Why I slept in the back of a stranger's Cadillac

Ten years ago, I went to the desert to start a new life.

I drove thirty hours from Detroit to Tucson in a beat up manual Ford Focus in just under three days.

When I got there, I camped in the mountains outside the city to escape the sweltering heat and save what little money I had before heading off to study permaculture with a guy who’d offered to let me stay on his land in exchange for work.

Two days in, I got a wake up call.

Turns out I had no idea how to drive stick shift in the mountains and I burned out the clutch while rolling back into town on day. So it was gonna cost a butt load of money and take 10 days for the dealership to even get the parts in and do the repairs. So there I was, broke, carless, three thousand miles from home, and I had ten days to kill in a city where I knew exactly no one.

That’s when I met the widow of one of the early figures who helped start the Rainbow Gathering (I’ve never been, but maybe you’ve heard of it?)

Anyway, she was a sweet, but slightly unhinged cat lady whose house smelled like a litter box that's never been changed. Which led to me climbing in the back of an old restored Cadillac in her driveway in the middle of the night to catch some Z’s on the freezing cold leather bench seat.

This also motivated me to be a little more outgoing and find a better place to stay.

Which led me to a local coffee shop where I met a few people who, somehow, knew half the people I knew back in Detroit and offered me an amazing fold out couch to sleep on for the next two weeks. There, I was offered jobs, places to lives, and went on a string of adventures I never would have planned in a million years. And keep in mind, at this particular point in my life, I did not consider myself to be particularly outgoing or even socially adept at all.

But eventually I met my permaculture mentor face-to-face.

And it was in that moment I realized that the locals who’d warmed me about him during my stay in Tucson were right, and it was time for me to come up with a backup plan. So I scrapped the whole “move to Arizona” plan, turned the trip into a 30 day camping vacation and saw some of the most beautiful natural landscapes I’d ever laid eyes on, drove home, and that’s when I decided to start my own construction business.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because there’s a well studied phenomenon where putting yourself in unfamiliar situations makes you more capable, resourceful, and honestly, more you.

Push yourself to try something new, and that novelty triggers a massive amount of dopamine release in the hippocampus of your brain. Which dramatically lowers your brain's threshold for learning and pushes you to explore and notice new opportunities.

All this lines up with exactly what happened to me while I was in Tucson.

I wasn’t a different person out there, it just forced me to use parts of myself I’d never had any reason to use back home.

That’s what unfamiliar situations do, they show you what you’re truly capable of. But you don’t need to get stranded in the desert in order for you to achieve the same effect. Another time I dropped myself into an uncomfortable situation was when I started writing daily emails again.

At first it felt hard, like I’d run out of new ideas by Saturday.

But now it’s one of my favorite parts of the work week and a handful of really great clients pay me to write emails for them too. It’s the same idea, exploring something new and uncomfortable to push yourself to places you never thought you were capable of.

So I’m curious where you’re at with your email list….

Do you have one? Do you email it regularly? Do you email it often… like daily? Do you want to? Have you been thinking about it but haven’t pulled the lever yet? Or do you secretly hate writing email but love reading mine?

Whatever it is, hit reply and let me know.

No pressure to do or buy anything. I’m just asking because I’m planning to create a lot more email marketing content inside my Skool community, and I want to focus my effort on the stuff that’s going to solve your problems.

So tell me where you’re stuck.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood