age, even with way less money than we had, we had a little bit of money saved um because we had been saving for an ad for an adoption, like I mentioned earlier. And so that ended up becoming our like boat money, which you know I um I I tell people now, like if you if these kinds of ideas of making a radical life transition are appealing now to start saving if you can, even if you don't know what you're saving for, because in our case it took about six years probably of saving before we could even begin to feel like we could quit our jobs and live a even like this lifestyle, which um the boat was a little, you know, it's a capital investment. It's like uh cost of like a luxury car. So in but we had known uh people who had far less money, who were far less hardworking, and who were like far less resourceful than us who had figured out how to live this life.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

That's kind of a funny way to identify people like less hardworking, less resilient, real, you know, those both.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

I mean, it's I it was I I would I say it with like all the love of my heart to be honest, but I've always had the idea that if other people can do the thing that I want, then I can do it too. And it's even more obvious, but it's even more obvious when you realize that you have like maybe a little, like some advantages, even over the those people that were able to do it. And that's why saline, even though it's it was so hard and everything, um, it still felt really doable, which was kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

There's three points that you just made that I think are so important that I want to kind of underscore. The first being just get honest about finances, right? Even if you have to just straight up change jobs. It's so hard to make any kind of change in your life if you don't know what kind of material resources you may have or don't have or whatever it is, to just be honest about that. And I know a lot of people are unwilling to look at that, but it's such a sense of freedom and control when you can see your material resources and understand we need to save, we need to cut back, we don't want to save a cutback that limits where else we might be going in life or what have you. And then you mentioned the community aspect of the scaling community of people that are doing the budget scaling community. And you know, it's so funny, almost anything that you can think of that you might want to do with your life, there's already people out there doing it and they're in a community of some kind, especially with the internet now. You know, you can find them and they're in, you know, subreddits or communities or newsletters or whatever that is, which is enormously helpful to see someone actually or a community of people actually doing the thing and can help you say, like, oh gosh, I didn't realize that aspect. This isn't for me, or maybe I want to refine what I'm trying to do next. And then truly I do the exact same thing that I look around me and I think, look, that person did X, Y, Z. And if they did it, certainly I could do it. And maybe that's naive or whatever, but it's worked really well throughout throughout my life. So I think that that's such a great, a great way to consider kind of getting out of your own way and looking for evidence and support in other places.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

That's exactly what it is. Yeah, just evidence that you can do it, you know, and um and I always try to encourage people too. Like that's one of the routes to find evidence. The other route is to do like little experiments with yourself, you know, to know uh whether you'll one, like the thing, and two, whether you'll you'll you can do the thing or learn the thing, or three, like what you what you don't like, you know, about the thing. And it turned out also that my husband and I were really complimentary on our skills. I I don't really have mechanical skills, nor do I have like mechanical confidence. And I think that if I was on my own, I wouldn't have chosen sailing. Um, I probably would have chosen like a digital nomad route, but probably off the beaten path. That's always been really important to me is just like doing something different again, where like there's more adventure that way for me, and that's really uh valuable. Um, but for me and my husband, it was just a really complimentary thing. I knew we knew sailing would be like a really good combination of both of our skills, skill sets.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

I I wondered about that when you said he was a mechanical engineer. I was like, well, that must be handy.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Yeah. And I really I really appreciate the the financial part too, because it's hard to talk about because like I know that we are very privileged, that we had really good incomes and we were living below our means. And I know talentless people who try to live below their means and it's just still impossible, or they get ahead for a second and they break an arm or something. And in America, that can be a really expensive uh accident or you know, unfortunate event. So I know like we so I I I I say it with humility, but there was a um there was a a point when we were really like working out the financial piece and building the spreadsheets to see like do we have the money to afford a boat, what kind of boat? And the answer was a small boat um with no bells and whistles. Like we don't even have a working refrigerator on our boat. We don't have a water maker that converts salt water into freshwater. That's a thing that people have. You know, we don't have uh fancy mechanical equipment that you know helps us change the sales and the sail shapes. We don't have uh robots that lift our anchor for us. We do it all by hand, it's all manual. That was the way that we had to do it in order to make it to make it work. Uh at one point, my husband had actually gotten a job offer before we left Denver, and it was a really good job offer, and we decided that waiting would be its own risks. Like we've what if we stay and then we change our minds? Or you know, I did sometimes we laugh being like, okay, maybe that would have been a good thing, we would have found something different. But what I mean is like we talk ourselves out of it or like we forget.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

And it's so weird to me, it seems like it happens so frequently when we make a big life decision, okay, I'm gonna leave the job, or okay, I'm gonna leave go live on the boat, or we make a big life decision, and it's almost like the universe gives us a little trickle back of like, are you sure? And some opportunity comes out of the blue. That's not what you want or where you're headed, but it feels like it's tempting. And it's almost like the final exam there of like, nope, no job, we're gonna go do this thing. It's happened so frequently in my own life of that last, you know, that last minute offer or that last minute opportunity that which really requires that you kind of double down on the plan.

SPEAKER_00 27:40

Yeah, you know, the thing is though, with the sailing life, like that kept happening. And it's funny because some people who are superstitious or looking for signs or whatever you want to call it may interpret that stuff as being like a sign that maybe they need to not do the thing or whatever, right? And like for us, um, the next one came when we bought when we bought our boat and we learned pretty soon after we bought it and signed on the dotted line and transferred the money that we needed a new engine for the boat. Um, we were really optimistic that it would work. Um the we but we had um we had like waived the C trial to actually test the um the engine because it the logistics of doing the C trial in our particular case would have been really like onerous and um and we loved our boat. And so by the the before we signed on the dotted line, both looked at each other and and said, Are we willing to like accept the consequences of whatever happens? Like, for example, if the engine doesn't work, and we said yes, let's do it. And then we found out the engine didn't work and it um but and it ended up costing like three times what we had estimated when we had made that decision, which was insane. It was like like he uh my husband came home that day and I literally felt like I was just punched in the head and I couldn't even breathe when he told me how much it was it was looking like it would cost. And then um, yeah, and like I said, like people some people might look at that as being like, okay, this is a sign that we're on the wrong track here or whatever. Or I mean, of course, others would say, like, we can't afford that. Like, that's that's horrible. I mean, thankfully we've been like really conservative this whole time with finances, and so one of the selling points of our boat is that we did we got it cheaper than our budget uh allowed, and so we had some wiggle room there if we did have unexpected expenses. So I we kept on having that stuff. Even when we bought the boat, um, we thought it would take about three months to get it in the water before we started sailing. It took 10 months, and that might not sound like a lot in retrospect, and in retrospect, it isn't a lot. That's like the secret of doing hard things is that after you do them, it doesn't really matter how long it took, is the important part of that you freaking did it, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Um, but like three the difference between three months and ten months when you're in the that time is huge. It was like we were planning on November, and November passing was December, and then it was January, and and we just had no idea like how long it would take, like because every new project that we knew that we needed to do, it was this like Pandora's box of like, okay, will it be a one-month project or will it be a two-month project, or will it be a one-week project? Like, we just didn't know until we started digging, and um, and that's common for sailing. Like, we knew that that that would be a a case, but like the the thing is we knew that we had to do it. We told ourselves like early on that if we do this, we're gonna do this. And even like when we started sailing, um, we knew that there was gonna be a chance that we hated it. Like I said, we I we didn't have much sailing experience. I'd never been on a s I hadn't been on a sailboat more than two times in my life, and the ones I was on were tiny, they weren't even it's a whole different world, you know. And uh the first night like we slept at anchor, we I had already quit my job and we had already like got rid of our apartment in North Carolina that we were renting while we were fixing up the boat, and like we were all in, but we had committed to um to a year on the boat, whether we hated it or not, because we knew that it aligned with our values. We had done the digging and the research to know that um like that this was a very likely thing that would that would end up working out for us really well and lead us to like a life that we wanted and a lifestyle that we wanted. And so we like we had trust that we would be able to make it work for us. Um and we never hated it. Like even when it was miserable, which is funny to say, like even when it was miserable, we still kind of like it. Because like life is sometimes miserable. I mean, sometimes we have days where just things are hard and all that, and uh like before it's a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

