Runaway Home - Following Your Path

Most people spend their entire life stressed without ever giving a single thought as to what it is they really want or what's important to them. See, I'm here to cut through all that noise, connecting you to yourself and the life that you were meant to live. I used to slave away at a corporate job that I hated, but I broke through the social norms and pursued my passion. As a result, I own my own coffee company. I'm espresso sommelier, and I get to travel the world. You, too, can live a life that you love, but it starts with getting clear about what you want. It starts with a new decision. I'm your host, Donnie Rouse. You are listening to the podcast One Life Runaway Home. While I was on my trip, well, in the past, people would come up to me, say, wait, you're doing all this traveling? What are you running away from? And I always thought it was a funny question that people would ask me because it would make me turn inward. I'm like, well, what am I running away from? What am I trying to escape? And this trip that I just had, I just came back from Portugal. I did Lisbon, Porto, and then I went to Madeira, the island just off of Morocco, which is Portuguese territory. And when I was there, I felt extremely alive. I felt extremely lit up. So much so that every single person that I. When I came back home, everyone was like, oh, my God, you look like you had an amazing time. I could see it in the smile on your face. And it made me remember, like, this comment that people say, well, what are you running away from? What are you running away from? And I said, what are you running away from? Because I am living my life the way I want to live it. But so often people judge how you want to live your life, forgetting that it's not their life that you're living, it's yours. And that it's so easy to succumb to the pressure of those around you because your life doesn't conform with. With the way everyone else is living theirs. But who is living the illusion? It's important here to start to question what are your beliefs about how life is supposed to be? Right. Oh, well, oh, I have to do the 9 to 5. I would go through these thought processes where if I wasn't always doing something, I wouldn't feel productive or I would feel like I was wasting time, forgetting the fact that I created my life and structured my life in this way so this way I could have the time to travel. I was doing something that I found enjoyable, that I loved. I created that. But yet if I listened to the outside world, everything else around me, it would tell me that the way I was living my life was not realistic, that I was trying to escape. I was talking with some friends on my trip and we were talking about, like, what is life, right? What do you want to experience in life? What is it that you really want? And pretty much what I just asked was the exact answer. They want to experience. They want to be able to travel, to see the world, to. To have time, because what is life if you don't have the time to enjoy it? Now, life isn't that simplistic in the sense that it's a little bit more complex. We do need money to do the things we want to do, but that shouldn't control everything. And it's not that it shouldn't control, but it doesn't mean you have to buy into the illusion, the path that everyone else around you is walking down. I remember hearing a podcast, I don't remember the gentleman's name. It's an indie guy. He was talking about in his family. His family was like, all right, well, go to school, become a doctor or a lawyer, and become rich. When he broke that path, there was all this tension in his family, but he was doing research. He said, well, all right, well, I'm doing this because this, it'll ultimately lead me to success. But what are the most successful people doing? He started looking at people like Elon Musk, and I don't know who else it was. I just remember the Elon Musk name. And he noticed that there's a pattern, like none of the richest people that he was, that he was told that he would become by. By following a career path, had followed that career path. They were all like entrepreneurs. Most of them started from nothing. So it made him ask a different question. What is it really like, if this is what I want, what is the way to get there? I'm not gearing this podcast to say that money is the end all, be all. What I want you to come away with from this post is how are you living your life and is it aligned with you and your desires for your life? More often than not, you know, people will interject, and it's probably. It's because we're part of a society. There's cultural influences, there's cultural pressures to conform and live like everyone else around us. But when you break out of that, you break out of the trance, you awaken from the sleep, and from that point, then you can start to create and say, okay, well, you know, what. What is it that I want? What is it that I want from. How do I want to experience this life? When I was in Medina, I was. I remember, like, one of the things that I was always told was, wait until you're older, wait until you're older. You know, don't do all the stuff now, make your money, do all this, and then go do your travels. I was also told, you know, wait, make your money and then start your business. What are the chances I would do any of the travels, any of the things that I've done if I waited? I will willing to say likely not. Because I. Even now, I look back, I'm