LIVE from…The Environment!

WELLINGTON — Emma's dream is to be a writer. Typically, someone who dreams of being a writer embarks upon a journey to get a book published. Emma, a 35-year-old New Zealander, has indeed been down that road. But there's something else: Emma's dream has taken a sharp turn from what she expected.

When Emma was 16, she was invited to represent her school at an environmental conference in Hawaii. She'd been hearing about big issues, things like "deforestation" and "losing the Amazon" and, most worrisome for Kiwis like Emma, "ozone depletion." Ozone depletion is a particularly pressing issue in New Zealand, because there's an actual hole where the protective ozone layer ought to to be. Trust me, if you lived beneath a gap in the ozone layer, you'd care too.

Well, Emma returned from the environmental conference thinking that, "It just all seemed stupid. It's not just about 'saving the planet.' It's about saving the human species!" She felt like these issues should be important to everyone, that they should be front page news. So Emma started a youth group of like-minded students who cared about the future of our planet. But, she was just 16 and as she put it, "It all fizzled fast." Life got in the way. Emma got distracted. In fact, Emma got distracted for nearly 20 years.

And that's familiar, isn't it? Don't we all get distracted? Isn't it a lot easier to pursue your dream tomorrow than it is to take even a single step in its direction today?

Recently, Emma began to do some thinking about all this. Not about the environment, not at first anyway. At first, she began to think about her original dream to become a career writer. Her dream had begun to feel like it was fading, and she'd had some dark times with it. But then Emma began to wonder if her dream wasn't tangled up in ego, if maybe she was pursuing it just to prove something to the world. As a teenager, Emma had even gone so far as to fantasize prizes she would win in writing competitions she would enter. "Dreams and ambitions driven by those kinds of aims aren't going to make you happy," she said to me today as we sat in a Wellington cafe.

So how does someone force the evolution of a dream that isn't quite working out as planned? How does someone move forward when the dream is dragging its feet? Well, for Emma, she would reignite an old passion, which would give her old dream to write a very timely purpose. This process, this slight shift, would create an entirely new dream.

Emma asked herself this: "What do I want to write about that I care about?" And with that, she began to tap once again into her passion for the environment. Motivated by curiosity, Emma did some digging. She uncovered some things she simply could not overlook, like the fact that a very critical rung on our food chain is being killed off by warmer waters. Or the fact that our planet may lose a quarter of its animal species by the year 2050. This scares her the most. Once again, Emma discovered her old passion for the environment. And suddenly, she realized that it was this she would write about.

But where? And who will care about it? The issues Emma hopes to tackle are enormous and theoretical. They feel un-tackle-able. The environment feels like somebody else's problem. How can she inspire other people about an issue that isn't necessarily important to them? Not only that, Emma will be facing tough opponents: industry, government, ambivalence.

Emma knows she's facing an uphill battle. In fact, she seems to be quite looking forward to it and to the challenge of writing about it. She told me that if she gets just five people around the world to change their environmentally-unfriendly habits…that that would be enough for her. (Yeah, I asked the same question: 'Just five?' And Emma smiled as if she knew, or maybe hoped, her impact will be far greater. Something tells me it will.)

"In thirty years' time," Emma explained to me, "I imagined myself having a conversation with my granddaughter. I didn't want to her to ask me what I'd done about global warming and tell her that I'd been too distracted to care."

*Disclosure: I happen to know that something very big is brewing for Emma and her new dream. So, what you just read in this week's dream-following episode will be followed up soon by a dream-come-true story. Fingers crossed for Emma and her new dream. See you next week! (And if you're following a dream, write me! I'd love to hear from you!)

LIVE from Mongolia, the book, is the true story of what can happen when you follow your wildest dream. It's available on Amazon (both hardcover and Kindle), in Barnes & Noble, and in bookstores internationally. "Light, humorous, and relentlessly optimistic." -Publishers Weekly review of LIVE from Mongolia 

LIVE from…A Dream Come True!

NEW YORK — LIVE from Mongolia, this weekly blog series, has just hit a milestone: 30,000 readers!

Seven or so years ago, when the London chief dealer at Credit Suisse said to me, "You should start a blog before you go to Mongolia," I responded, "A what?" 

Hurray! Thirty thousand readers!

Back then, I'd just quit my sensible job to pursue a dream. Back then, the dream was to become a foreign correspondent, to go to war, to cover conflicts. Back then, I had no idea what would happen next. And that was pretty exciting. It still is.

All these years later, this blog has turned into a book. It's collaborated with a TV show. And it's been to some pretty cool places: North Korea is still my favorite. And Mongolia was my longest stint, the place that changed me the most. New Zealand, for its part, has by far, coughed up the most dreamers of all forty-seven countries I've visited - combined.

So where will "LIVE from Mongolia" go next? I have an inkling, a real dream. It's going to take some planning, and it's going to take an enormous leap of faith, but I look forward to telling you, all thirty thousand of you, all about it. Thanks for joining me on this journey. You readers make it all worthwhile.

- "Light, humorous, and relentlessly optimistic." -Publishers Weekly's review of LIVE from Mongolia, the book. Published by Beaufort Books, October 2013. Available on Amazon, bn.com, and in bookstores internationally. 

LIVE from…Wall Street!

Wall Street  — Sam Polk made much, much more money than I ever did. But he and I both worked at Credit Suisse, and both he and I came to Wall Street, inspired and excited, after reading Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker. And like Sam's parents, my parents raised us kids paycheck-to-paycheck. And also like Sam, it didn't take long for me working on Wall Street to earn in just a couple of years what my parents had spent a lifetime earning.

Earlier this week, Sam Polk wrote an Opinion piece in the New York Times about his experience being, as he described, "addicted" to the money on Wall Street. He then goes on to talk about how he finally, one day, walked out of Wall Street. Unlike me, Sam didn't have a plan for what he wanted to do with his life after banking, and I think it takes an awful lot more guts to leave without a plan than to leave with one. At least I knew where I was going — or thought I knew, until for a time I didn't.

But Sam's piece in the Times has pushed a lot of buttons, and not just bankers' buttons. There was this in the Times' Comments section from Matt R in Brooklyn:

"I know I'm supposed to feel pleased at the author's epiphany. But I don't. I feel angry. It's nice that after making more money than I've made in my life the author was willing to walk away. It's nice that he was able to come sober, though I doubt there would have been many repercussions if he hadn't. It's nice that he went on to perform charity work. But he still seems to be an over-priveleged person."

A banker friend commented, referring to the comment itself, that had Matt R been given the chance to make that kind of money, Matt R would've jumped at the chance to do so, just like every other 22-year-old kid getting his or her first shot at making it big on Wall Street, or anywhere where money is growing on trees.

But all of this misses the point. The point here is the exit, the courage it took Sam to realize something in his life was very wrong, at least from his perspective, and change it. Even when he wasn't sure what the change would be.

And I do know what it feels like to have your very powerful and very persuasive Wall Street boss trying to encourage you to stay for 'just one more bonus.' I know how hard it is to walk away from a good job, a job you've worked, as Sam put it, "like a maniac" for, a career that makes you feel important. And I know how disillusioned you feel after leaving that career behind.

It's been several years since I left Wall Street, and still every morning I wake up missing having to be somewhere at 6:30am. I miss the banter, the friendships, the eccentricities. But nothing can replace what it feels like to follow a dream. Nothing, not even the fantastic adrenaline of Wall Street, can replace what it feels like to discover your truest self.

"LIVE from Mongolia" is Patricia Sexton's true story of leaving Wall Street to pursue her dream…which ultimately led her into the news anchor chair in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Patricia has hosted Sinovision's WE Talk, a talk show about people pursuing their dreams, and she authors this weekly blog about dream-followers and adventure. LIVE from Mongolia was published in October by Beaufort, and is available on Amazon, bn.com, and in bookstores from New York to New Zealand.