That speaks to the resilience. Well, that speaks to the resilience piece that you mentioned of being able to kind of do hard things and having that be a skill that you're able to manage hard things or m some misery um without kind of throwing in the towel and saying it's not for me.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yep. It's important to separate the the the negative feelings that you're having while doing a thing and negative feelings about a thing. Because like it would be easy to say, man, today was really hard and I'm like really depressed and anxious about whatever, and then think like, oh, I know why. It's because we live on a sailboat, and it's hard, you know. But a lot of the times that we felt like that, honestly, it was just because it's life. And like, even if we were back in Denver in our old house, I remember I would just like be able to at least have like the presence of mind to realize, like, oh, I had days like this even when I was back in Denver. Like, actually it was kind of worse because I was just like also not even hopeful about the future, really, you know, in the same way that I am now, and stuff like that. And I was just like counting on the days to the weekend, like a lot of people. And so even when I was um even like I I actually had a pretty rough day yesterday. Um, you know, I mentioned this cat that we have on board. It's been the delight of our lives to have a cat on the boat, and she's 18. Um, it's very fun to just give her the second life. It's it's just really great. And something I haven't written about on Substack yet, but happened yesterday. Um, she fell in the water at the marina, but she had fallen off a neighbor's boat into the water, and she was howling and all this stuff, and it was really traumatic. I had to jump in the water to get her. Uh, and like thankfully she was able to swim. I never knew that. Uh, it was very unexpected. Um, she usually walks around on deck on our boat and we're like watching her, and she's never made a misstep. And I I actually really am starting like I been starting to trust her a lot to be like, okay, I think you know, cats cats know how to walk in crazy places and stuff. So I'm still not 100% sure how she felt. Um yeah, yesterday was it really shook me up. I really was like, oh my god, but that could have been it, and I would have been partly responsible, you know, and I would have felt horrible and all that stuff. Um but like it still it doesn't I I don't let it like be a judgment or uh you know, a I don't let it be like the judgment on this thing. I'm I'm just more like this is life, this is our life, our life is very unusual right now. Uh but we chose it for a lot of reasons and our cat's super happy. She after I dried her off, she just took a nap. Like it was a normal day.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

She's moving on. So, Corey, this is amazing. So you're waiting for your boat to get ready to go. It's 10 months instead of three months. Finally, after that, someone says, Okay, you're good to go, project finished, you're free to leave, or what have you. Is there a moment where you're out on the water or starting this where it just kind of dawned on you, like, oh my god, we did it, or are you kidding me? This can't be our life, or something that was that realization of like, oh my gosh, it's happening.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Oh, constantly. I mean, constantly, every night, like every day. Um, yeah, the first day uh that we left on the sailboat, we had we had planned a 15 mile sail up the river to like the next little sailing town in North Carolina. Um, I hadn't really mentioned this detail in this conversation yet, but yeah, we had moved to North Carolina to buy the sailboat, and that's where we did the refit. And um that sale, like while we were just on a one-way sale, you know, we had told everyone at the boat yard that we were leaving, and they were all like, What do you mean? Uh because like you know, no one gives you approval to go. You have to decide for yourself that this thing is capable and we are capable enough, and we are going to figure it out along the way. And if something breaks, we'll fix it upriver. We're not gonna wait because enough people had told us that if you wait, you're just gonna wait forever, it's never gonna be ready. Like you need to just go. And that's actually one of the most valuable things I've learned on this whole adventure, and I've actually I'm applying it to literally everything that you basically it there's actually a lot of wisdom in like starting before you're ready, or like starting before you feel ready, right? And uh, and so we just left. And that night, like it or that evening, I guess, as we were anchoring, it was so scary, actually. The way that uh you pull down the sails when you're sailing in a sailboat is like you want to face the boat into the wind, and that helps uh take the that helps like depower the sails and it makes them easier to pull down is when you're faced into the wind. Uh my husband had like said, okay, I'm gonna go out on on deck and like pull down the sails, aim into the wind, like steer the boat into the wind. And I didn't even know how to sail into the wind. I didn't know I didn't know where the wind was coming from. It sounds like an obvious thing to do, just sail into the w, you know, point into the wind. But it's not like if you think about it, next time you're out like feeling the wind, um, try to try to try to figure out what direction it's coming from. It's not always obvious, actually.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