like, well, if I were to, would I start my business now? I guess I could if there was enough pressure, you know, if, like, the pressure cooker was literally about to explode. But I probably wouldn't have. If I were started now, I probably would have stepped in something a little bit more safe. Maybe not, but everyone is telling you to put life off, but not a single day is taken, not a single day is guaranteed. And when I was in Madeira, I noticed that there were a lot of. Of older people that were traveling there. Some who may have been their first. You know, like, they're retired and now they had the luxury to travel, but their movements, they couldn't move. And I thought about that, and I had this conversation with a couple of my friends. Well, if that were me, like, I mean, that's not really traveling to me. Like, I want to travel, I want to have adventures I want to experience, like hiking through the rainforest, climbing mountains. I want to do the great stuff. I don't want to wait all that time to have the time to then go visit the places, but not being able to do a whole lot and then maybe sitting at a bar, have some fancy dinners. No, that is not me. That's not how I want to experience my life. So what is it that you want to experience? How do you want to experience your life? It's an important question. And you don't necessarily have to travel somewhere in the world in order to get the answer. The answer could come to you just by giving yourself a little bit of peace, some solitude, away from all the distractions, all the noise in your life. Mainly, I'm talking about your cell phone, right? When I have that cell phone now, I literally. It's like my head spins. I'm checking Instagram a hundred times and there's nothing, you know, And I will catch myself now. And I say, no, put the damn thing down. And Instagram, I mean, I get more ads on Instagram. They're not even showing me my friends anymore. Now I'm getting ads and I'm getting followers of my friends. It's like it's complete shit. But what it's doing is it's just looping your mind and keeping your mind busy, preventing you from going after the thing that you want, preventing you from. From putting that thought energy into the thing that's going to make you feel alive, the thing that is going to make you feel fulfilled. I turn off my phone as a result, now at 8 o', clock, my phone goes off. Because I know that it even affects my sleep. Once I turn that phone off, once I cut out all media, every electronic everything starts to quiet down. I start to feel at peace. The same thing happens in the morning. I woke up this morning, I went for a run around the neighborhood because I love sunrises and no one else is up. Sometimes I wake up and my whole body is going. I feel the energy kind of pulsing my body. But then at some point on that walk, I feel peace come over me. So one of the reasons why I am doing this post here right now is because I took the time at the beginning of my day to say, okay, what do I want for my day? What is the impact I want to have? How do I want to give? How do I want to show up? What is my intention? I wouldn't have gotten that if I literally was dropped into my day. And all of a sudden now I'm bombarded with the emails, the phones, texting friends, looking at Instagram, ooh, she just got a new dog and oh, wow, he has a great house. No, that pulls you away from your life. It pulls you away. So what do you gather from all this? Have you taken away anything? Anything I just said right now? What I want you to take away is that every single life is unique. Every single life lived is unique to it. Meaning how you want to live your life is completely up to you. We live in a day and age where you can make money doing anything from anywhere. It's just a matter of deciding what it is that you want. And having the Gazoons, the courage, the balls, if you have balls to go after that thing. That is what I want you to do. That's what I'm hoping for. Me coming on here. I'm hoping to spark, like to be the catalyst to give that little spark. Because my intention is to live my life to the fullest as well as to get you to Live yours. Because why not, right? I mean, we have such a limited amount of time here on this earth, so why not make it enjoyable? Why not spend the time doing things that bring us joy? I mean, and that's not to say that life is going to be peachy all the time, right? Because that's not realistic. There are periods of growth, there are periods of sacrifice where you have to put time into the thing that you want to build. But you have to have this vision that's big enough in order to pull you forward. That, again, takes time. And one of the ways to go there. Again, I'm just going to throw the travel thing in, is to put yourself in environments where you feel good, environments that make you feel alive. Because when you're there, things go into a state of flow. You've been there, right? Like falling in love. When you have that lovey dove feeling, nothing can go wrong. Everything that you experience is filtered through this. This frame of love. The same thing is when you're doing something that makes you happy. In the last episode, I gave an. I was talking about how I was meeting with my friend Jacqueline in Funchal, and I gave her. And I didn't even give her an address to meet me. I gave her a street. So the taxi dropped her off at the street, and she had no way of finding me. And in that moment, she had the choice. She could