There’s a great reality show on TV called Chasing Nature. Four engineering students are split into two teams and each team has to build gadgetry that will literally enable them to emulate a creature in nature. I’ve seen them try to emulate the sonar detectors of bats while flying in a harness, the tongue of a chameleon while crawling on a pole 10m above the ground, the suspension of a sloth from a bridge between two skyscrapers and, best of all, the 25km/h head-butting power of the ram.

Sometimes they’re successful, though most often not, but what I find most fascinating is how cumbersome the machinery is that gets created. You also know that with time it would be streamlined and the results would be improved, until the robot became as elegant a creation as the real thing. The modern motor car is a case in point. It can easily match the horse for elegance. (If we could only manage its cycle of use and decay better, but that will come too.)

The point is that every human creation starts out rather clunky, like computers 20 years ago, and we have the power to master and refine them until we achieve the utmost efficiency and beauty. What stops us, often, is that the first version looks so clunky. Behind this is the fear that people will laugh at us, like we were Noah, building an Ark.

Hey, maybe that’s the meaning of that story – that there’s a calling in every one of us, that when we follow it we get laughed at, but sooner or later the flood comes and the ones who do, the ones who are ready, are the ones who are smiling. Bill Gates will tell you so.

There’s a flood coming your way. I hope you’ll be ready with version 2.0 of your contraption, or your business model, whatever it is!

Henry David Thoreau wrote that ‘most men lead lives of quiet desperation’. I am at war with ‘quiet desperation’. What does quiet desperation look like? It looks like someone shutting up for the sake of peace. It looks like someone not doing what he wants in order to meet expectations, or fit in, or maintain the status quo. It looks like someone falling in line.

What’s the opposite of ‘quiet desperation’? It’s a man who starts each day knowing that he’s surfing the wave of being, that he could not be more, or express more of himself than he is. It’s a man to whom life is an adventure, a sea to sail across, a river to ford, a lion to tame, a woman to woo. It’s a man whose heart beats too fast more than once a day, not from fear and worry, but from lust and liveliness.

How do you live your life? Do you live merely to survive, or do you live to ‘suck the marrow out of life’, as Thoreau did? He went and lived in the woods for a few years, as his way of expressing this. For others it might be something completely different. What would it mean for you?

Look into the fabric of life and you’ll see that we don’t have all the information we need before we start a task, which is when we need it most; instead we have to learn it. Similarly, we have all the knowledge and wisdom about life at the end, when we can no longer use it. Seems crazy, but if life has any order or meaning, then there must be a reason for it having been constructed that way. Perhaps the learning is more important than the knowledge or the achievement itself, which would mean that the more learning you expose yourself to, the more you’re in tune with life, and the more meaning, purpose or just plain satisfaction your life will have.

This would mean living your life constantly outside of your comfort zone, treating your life as an experiment, putting yourself on the line to test anything and everything that’s presented to you as a truth. Certainly I have lived this way. For me it’s never been about safety, or about success in and of itself; it’s always been about finding what’s true, what’s possible, what works, what’s the best way to make the most out of life, what are the elements of a rich and fulfilling life? I’ve been my own scientist – a sample of one, doggedly testing everything that every book or expert has told me. I’ve had bumps and bruises; I’ve got scars – I’ve also got a smiling soul.