And uh and then also when you're steering a boat, it's not obvious which way to push the tiller and all that stuff. And so um he went out on deck and said, I have to do it now, you got this. And I was I I thought he was gonna fall off the boat. That's like the one thing, like the biggest fear I have is one of us falls off the boat because that's like a game over situation, actually, on a sailboat, is when you're out in the middle of the water, like no one's gonna come and get you. Like, and yeah, it's a very bad thing to fall off a sailboat. Um, but we had pulled down the sails, we had figured it out, like we had got, we had anchored, and I made dinner that night. I don't remember what I made exactly, but we had watched the sunset in the cockpit, and and we're just like, wow, this is our life. And I remember watching like a fishing boat um come by and they were throwing out all their nets, and we were just uh on the sailboat, and we had our our boat was full of food um we had stocked up on um and we had enough diesel on board and we had our cat and uh we had tons of fresh water. We can carry like six weeks of fresh water on the boat, and I just remember feeling like wow, like we don't need anything else, actually. And I think it was like a Wednesday, and I was like, wow, and I don't have to go to work tomorrow, you know? Wow. And then the way that we looked at this whole adventure from the beginning was to treat it, it was way too overwhelming to just like take it all. We actually had the goal of sailing around the world, and that's how we started out this whole adventure was like we're gonna sail around the world, and now we don't really say that as much anymore because that is just such an outrageous thing to say. It turns out it the world is a big place, as we know. Obviously, people sail around the world and we could do it if we wanted to, but it it's like more of like a five, six-year thing, you know, it doesn't just happen right away. Um, it feels similar to saying like, hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna start a Fortune 500 company. The way that we handled this whole sailing thing was to take it in phases and to be like, and we knew, like I said earlier in this conversation, we had to at some point get to the phase where this thing becomes financially sustainable, but that wasn't the phase we were in right away. We had a runway, and so phase one was learning how to sail.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Wow, starting at the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Yeah. And so those little milestones of like anchoring the first night, surviving the night, not washing ashore, pulling up the anchor the next day, sailing to the next spots, like that's another skill that isn't something you're born with, like you have to learn and like all these things you just have to learn. And um, and that was phase like phase one, I we figured would last a few months, you know. It was gonna be a it was gonna take a long time before we knew how to sail or felt comfortable, especially because we were ratcheting up the difficulty over time. We knew that at some point we were gonna do not just day sales, but also overnight sails, and we were gonna go instead of of some of the protected bays and rivers in North Carolina, we were gonna go out into the ocean at some point and like we were gonna work our way up to all that. And then phase two for us was learning how to thrive on the sailboat and like be happy day to day and like we're able to build routines day to day that we that make us happy, and like that was phase two. And phase three was to figure out how to make this thing sustainable, like financially. And right now we're in phase three, but it's all more possible to break it up like that. And so each phase along the way has been um a series of just like, yeah, like we're doing this. Like, you know, one of the other big memorable parts is the first time when we sailed out into the ocean, and we had um in we had a two-night sail from Cape May, New Jersey, which is the southern part of New Jersey, to New York City. And that was like one of our big dreams was to sail to New York City, but also sail like past Manhattan, like up the East River. We sailed from uh Cape May to New York City and and we, you know, overnight and just sailing through the night. And I still have some pictures of us like during that passage, and I look at them and I it feels like one of those events that feels just so formative. And um that was a big one. We actually did make it to New York City and it's a milestone, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:30

It's a milestone, it's a dream achieved, it's something that you wanted to do and you did it, and to celebrate that moment and mark that moment is important.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Yeah, and you become someone different afterwards. Like, you know, it's almost like a dividing line or something. And I've had a lot of those. When we tell sailors that we've been sailing nonstop for 10 months, um, they're like, wow, that's a long time because it is, but I also can't believe it's only been 10 months because I have we have experienced so much growth since then. We went from doing two nights uh on the ocean, we ended up going to Newport, Rhode Island, and then we came back down south and worked our way to the Caribbean because hurricane season was ending, and that was our big goal was to get into the Caribbean when we as soon as we could. And we had done a five night sail like on the ocean, and that was an insane experience. We actually had some uh major equipment failure when we were out like a hundred miles off the coast.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

Um yeah, and but we were just like working our way up, like it's huge, and it it speaks to the fact that we never stop growing, although some people tend to choose to stop growing, there's no limit to the things you can learn or become or achieve. Um and especially I appreciate that you broke that up into phases or into the next leg or the next few nights because that makes it more possible than stepping onto your boat in San Marcus and around the world. That's exactly it's overwhelming, yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

Yeah, I I totally I totally agree. Yeah, that's um I mean we had to figure that out like empirically, you know, it wasn't something that someone told us to do. I mean, this whole thing has been kind of trying our best uh to to to you know to make this dream happen, like to get to the third phase where this thing becomes sustainable basically. Um and and then having to figure out how to get there. And you talk to if you talk to 20 sailors, they'll all give you 20 different opinions on how to do it. That's one of the other big surprises of this whole journey. I mean, it's probably similar for um anyone that does like hard things, like I'm sure parents, like when you're pregnant and you're walking around and I'm sure you get unsolicited advice from a million people about how to you know boy, do you handle parenthood or whatever. And at the end of the day, you gotta just like do what you think is right and make some mistakes, break it up into phases where you're just like, okay, like we're keeping the baby alive one more day. You have to work your your way up to whatever you do. And one the other thing I I thought of when you were talking about um you know growth, I guess, is like, you know, I think there are there's something to be said about comfort, and that comforts are not inherently a bad thing. Like, I actually we're at a marina right now in Guatemala, it's very comfortable. I actually wrote about this in my last um newsletter. I called it like the benefits of convenience. You know, after we spent 10 months uh like on anchor and we didn't even have a working fridge and all this stuff, like uh, you know, another thing we didn't have is showers, regular showers and laundry. Like all these logistics are actually really complicated um when you're living on a sailboat. And at a at the marina, we have all that stuff. You know, we also have an easy, easy access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and it's beautiful and amazing. What I would say is like this is this is comfortable. Like we still don't have air conditioning and it's like a hundred degrees here, you know, so um we don't have everything, but but there is something. Be said about that. And um the way I'm thinking about it is I'm using this time of comfort to still grow in ways that are important to me. I'm also resting, and it's kind of funny because we've been here in Guatemala for like nine days, and I gave myself seven days of rest before I really started to like put the pressure on myself to start to figure out what to do for um like my next professional move. But um, but there's still a part of me that's so tired, and um and so I am like just letting myself be comfortable that I don't it doesn't all have to be a challenge. Like, you know, I do like challenge and I do believe in hard work and I do believe things need to be hard in order to not only achieve a goal or to make a dream happen, but also to have me aim that needs to be kind of challenging and struct in hard, I think. But um not every like there is something to be said about just enjoying comfort and uh and you know, and I talk to people who um a lot of people, a lot of sailors that uh we meet are retired and um and they're they had really busy careers and really busy lives. They raised families, you know, ran businesses, whatever. And and I think that's great. I I I think growth is still something that can that is that's important to give us like some some meaning in our lives, no matter where we're at.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

