Barefoot Beyond Limits with Ken Posner

This is a podcast about adventure and how , through our adventures , we can overcome the challenges of life that come our way . While I expect you will learn some things about different adventures , this show will entertain you . Each episode will feature a different guest or guests , as they share experiences and stories from the different adventures they have been on .

Not only will you be entertained , but you will also hear the failures and trials each guest faces and what they have done or are doing to overcome the hardships that come their way . My goal is to take each of us on a journey through the experiences of my guests , with the hope that you'll be entertained and inspired to overcome your day-to-day challenges .

After all , it's not all about the destination , as it is about the journey . Welcome to Journey with Jake . This show is all about people who chase adventure , push limits and live life with purpose . Be sure to follow me on Instagram at journeywithjakepodcast . And , don't forget , you can also catch full episodes on YouTube .

This podcast is proud to be part of the PodMatch Podcast Network , connecting podcasters with incredible guests from around the world . Check out podmatchcom forward slash network . Today's guest , ken Posner , is a barefoot endurance runner who's completed the grid , climbing all 35 Catskill peaks every month for a year .

Beyond the physical feat , ken shares powerful lessons on simplicity , mindset and pushing your limits . I walked away from this conversation with a new perspective on how we move through life , literally and figuratively . If you enjoyed this episode , check out episode 41 with ultra marathon legend Dean Karnazes for even more inspiration from the world of extreme endurance .

Let's get to my conversation

with Ken Posner . This is fun . I've got barefoot Ken with me today . Ken , welcome to Journey with Jake .

To balance the intensity of work , the demands , competitiveness , I got into a little bit of running and that became trail running and then ultra marathons and then peak bagging and through hiking .

You've kind of done it all , which I think is fantastic , and then you're doing it barefoot as well , which we'll get into in just a minute . For you getting into that whole , you know , picking up running , doing that sort of thing something that you kind of did as a kid , or did you just kind of pick it up later ?

Was it the whole stress of the jobs and stuff ? You're like , hey , let me get out and get some exercise . What was it about running and getting outdoors ? What was it about running and getting outdoors ? That ?

I saw colleagues at work beginning to fall by the wayside . My boss had a mild heart attack and retired early and I got to take over his portfolio and I was like , well , look , I'm advancing in my career . But there was sort of a pattern there .

And then it happened again with a colleague who got sick and left , and so I realized in my 40s that I was going to need to invest in myself if I was going to make it to the long term . Invest in myself if I was going to make it to the long term . So entirely pragmatic at first . But the thing about loving is sorry .

The thing about running is that I loved it so much that once I got into it for pragmatic reasons , it began to take over my life .

He had a number of challenges and it led him just to re-examine where he was

going in life .

And his argument , his theory , is that shoes are great for what they do , but they can predispose people to injury because they change your gait ever so much .

So apparently I'm the only person who didn't get the memo , and the memo is hey , it's just an idea , it's just a metaphor , it's about seeking the primal activities that we attribute to our ancestors , but you're not supposed to actually do it .

I didn't get that memo , so I began to experiment with it , and again only for pragmatic reasons , because I was guess what ? Starting to have injuries and I was like I better give this a try before I run myself to pieces , and the surprise was how much fun it was , and so , as I started doing it , I lost interest in shoes .

So , just to be clear , the 100 , I think it's 116 marathons and ultras , most of those were in shoes . It's only the last 26 that have been verified .

And I'm cruising along and I'm probably about four or five miles in right in the heart of the canyon , Just beautiful . People are passing me , I'm passing people . There's thousands of runners in this thing and sure enough , someone goes flying by me barefoot and I was just like shocked .

Some people next to me started clapping and cheering for him and they were just like and here he goes , just running barefoot . So to me it's just from the outside looking in . It's amazing that you do that , because it's hard to imagine .

But he was already past me At the Boston Marathon . I saw this guy running and you know I was trying to set a personal best , so I was in racing mode . It's set a personal best . So I was in racing modes , like , and he just ran past me and he was smiling and then he took out a little camera and took some pictures and ran on .

But here's the weird thing uh , jake , after reading Chris McDougall's book this is gonna sound weird I started noticing people's feet a little bit more . I was in Central Park and a man and his daughter ran past barefoot and I was like , wow , that looks so natural .

I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with some family and looking at the ancient Greek and ancient Roman statues and I thought , you know , their feet look really strong , not like modern feet .

