Hi there! Got a full newsletter for you today. But first, if you didn’t get a chance to take the quick poll last week, I wanted to put it up top to see if a few more folks weigh in.

This week you’ll find me chatting with Rachna Ghiya who I met through the Ness Labs community. Rachna resides in India where she spends time helping people break free of their discomfort with drawing by running a creator bootcamp.

Check out Rachna’s work:

A Little Pause on Substack

@rachnaghiya on LinkedIn

Grand Canyon, August 1997.

Our family of five set out before sunrise on the Bright Angel Trail from the south rim. As the oldest of three boys, I was between my junior and senior year of High School. My youngest brother would have been about 12. By all accounts, we were an active Midwest family with an aggressive approach to recreation.

The objective: Hike 10 miles down to Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the canyon, and then 5 miles back up to Havasupai Gardens Campground in a single day. On the way down, we'd pitch our tents to lighten the load a bit, allowing us to return to a set up campsite after covering 15 miles.

Our parents had registered a full year earlier for the camping permit, so this was a well-planned out trip (including the ~4 week round trip drive from Indiana). A few important cautions however, may or may not have been given appropriate weight. The first was the ambitious distance. It was made abundantly clear by the park service that hiking all the way down and back up in a single day was inconceivable. Especially in August.

That's fine. We won't come all the way back out, then. We'll do 3/4 of it in a day and then finish the next morning. Easy peezy, Midwest-squeezy.

So off we went in the faint morning light, each of us with a backpack and wide eyes. The initial shock of going down into the canyon is something. The switchback trails drop off hundreds of feet all over the place. Sheer rock walls straight down. At one point my younger brother posed for a picture sitting near the edge of one and a passerby said "You know how many people die doing that right?"

I'll fast forward the first 10 miles. We made it to Havasupai, set up our tents, and continued on to Phantom Ranch on the Colorado River at the bottom of the canyon. (This was were I had heard the dreaded Tarantula Hawk Wasp could be found hunting… well, tarantulas. These 2” terrors can sting a human that inflicts pain on par with being electrocuted in a bathtub.)

As we walked along the river and approached the ranch, a thunderstorm came barreling through. The thunder echoing off the walls was one of the wildest sounds (and feelings). Caught in the deluge for a few hundred yards, we made it into the safety of the ranch, but soaking wet. I remember sitting there for a while eating, and wringing out our clothes. Shivering, after being hot as hell.

As the storm passed and we prepared to gear back up, we started hearing chatter amongst the rangers. It sounded like things had gotten interesting with the storm.

Two search and rescue choppers had been called in because a few rafts went MIA on the river with the flash flooding.

Trails were washed out. Trees down. Generally not good developments. But now that the sun was shining again, we needed to make our move to get back to camp by nightfall. It sounded like we were gonna have some obstacles.

The ascent from the river back up to Havasupai Gardens runs through the Devil's Corkscrew. It’s a steep, exposed, shadeless switchback series in the lowest and hottest part of the canyon, the zone that can top 120°F. Good thing it wasn’t humid now.

We made our way, and sure enough, came to our obstacles. At one point there was a 20’ wide river now flowing straight across the trail. It wasn’t all that deep, but it was moving fast. All that water from the hills and canyons above carving its way down to the river as fast as possible. No option but to traverse it and get soaking wet again.

We came across another set of hikers who saw a boulder the size of a car fall down a rock wall across the valley.

I admittedly lack many specific recollections after that until we arrived back at Havasupai at nightfall. Exhausted, filthy, no doubt hungry and thirsty, and now having to deal with… scorpions.

What I do remember is one of the worst nights of sleep I’ve ever gotten in my life. In part due to the scorpions (obvi), the adrenaline, the trauma, the sibling sardines next to me, and the realization we still had to finish our way out in the morning after all that.

I retell this story because, even if far removed at this point, I still think of it as one of the more precarious experiences I’ve lived through. And that’s a word carrying some extra weight lately.

Somewhere post-Covid, I head the term Precariat for the first time. Apparently it emerged after the Great Recession and refers to the growing class of people who live precariously on the edge of uncertainty and peril. They keep moving along the path but remain a foot fault away from tumbling down into carnage.

This group has grown as wages have stagnated, jobs have been lost, cost of living has increased, and fewer risks are paying off. (That’s my personal synthesis at least.) Paycheck to paycheck they survive, but without savings, retirement, college fund. One catastrophe away from cascading into trouble. In a word… precarious.

Naturally, I spend a lot of time debating myself on how we ended up here. How we get out. And maybe that’s where I changed my focus from the word defining a group of people to instead being a descriptor of the journey we’re on.

Then frequently I’ll read something (or feel something) that tells me this path is the only option and to stay the course.

Our kids are the same age right now that me and my middle brother were during that trip. Back in 2019, we took them to Arizona for spring break and visited the Grand Canyon. We spent it on the rim, naturally, overlooking the vast expanse below. I even took them to the Bright Angel Trailhead, but couldn’t get them further than a few hundred feet down before they begged to turn around.

To be clear, thats not criticism. It’s just that physical peril apparently isn’t our flavor. See, as we were sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off from Chicago (home at that time), my wife got an email from our accountant that let us know we owed nearly 20k more in taxes than we had anticipated. This was one of the two years we had finally done ok financially and eeked our heads out of the hole we had gotten into. But selling stock to live on meant new tax territory that was unfamiliar. So before we had even gotten off the ground, we suffered a financial gut punch that hung over us for that trip.

I will say, however, that precarious circumstances present rarified experiences. Of the roughly 5M visitors each year, less than 5% venture past the rim of the canyon. Only 1% are able to experience it from down within. I was able to see it from an unforgettable angle all those years ago—to appreciate my humanness and vulnerability that comes with a high stakes scenario like that.

Today, the rarity may be less glorious. This kind of circumstantial precarious is easy to point fingers at and say “well if you just did this” or “if you’d only stuck with that” you wouldn’t be in this situation.

But I know better now. This path has had our name on it for a while. The shit we’ve experienced tells me this has always been part of our story. The storm has rolled in, the trails are washed out, and we’re facing devils corkscrew from the bottom up in 115° heat.

But as was true almost 30 years ago, we get to experience our humanness and limitations while putting one foot in front of the other on the climb out of it. Obstacles will be overcome. Stings will be stung. And at some point, we’ll look back with a really incredible story to tell.

-Justin

Most of my reading lately has been on consciousness, self-awareness, intention, etc. When I saw this as a $0.99 on Apple recently I grabbed it to mix things up a bit. I’m barely into it, but thus far it’s a good read. (It also influenced my topic for today)

I’ve started following a handful of business coaches and consultants who put out thoughtful and helpful content. Nick Bennett and Erica Schmidt have a project called How Solos Scale. The Belief Prison examines 11 beliefs that tend to keep entrepreneurs stuck, many of which were right on the nose.