Yeah, absolutely. And I also want to add here, because I know a lot of my listeners might be dealing with burnout or just total overwhelm at work or exhaustion from work. And I want to say two things. One, that's not a great place to start to be creative about where your life's gonna go next. It's just not, you know, you're exhausted and burned out and worn down. That's not a very creative spot to be. And number two, to your point, to learn how to rest. And I suspect for a lot of people, the rest they need is much more than they think it should be, right? So you hear someone who's burned out who says, Oh, well, I'm gonna take a long weekend or we're gonna take a week vacation, two-week vacation. And it can take people a couple years to fully become restored and see some of the other options that are available in their life just because you don't have the creative juice, you know.

SPEAKER_00 46:12

Yeah. And, you know, for us, it was really like I you talked about the financial piece being really important and the financial planning. And we did build this into our schedule and our plan where, you know, like I mentioned at the outset, we have uh we had about a year of runway uh where we could feel really comfortable just not making an income for about a year before we had to start really focusing on that. Um, and it's been about 10 months since I left my job. And I've been able to make a little bit of money along the way, which has been another surprising thing, did make a little bit of uh income for my Substack and just my writing. And also I uh work with clients on on um helping them with their own uh life transitions because I I turn it turns out that discovering our values and building a vision that is aligned with our values and finding a plan to actually like bridge the gap between where we're at now and where we want to be, and then making sure that that vision is is like durable and not just like something that looks pretty but actually doesn't fit. Um something I talk about a a lot with clients actually is like you want an average weekday to be like something you enjoy, you know, uh once you once you get there. And that takes some some real thinking through and all that. And you know, I and people uh need you could need some help with that. And so I've been able to um to to work with with folks along the way and make a little bit of cash that has helped extend the runway again. So even now, uh one of the reasons we chose Guatemala was that it's relatively affordable to to live here, so our savings is actually going the r like further. And so like I bring all this up because I wouldn't be c talking about my life from a position of like calmness and like um like as much fulfillment if I was also stressing about like how I'm gonna feed us tomorrow. Great point.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

And so like I know we're okay. And even that year, like I said, I work along the way, so it's actually a little bit longer than that now. And I'm like thinking, wow, like I think we've actually I think phase three is actually looking okay. Like I think we are sustainable, actually. You're like thinking more about like, wow, like okay, what what do I want to do next? You know, like where do my curiosities lie? And where what am I excited about? And what are these people who I really admire doing? And what can I learn from them? And what if I talk to that guy who is doing that cool thing, or that lady that's really nice and like interesting, and like where would that lead? And for us, we we um we're not done working. Like, even if we had you know, even if money wasn't an issue, we would still be looking for work because or like work that was really fulfilling because um, you know, I think I I I think a lot of people who who are listening to this can relate who have worked their butts off to get to the careers that they that they built or like the academic success or the business success that they've had. Not everyone's just doing it because of the money and the fame or the prestige or whatever. The people we we really want to work hard and we really want to like work to the next step and we really want to see what's possible for us professionally and stuff like that. And what I found is that that desire didn't end just because I went and lived on a sales route. It's actually still strong. The thing that's changed is just my um my definition of success is a lot more personal and um it has very little to do with money beyond like my basic needs and stuff like that. Sure. It's more about curiosity and excitement and um and impact is another thing that you know is really important to me. So like yeah, so so that's the other thing. It's like I'm not I'm not preaching, I like I'm not like I think that's clear. I think you mentioned this a little bit uh in the outset that I didn't just like move onto a sailboat to retire into the sunset. Like this is actually I actually look at this as part of my career in a lot of ways, that this is experience and these are skills and these are perspectives that you know are going to be useful in whatever I do next professionally.