So , part of the part and this is what happens when you read what Dean Karnazes or Chris McDougal or people have to say , it starts , you know , wheels turning in your head and then you start to notice things and then possibly you realize you're out on a frontier , somewhere that maybe you didn't even realize was out there .

So I think and you'll hear people , jake , talk about earthing and grounding and the mental calm it produces , and there are these theories about electrons and ions and I can't tell you about that stuff .

My theory is that a large portion of our brain is there to move us , move our soft feet over rough ground , and when those parts of the mind are engaged , that's being like our ancestors were living naked in the forest and it's you're fully engaged with what you're doing . When you shield your feet with shoes , those parts of your mind they go to sleep .

They don't have anything to do . They don't actually go to sleep .

They start working on other problems , like how much you hate Trump or Biden , or how your spouse just pissed you off , or whatever you just saw on social media , or your friend who said something that wasn't really nice , and so you can't do that really when you have to pay attention to every step , so that's why I call it the original human mindfulness .

That's the only medical expenses I've had , although barefoot is part of what I call minimalism and it's about pushing boundaries without technology to see what you can do . So snow and ice , there's limits . We all have limits . They might be different and I can assure you that cold weather injuries or cold injuries , they hurt like hell .

I think that's the body's way of saying don't ever do this again . So I have pushed it a little bit too hard , a little bit too far on a couple of occasions , but cold nights , but no permanent damage . It's just , you know , a little bit of frost . Nip is really painful .

Barefoot is a lot more variable . On smooth roads or sandy trails or at the track , I can run just as fast as in shoes , but on gravel , no sir . So I showed up at a 5K and , unbeknownst to me , they had changed the course .

It used to run through a little downtown area and they moved it out onto a rail trail that was freshly paved with gravel , and so my time was five times slower . I could barely walk on it and , being stubborn , I just refused to put on shoes . I finished last place and it was over an hour for a 5K .

So that's the challenge with barefoot it can be very slow . Shoes are great for protection against sharp objects in question , or cold , or or cold , or you know other hostile environments .

When you go out there and you do something , you do something natural , you put out the energy and you're like , at least I got myself from A to B .

It's empowering hands or your face , and so to go through life with all that shielded is sort of boring , and once you unshield your feet , it's just really engaging and you get the sense wow , I just did three more miles and I'm happy .

I think what my here's my theory , is that mother nature , she gave us the energy to go out and do what we needed to do , and our ancestors had to go through the forest and they didn't have shoes way back when they had to go through the forest and the desert and the mountains and find food and their feet would have hurt but they had to keep going .

So Mother Nature gave them joy as a form of energy , which is the joy of movement through nature , and we feel that running or hiking or walking and barefoot just sort of gives you that extra layer of information . So it's so much , and you can't explain this to anybody in shoes . They just stare at you like you've lost your mind .

We did about four miles in Harriman Park in , you know , in the Hudson Valley in New York , and there were plenty of rocks and some patches of grass and dirt . The younger folks just shot ahead like it was nothing . Some of the older , some of us aging dinosaurs , had to work on balance a little bit on some of the slipperier , slippery sections .

It was just fun and people look so different going barefoot . It's a more delicate way of moving across the earth . You pay attention , you're careful , you move more slowly . It was so much fun . So I just I would tell folks , just give it a try and your feet will tell you .

Like when I first did my first barefoot run and this is probably this is again 10 years ago I just did a mile and a quarter and I was self-conscious , you know . I took my sandals off and hit them behind a bush and ran around , was embarrassed and got a couple of scratches and I was like this is total meh .

But the next morning when I woke up , my feet were sort of tingling and it was clear they wanted more . They wanted more sensations , more textures , more experience . And so give it a little . Try and see what your body and your feet tell you . They might tell you don't ever do this again .

By the way , if you go barefoot in the city or in the town , now you're crossing a different frontier , now you're putting yourself out there and doing something that's visibly different from other people , that's different from the physical frontier of seeing if you can relearn the art of moving naturally that we no longer practice generally

. I don't think I've been out in Utah in several years , but I've noticed that in the Northeast there's a higher grumpiness ratio compared to the Southwest . I think people in Utah would be pretty cool generally , but in you know , like in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and places like that in small towns , you do , you might get confronted .

And then I heard about people who went around barefoot full time and I thought , huh , that's interesting . A little odd , but I heard about a challenge and it's called the Barefoot Autism Challenge and I think there was an autism challenge a few years ago where you got to get a dump a bucket of ice water in your head , If I remember .

I think that's out to be unpopular . But the Barefoot Autism Challenge is the idea of a guy named Tyler Leach who is somebody with autism . He lives in Iowa and he said , hey , in the autistic community , barefoot is popular in many cases because of the sensory input . It helps folks process their surroundings .

It's back to that idea of earthing and grounding and the mental calm . And he said , hey , the challenge is just to go somewhere barefoot for the experience and to show support for the autistic community . So just post a picture on Twitter or Instagram hashtag Barefoot Autism Challenge . And I heard that and you know what I heard ?

I heard , besides the barefoot and the autism part , I heard the word challenge , and challenges are interesting and this is part of your theme , Jake . Challenges put you out there somewhere and they expose you to a wild or unmanaged environment and you might learn something and you might change .

And so that's how , that's what was my introduction to , just you know , going around town without shoes .

Vietnam War was not a good idea , but people were freaked out about them because they were back to nature and a lot of people in our world have lost connection with nature and are put off by that .

I was in a Dunkin' Donuts in Vermont yes , it was in Vermont and somebody in there said hey you can't be in here without shoes , and so I have a pair of slippers I carry . So I was fine , I put them on . You don't want to get into fights with people .

It's easy to get into fights because nobody likes being told what to do , but when you put yourself out there it forces you to engage with people . You understand you're going to surprise them in some cases and you need to develop some procedures to either make your case or back off .

So I love that . I love the things I discover about people . I think that's cool . I love that you're doing that . I think it's pretty awesome that you're doing that and you're like you said , you started off kind of pragmatic . It's just , you know , it's hey , so I helped with injury and it's just become a whole way of life for you .

He put together his own challenge , which was 52 bucket list items in 52 weeks , and he said this is my way of taking charge of my life right now . I need to do something that works for me , because the conventional wisdom about what I'm supposed to be doing has sort of left me high and dry . I need to take charge .

Put my hands on the wheel , turn the wheel real sharp , pull up on the parking brake , do one of those emergency 180s and then peel out in the other direction . And he , he did that and he changed as a result . He learned and he changed .

I think you're also bagging peaks peak bagging , as they say and I know you did a challenge . I think you're still I mean , you're still doing these challenges . You've got more challenges to come , but can we talk about the grid ? What is the grid ? Where are the CAT skills ? Kind of give me the whole what this challenge is . Again , the word challenge .

You heard the word challenge and you're off .

New York's got the Adirondacks , which are a little bit taller . They're another two hours further north . The Catskills are not huge mountains . They're 3,500 to 4,000 feet generally . But the terrain is very rugged , steep , rocky trails , thick forest .

One of the distinctions of the Catskills is a number of the peaks don't have official trails , so you have to navigate to the summit using map and compass or GPS or just paying attention . But it's hard to see . In the Catskills the vegetation is very thick in the summer anyhow .

So in the Catskills there's a peak bagging list that includes 35 mountains and that's a common challenge slash goal for a lot of people . It's a way to just get out there and enjoy the mountains , but do it in a structured format that other people have done and that adds some social meaning to the project .

The grid takes a peak bagging list to the next level and you could do it anywhere where there's a list . You want to complete that list in each month of the year . So for the CAT skills , that's 35 high peaks times 12 months is 420 climbs .

Now you don't have to do it in one year , you can take as long as you like to finish it , and for most people it ends up being a multi-year project . But this is something

I discovered accidentally at a point in time in my life where other things were not going perfectly , and so I talked about .

You know , I had a corporate job and you know I think a lot of times we progress in our career and then we hit sort of a leveling off place where you're like gee , to get to the next level , that's going to be really hard , or the people who I'm competing with are actually really good , and that's a risky place to be because you can lose a lot of energy

when you realize that maybe your idealistic goals for yourself to be the CEO or the president of the United States or whatever you had imagined maybe the probability of getting there was lower than you thought . So I was . You know things were slow at work and so I was like , great , I'll do more running . But then I began to injure myself .

And there's a point if you get good at running , that means you're getting good at pushing yourself . But apparently , as we get old , the platform loses resilience and so you set yourself up for some problems .