have been like, oh, my God, well, what do I do? Do I screw this? You know, this is too scary. I'm just going to take the taxi and go back home. Could have done that, could have done that. But she was in, like, maybe because of the promise. I said that this was going to be the best day ever. She made the decision that, you know what, this is an adventure. I am just going to enjoy this. And as a result of being open to that, and all of a sudden, we had an amazing day. All these great experiences flooded in. And when you have that, it's like the compounding effect. When you feel good, you get more things that make you feel good. When you feel shitty, more stuff is going to show up in your life to remind you just how shitty it is. We control the frame that we. The lens that we look through at any given moment in time. But we have to make that decision up front. We have to decide to take the reins and not let anyone else influence and tell us what our experience is and allow them to color our experience. I have a joke. I have a friend or an old friend of mine. We would talk about coffee and I would be critiquing the coffee before he even had a chance to take a sip. So I would go through. I'm like, oh, my God, this is shit. This is bad. And then before. Before he would even take a sip, he would take. Well, actually, he would take his first sip, and all of a sudden, he's like, incanting the same things that I was saying about the coffee. It's one of the reasons why you never share your experiences when you're doing cupping, because you can influence other people, but it's the same thing with life. Everyone's going to try to color your experience with their experience, and most of the time, an experience that they haven't even had. I was in Genova, Italy. I remember I was there in 2019. I was there for my espresso sommelier. I was studying, taking time to travel. I think I was in Milan, and I was talking about, no, no, I wasn't in Milan. I was thinking Cinque Terre. And I was talking with people about Genova, and they're like, oh, Genova's a dump. You know, I didn't like it. It's a busy city. It's a, you know, ugly port. And I was like, well, you know, I was. Yeah, but, you know, it's close. It's right there. I haven't been to Genova yet, and I want to eat pesto. So let me. Let me just go. I'm just gonna try it out. And plus, I had a friend there. I went there and I had a blast. I thought it was one of the most amazing cities because I liked the height of the city. The topography is very different. There's, like, hills, all these little alleyways. If I had allow other people to color my experience, sometimes even people who hadn't even been there, but they had just heard that this was the experience that someone else has. So they like to regurgitate and throw it up all over other people. If I had listened to other people, I would have missed out on that experience. So much is true about life. Going back to travel, my family would say, oh, you're going to that place. Watch out, it's dangerous. And they would start planting all these seeds of doubt. Meanwhile, none of them have traveled anywhere. Yeah, Mexico and maybe Italy on an occasion, but they haven't traveled anywhere, so why would I let them influence what I want to do? Right? But that's what happens. That's what happens. You turn on the news, you know, you go to the State department's website. Oh, it's a dangerous World category four. Don't go there. But it's no more dangerous or safe than in the United States here. I mean, I would say most of the times, the places I've traveled where they would kind of seem sketchy, just based on this misconception that we have from the news, they're actually safer than being here in the States. All right, so let's bring it all together. Let's pile it into this little ball so this way you can take it home and start to munch on it. What is the life you want to live? What is it that makes you happy? How would you feel? What would make you feel most alive? What are the forces outside of you that are influencing your decision to live that life? And look at their experience, those people who are saying those things to you. What has been their experience of life? Is that the experience that you want to have yourself? And then the last question is, really, there's only one thing left to do. Go after that life that you were meant to live. Go after the life that makes you feel alive. And then when you do, when you start to make the steps, message me and tell you, hey, Donnie, I listened to your podcast and, man, you were right. And, and I'm living the dream. But that is my intention for you guys. So I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I enjoyed creating it for you. Thank you so much for doing. I appreciate you taking the time, really, really, really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen to this. And I hope that in some way I connected you to a deeper desire, a deeper truth that's within you and that in some way helps you live a life that's more congruent with you and what you want for it. If you have any questions, if you'd like to subscribe, or if you'd like to make a comment on any of the episodes, you can do so. And I would greatly encourage you because I love getting messages about your experiences with this, you can do so by visiting www.donnyrouse.com again. Www.dot O N N Y R A U S.com thank you guys so much for tuning in. You get one life. Live it. God bless, and I will see you again soon.