SPEAKER_01 50:31

Absolutely. And I like your point that, you know, I think we're wired to want to make a contribution in a meaningful way, whatever that is, whether you're um part of a community or you are the main person that takes care of your family, or you're out in the world, you know, making a way that way. There's no meaning that's derived from that. And I do see some people in their midlife, kind of midlife crisis, like if you look at the stereotypical midlife crisis where they start to kind of run away from what they had. And it's like a scramble instead of a thoughtful thing of like, hey, where is my life now? What's important to me now? And how might I build a life that fits who I am and what I care about and what the people that I care for need? How do I make that happen? And there's lots of possibilities there. I I love the the different different folks who are sailing, having different ways that they fulfill their own dream, right? We're out here for two years and we're gonna go home. We're out here for 10 years. We're this is what we do. I'm retired, I'm not going back. Lots of ways to get there. And that's the excitement of it to me as you were describing that. I just felt um so inspired and excited about the possibilities for people who there is no dead end. There's always a creative way forward.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

Yeah. And I, you know, the the part that I'm at right now in this journey that is there are possibilities, even when we have no idea what the heck they are. Like that's something that I've had to get comfortable with. You know, I talked about throughout this conversation is the idea of the unpredictability being actually a a feature um and something to embrace. Because I think if I decided what I was doing next, I mentioned that I do coaching, but actually I'm I want it to be a very small coaching practice. I I don't want more than a like a couple clients at a time, actually, even now that I'm like have a more predictable life, even because I really do want to leave room for myself to do something totally unexpected. This it feels very similar now, uh as like I did when I was in college or in high school, when I would think like, what do I want to do for my career? And I would just think about everything that I knew about, and I'd be like lawyer, doctor, firefighter, police officer, uh teacher, um, you know, nurse. Like I could think of like 10 things, you know?

SPEAKER_01 52:54

Yeah, the top 10. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:55

And none of those sounded good, actually. And I'm like, damn, like like that sucks, and you know, or something. But the reality is like most of us actually, it turns out, are not doing those obvious things. We what we did first is just kind of followed our interests, and then we like figured out what other people were doing who were doing something similar who had similar interests, and then people told us about new things that we had never even heard about, and then we got a job, and then someone else told us about some other opportunity, and then we went and did that, and blah blah blah. And probably, you know, if we're 10 or 20 years into our career right now, uh we could all like think about like, yeah, like I actually would have never predicted what I'm doing now. And the way I'm approaching my life now is trying to build that in to the as a reality that like if I were to choose right now the thing that I'm doing next in addition to my small coaching practice, I feel like that would actually be a shortcut. It wouldn't be giving myself enough freedom to explore. And so I've started having conversations with people now like about like what else is possible and based on my experience, my interests, and my passions, and everything I've learned up until this point. And my hypothesis is that wherever I end up in a year will be very similar to, you know, how it was for my sailing journey, where I have a I'm pretty confident that whatever I'll end up be doing isn't on my radar right now. It's gonna be something totally new and obscure. But I think that's like the cool part, you know, and so yeah, I think a lot of people are like in a certain situation, maybe like where they feel stuck and um they're not able to see a way out. And I think what I just said actually applies to those those situations because I was I was there too, where you don't actually just figure out where you want to be and do that thing. Um you like you you you first admit actually that this isn't quite the life I want. And that actually is one of the most empowering things that I found for myself um when I can admit that out loud. And and that's just the beginning of that next hearing. And then the questions are like, what do I need? You know, and from there you start to be on you can be honest with yourself and you know, you answer in your own voice about like what you need. And then you can start to to to fill in what that looks like and and then look to see like okay, what do other people with these needs do? And how do they do it? And like, you know, one of the reasons I mentioned the ten months in the boatyard and like even the ten months of sailing to get here is like it is a journey and um you don't just get it right away. And um even if you did, you probably wouldn't be that s as satisfied with it actually, because it'd just be it'd just be like another thing you buy or whatever. Um and the important part I think is to yeah, break it off, break it up into bite-sized pieces and and and accepting that fact that it's okay not to have an answer right now. It's okay to explore for a little while, it's okay to just have conversations with people, including like maybe your partner or your kids or your your parents or whatever it is who are expecting a certain thing out of you, um and to just really explore where that where that leads. Um and you know, like something I like to just leave people with actually is that that um it's really hard to make a big change in like 30 days. And um I think that the kinds of big changes that I talk about or that I've done would be actually a little reckless maybe to do that quickly. Um but I it it is possible to make a big change in like 12 to 18 months, and you don't need to wait 12 to 18 years, and you don't have to like wait till someday, maybe you can actually like 12 to 18 months is a super powerful period. Like and that's a really incredible amount of time where you can like you can learn a new language pretty well in that a lot amount of time. You could probably learn how to pay to play the piano very well in that amount of time, or you know, you can get a certificate in some sort of new thing that you wanted to do, or um finding a new job, like even that you maybe don't have another ton of experience in in that amount of time. You know, like that's that's some real amount of time there to to do the next thing and um and and it's worth it to just like to give yourself that kind of window to um to explore.