So both of those things were beginning to challenge me and I sat around thinking to myself this is what Henry David Thoreau meant when he wrote that the majority of men and of course this is 19th century , so he meant the majority of people , the majority of people live lives of quiet desperation . The majority of people live lives of quiet desperation .

And I was like , hey , that sounds like me and that had not been my attitude up to this point . So I was , you know , wondering , because before that I had done marathons and ultras and I had done some record setting runs .

I had set a record on the long path , I had set a record for running the Badwater Double , and those were hugely empowering and thrilling adventures . And now I was sort of stuck .

That's when I heard about the grid and I thought what a perfect project , because I don't have to race , I can take my time , I can scratch off the peaks as I can get to them on the weekends or taking vacation time and I can give myself a multi-year runway to achieve a meaningful goal .

So that project immediately took over my life and became the most important thing that I was doing , and so I threw myself into the project .

I've got a book coming out in the fall on this and I think you might say there's possibly a little bit of an obsessive undertone to it , but this became the most important project in my life and I think it was like Jeremy's 52 bucket list .

It was my chance to take control of my life and achieve a goal that was meaningful to me , and it ended up being a project where I really learned a lot about myself and changed .

And then a few months later I ran into somebody else on the trail randomly and they mentioned that they had just finished the grid for January . And I was like I've heard about it . What is this crazy project ? How does it work ? And they explained it and I finally got it .

But when I discovered the grid I had done so much hiking and running already in the Catskills that I had a head start . So I was able to go back through my training logs and find 120 or so peaks I'd already climbed and could find the dates . So I only had 300 to go . So that took me two years to do that 300 .

Like I mean , it's probably like a whole different experience doing a peak in winter versus summer .

So I got into my second year and I was like , holy crap , I have 100 winter peaks left to do January , february , march , first half of April , and then November and December . The winter can be easy or it can be difficult , but fresh snow requiring snowshoes . Most of the time it's not this bad , but there were a couple of times I had to get out there .

And when you're on a schedule to get this done like a normal person would say , fine , it's not great conditions , I'll just finish the grid a year later . But if you're in a hurry to do something and why would you be in a hurry ?

Because it's meaningful to you and you want to get it done , just like you want to get to the end of the half marathon , right ? You don't want to . You want to get to the end , right ? So then you have to drag yourself out .

So the toughest times for me was when there was fresh , deep snow , so like two , three feet of fresh snow , and suddenly you're going , at best , one mile an hour and then you go uphill and it's like no , it's two hours to go one mile . I think my slowest hike was three hours to go one mile . And the snow .

If the sun comes out and the snow starts to get soft and heavy , then you've got like 10 pounds on each foot and you're carrying a big pack because you need more gear and so forth . There's nothing that a thousand million other hikers haven't contended with .

But for me that was the challenging part of the project and that's what made it intense was the need to get out there , whether conditions were good or bad .

And there's subtle things too , jake , like I don't know about you , I love the sun and in the sun I feel energetic , and when the fog comes curling in overhead , you know it sucks out a little bit of my energy , and so the winters were also difficult . Because of you know , you lost the sparkle of spring and summer and the colors of fall .

What made you decide I want to write a book about this ? Did you think about that before you started it , or was it while you're doing it ? What made you want to do that ?

He's done Everest , as well as the Badwater Race , multiple , multiple times , and he said if you're just going out to do peak bagging or other kinds of bucket lists , if you're just going out to brag , that's vulgar . But if you're going out to learn and admire and share , that can be noble .

And so , part of my thinking , I knew I was going to write up something about this because to me part of what made this project so thrilling was the variety and the contrast . And 35 mountains are all different , plus they're different routes up them , plus they change with each point of the year and plus you and I are always changing .

Some days we're feeling great and some days we're dragging ass . And so I really felt like the 420 climbs were 420 meaningful experiences in just the brilliance of that and the joy of being out in a natural environment . I just wanted to share that , if it would resonate with anybody at all .

But the spiritual part , that was sort of a that has been an interest of mine since I can remember and it's again just pragmatic . You know , here I am and where are the levers that I pull to operate myself . So in the book I talk about not just climbing this mountain and then that mountain , but also sort of what I learned .

There's a great tradition in America called the transcendentalist tradition . It's Thoreau and Emerson and Walt Whitman and John Muir , and we learn about these guys in high school and then forget them and move on to our high tech digital ecosystem that we inhabit now , and hopefully AI won't take over .

