Is this bragging?
The thing nobody talks about
Last week, someone I don’t know sent me a message.
“Traveling the world is not a reality for most people, you know.”
Fair point. I do share a lot of my lived experience. And a lot of that experience involves making memories with my daughter and my wife. Yes, all over the world.
But here’s what that message made me think about.
If freediving in Bali, climbing Kilimanjaro, running obstacle races in France with my daughter Leyla are a 10 out of 10 (and they are)....
then sitting at the living room table with her on a random Tuesday morning, coffee going cold, talking for two hours straight about whatever’s fascinating her this week... that’s still a solid 8.
Maybe an 8.5.
Because here’s the thing that man in the DM got slightly wrong: it’s not the location doing the work. Well, the location helps. But the main ingredient is something else entirely.
It’s time. And what you do with it. The thing nobody says out loud
When I was building businesses in Spain in 2009, I was physically present everywhere I was supposed to be. Dinner table. Weekends.
But I wasn’t there.
My body was in the room. My mind was at the office. I was going through the motions of a present father while mentally drafting emails, running numbers, worrying about things I had no business worrying about on a Sunday afternoon.
I wasn’t bragging my way around the world back then. I was doing all the “right” things. Working hard. Providing. Building. And I was completely, comprehensively absent.
That’s the version of success I’m trying to talk people out of. What the travel is actually about
Yes, I share photos from Bali. From mountain trails. From Kilimanjaro at sunrise.
I share them because they’re real. They happened. And they happened because I made a decision (back in 2009) that the business was going to serve my life. Not the other way around.
The travel is a symptom. Freedom is the actual thing.
And freedom doesn’t always look like a tropical island. Most of the time it doesn’t.
Most of the time it looks like a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be. A kitchen table. A cup of coffee with your kid. The kind of conversation that goes nowhere in particular and somehow takes two hours.
I have those mornings now because I built a life that allows them, because I got ruthless about what got my time and what didn’t. The version I’m actually coaching
When guys come to work with me, most of them already have the money part more or less sorted. That’s not the problem.
The problem is they get home and they’re still at the office.
They’re sitting at dinner but they’re thinking about a deal that didn’t close. They’re watching their kid play sport but they’re half-managing a conversation on their phone. They’re technically home. They’re nowhere near home.
That’s what I work on. Not the woo-woo version of “be present.” The practical, operational version.
What are the decisions you need to stop making so your brain can switch off?
What’s in your calendar that has no business being there?
What are you giving your best hours to and is it worth what you’re trading?
Sometimes, when you get that sorted, you end up with the freedom to travel. To say yes to Kilimanjaro. To plan something epic.
More often, you just end up actually home when you get home.
And honestly, for a lot of the men I talk to, that’s the bigger win. On the bragging question
I thought about it after that DM. I genuinely did.
My ego doesn’t need this. I’m not posting photos from mountainsides to impress strangers on the internet. I’m posting them because I spent years not having this. Because I know what it costs to build it. And because I want men who are in the middle of the grind to see that there’s another way to run the equation.
Not everyone will take it as inspiration. Some people will read it as bragging. That’s okay. I can’t control the filter someone brings to what they read.
What I can control is being honest about why I share what I share.
It’s not to show off. It’s to show what’s possible.
If you’re the kind of man who read this and felt something (not inspired exactly, but more like seen) I’d say you already know something needs to shift.
You don’t need a tropical island. You might just need a Tuesday morning. To freedom, Robin
PS: This Linkedin Post kinda blew up last week. Maybe you missed it. It´s about how we lost 90% of our friends when we moved in Holland and how we rekindled those friendships.