SPEAKER_01 57:37

Absolutely, absolutely. We overestimate what we can do in kind of one day or 30 days, and we truly underestimate what could happen in a year or a couple years, right? And so widening your um timeline there is really powerful. So, Corey, I'm gonna include a link to Radical Paths. That's your Substack. So if people are looking for you, they can find you at Radical Paths on Substack, and I'll put the link in the show notes. I don't, you know, I'll I'll close by saying I came across you on Substack. I didn't know you, and I just read your work. You're a beautiful writer. The work is the writing is so engaging and so wonderful. And I don't know who takes the photos, if it's you or your husband. They're beautiful. I mean, we didn't really get into just the beauty of this um expedition. Wonderful. It's really rich and inspiring. So even if you're, like you said at the beginning, even if you're just looking to see what happens to somebody who finally does the thing, you've got to follow Corey on Substack. It's it's really great.

SPEAKER_00 58:37

Yeah, I still try, you know, even if my pros and my iPhone camera are showing something beautiful, I always try to still show the the good, the bad, and the ugly. You do. Um but I and I always encourage people to not trust people who don't show the good, the bad, and the ugly about some sort of lifestyle because um yeah, the ug the good, the you know, the bad and the ugly aren't necessarily evidence that you shouldn't be doing it. They're actually just more evidence about what a Thursday will look like, right? And um, what you're getting into.

SPEAKER_01 59:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:09

Yeah, I appreciate it so much. And I also I'm on LinkedIn, so folks are interested there. I actually post quite a lot lately on LinkedIn and I've been really enjoying that um journey as well. It's like a little bit of a different audience than Substack, and uh but it's it's been really cool to um to explore there as well. So uh I try to uh post both on Substack and LinkedIn pretty regularly.

SPEAKER_01 59:32

I'll include that link too. And to close, I'm gonna read another little piece of your writing that I read and honestly um really loved the way you captured this. I get my glasses here. On Wednesday, sailing 800 miles to Guatemala felt impossible. But tonight we head west in our little sailboat for an eight-day passage, the same way I've done what felt impossible before. The same way I stayed sober, one day at a time, aimed for what's true. The same way I got through school, one day at a time, aimed at the next question. The same way I saved enough cash to quit my job, one day at a time, aimed at what was mine, the same way I became an ocean sailor, one day at a time aimed towards who I knew I could be. Now we sail, one day at a time, aimed west. Thank you, Cory Girl.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:33

Thank you, Cordy.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:37

Thanks for listening to Evolution or Revolution. If you're interested in learning more about my coaching work, please go to my website at iconifadershipcoaching.com to read more about how I work by partnering with people like you become more grounded and reconnected to their piece of power. If you have a friend who could benefit from this podcast, please share to leave a review and helping people like you find us. Check out the show notes for more resources and more information. A big thank you to Midwest Got It for Podcast Music, and I look forward to and I look forward to our next episode.