But the more I think about this world and how super high tech we've become , the more I go back to know strength and joy and creativity come from nature , not from technology , and agency too .

And so as I went out into the mountains and hopefully this is interesting to the reader , I began to have some weird experiences , just in the sense that , spending so much time out there in the mountains , I began to , if you will , rediscover the more original way of relating to our environment In the modern world .

It's all about I , I , I , I , I , I'm this , I'm that , I have this label and I can do that . I can dress myself up as a runner or a barefoot person or a worker or whatever .

When you're out in the mountains , that starts to fade and then you start to realize , hey , I'm not really that much different from the other living creatures out here have a brain , but we're both people in the sense that we're just trying to survive and grow and reproduce . Maybe John Muir used to call trees people and plants people and butterflies people .

Everything was a person to him . I think we feel we still have tree huggers and people like that , and so that , to me , is part of the spiritual element of this . It's trying to get disengaged from the modern world and rediscover , in a sense , who we really are .

bagged more than that just around the country . Colorado's got some nice-sized mountains , things like that . I think you've been in Colorado . Is there any particular climb or mountain that stuck out to you for whatever reason ? Either it was difficult or maybe it was the beauty of it . Whatever you think , is there a particular one that stood out to you ?

And to my astonishment , on the way down I met another barefoot hiker , a young man named I think it was Mike from Boulder . But Katahdin was difficult in Maine and I approached Katahdin from the knife edge and the knife edge it's a very narrow , I guess it's called an arrette .

It's not really an arrette technically but it's a very narrow sort of knife edge ridge between , I forget , the mountain to the south and then the peak and the trail sort of creeps along the crest and you know you're climbing over rocks and boulders and it's not dangerous per se but it's not really a trail and barefoot you don't want to just go lunging , jumping

on sharp rocks . So I did a lot of that , crawling and sliding on my butt and it was very slow . So that sticks out in my memory as being difficult . But I'm at 521 .

I said I'd been reading Walt Whitman and I've been reading Walt Whitman's views on the self and time , and I said , well , we'll go up Windham , and of course Whitman's tome of poetry is called Leaves of Grass . So I said , well , climb Windham , we'll stop at the top and think a little bit about Whitman's poetry .

One of the things I had been doing was observing some of the different plants in the Catskills and I realized that I hadn't learned to identify any of the grasses , and the path to Wyndham is sort of grassy in places . So I was like , cool , we'll study the grass . So that's one of the chapters in the book .

Because we got to the top and as a runner I'm always used to being in motion , and so the very act of stopping is difficult for me , unless I'm really tired out or something , and even then the clock is always ticking . So it was just an interesting experience to sit at the top for a while , and Odie , you know , is the same as me .

He likes to be on the move , but as he got a little bit older , on this climb he took a nap and I stood a bee sitting on a meadowsweet . Bush and a private jet flew overhead and then out in the distance some gliders were circling and then a sparrow flew past and a few seconds later a couple of vultures flew past after it , perhaps .

So it was a special experience , and Whitman is very clear about his views . We think of time as rushing past , but I think he thinks of time more as a permanent kind of direction , complementary to distance , the way we learn in physics . John Muir had a comment in one of his diary entries when he was out in the California Mountains .

He talked about hiking up into the mountains and then running back to camp in the moonlight and it was such a thrilling experience . He said so ends a day that will never end . And I read that to myself and I was like well , how does a day never end ?

And what he's saying is that the experience is permanent and the experience changes you and you and I and others . We change other people . So the experience is permanent even if we're not . So that kind of thinking about time was one of the things I came away from the grid project with maybe a little bit of a different perspective .

I'm going to take over my life , I'm going to make my decisions and I can make decisions to help other people because I like other people . But I'm going to make my decisions and I can make decisions to help other people because I like other people .

But I'm going to make those decisions instead of being gaslit or bullied into thinking the right things or dressing the right way . So part of the spiritual development , I think , is just getting stronger so that we can manage ourselves . And how do you get stronger ? Well , if you're a weightlifter , you go to the gym and you lift weights .

If you're a runner , you do a half marathon or whatever you want . And I think it's just that practice of making an effort to push yourself into a zone of discomfort and manage yourself in that zone and you come out of it and you're like okay .

Sometimes they all fall down in piles and you have to . Hopefully you were paying attention and you saw the deadfall and you aim around it , but sometimes you don't and then you're crawling through the deadfall while the stuff is trying to move the stuff out of your face . That can get frustrating . Again , it's like the snow .

You're a runner , you're used to moving quickly and now you're looking at your watch and you're not even going one mile an hour and I would get angry , I would get frustrated and part of me . There's a great Emerson quote lose the military hurry . And of course , having been a ranger for a short period of time , corporate America is the same as the army it's .

You've got a mission , get your mission done , accountability , performance , et cetera . But he said lose the military hurry , adopt the pace of nature . Her secret is patience and part of me knew that after years of being over caffeinated and rushing around mindlessly .

I needed to learn how to move slowly and actually the stunning thing is , moving slowly , I found , was mentally much more difficult than putting out an all out effort and running quickly . So those were challenges , those were challenges , and so the 420 peaks was part of how I took myself . Offline .

I subjected myself to the challenges of being tired or the trees , or rain or snow or whatever . It was just worked on myself and I think at one point in the book I say if you drag yourself back and forth across rugged terrain long enough , it might smooth off some of the rough edges of your personality . So that's it , just practice it .

Being a person and moving yourself is just how we try to get better .

Do you have a set date in mind or are you just going to kind of take your time , get into that ? Do you have any other challenges ?

And for some people who have super high power jobs and they're changing the world , they just need to do that because they're having such a big impact . But I think many of us benefit from taking a break from the nine to five or whatever the eight to six or whatever it is and doing different things to learn , because it's a shame we only have one life .

So I was just thinking the other day it might be time to do something different . And the last thing I'm going to do is commit myself on your podcast , because if I say something on your podcast you heard it here first everybody but the Thousand Mountains is meant to be a multi-year project .

Right , I'm also doing the 50 marathons in 50 states , but that's a terrible project because it's just endless logistics and travel and I'm at 11 , I think , or 12 . So I'm actually potentially due for something , but I'm also looking at the opportunities just to make a difference . So I'm involved with a not-for-profit that's important to me .

We're going through some change at work and I'm trying to think how can I make a difference here ? My alma mater . I went to a school and the current administration is talking about changing the tax rules and there's challenges . I'm like they're not facing up the challenges . They're not taking the action that I would like to see them take .

Could I somehow get through to them and help them think this through ? Probably not . But so I think about other things . And you know the great thing , these projects out in nature . They're like a baseline . I've made some decisions like not to take maybe , a bigger job because it would not give me enough time to do my running and hiking .

I would take a job or do something else if I felt it would be better for the world and better for me than another mountain . So hopefully I put myself in a position where I can flex in different directions .

, getting to know you and who you are . It's been amazing . There's one question I always like to ask , because I ask on every show , but for you , for you , ken , what does adventure mean to you ?

It could be like Bilbo and the dwarves going after smog's gold , right , but there's something you're setting out to do with you . You have a crystal clear understanding of what the objective is and there's risk . There's risk you might not be successful and there might be people out there trying to work , dragons trying to to stop you .

And I think the adventure tends to leave the community , the community of people who are working and are productive and are raising families and doing the normal things in life , and you're saying I'm going to leave that behind and take a risk and do something different because it might matter , it might be important enough to take that risk , or you're impatient and

you want the challenge . You're not suited to be just somebody who follows the normal path . So those are the ingredients in my mind . Adventures can be thrilling and you can win great prizes , but you can also lose , so I know I've done things that haven't worked out well , and this can be very painful , besides the lost time and energy .

Barefoot turns every walk or hike or run into an adventure . You don't necessarily know what you're going to encounter and you have to pay attention .

If you want to follow along with Ken , be sure to check him out on Instagram at long brown path that's long underscore brown , underscore path and visit his website , barefootkencom . You can also pre-order his upcoming book Chasing the Grid and Ultra Runners Physical and Spiritual Journey in the Purs pursuit of the ultimate mountain challenge . I highly recommend it .

I'm looking forward to getting my copy . Thanks for tuning into Journey with Jake . If Ken's story inspired you , do me a favor and share this episode with a friend or leave a quick rating or review . It really helps others find these incredible stories . We've got another great episode coming your way next week with Cody Sudmeier , the founder of Spur Experiences .

We'll be talking all about the power of choosing experiences over things and how that mindset can lead to a more meaningful life . And , as always , remember it's not always about the destination as it is about the journey . Take care everybody . Thank you .