Adam Lind | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:13Adam, thank you for joining me. thank you for having me i've been really really looking forward to this conversation so tell me who is adam lind who is adam lind i guess on a practical corporate level i'm a author content creator and mindset coach on a personal level i'd say i'm a curious freedom seeker and someone that's infatuated with human connection that's why we get on yeah where did that all come from because we should all we should all be interested in that right but there are so many people that have probably lost that connection if you like yeah good question I think when I look back my mother always held like a very open home there would always be random people that would come in and out of my house for various reasons and from that age I was always interested in people and then I think there was this crossover between I used to struggle quite a lot growing up with intrusive thoughts so essentially intrusive thoughts are these like unwanted invasive thoughts that control your mind basically and as a kid I didn't really know what they were and they could they could change in so many ways I could be like driving in the car with my family sitting in the back my mind would be thinking like what would happen if you just like swung this car door open right now and I didn't actually do it but my mind would like be saying this stuff to me and they'd manifest more and more I could be like a train platform feeling completely happy my mind would be like what would happen if you just like threw yourself on the tracks and I didn't want to do it I wasn't suicidal but there was this kind of mind control that was happening to me and I never told anyone about it and then it wasn't until I think I was probably about 16 and they were getting quite a lot worse and I lost my father to alcoholism he'd been an addict throughout my whole life and it was through the grieving process when I really started to open up basically and try and change and retrain my mind and retrain my thoughts and once I realized I could do it I felt like I was just on this mission to kind of help other people realize that they can do the same and the more I started to open up about intrusive thoughts I learned that everyone has them to some degree rarely people speak about them there's a real taboo around them and I was just like right I want to just go around sharing all of my problems in the hope that maybe other people can be like, oh, I'm not crazy.

2:36I love that because certain people find something out and then they protect it. Yeah. It's almost like you found it out and it was so enlightening, so life changing. You don't want to tell everyone about it. And of course, what a great way to be able to do that with using social media as a force for good and writing a book, if you like, and all these things that you've done to help people. Where do you think the desire to help people, Kimball, because just listening to you then and the fact that you lost your father at a young age, that's a key kind of role model, if you like, and someone that can help you.

3:06Do you feel there's an element of you wanting to give back because you struggled personally and you didn't have others around you to help you? I think, to be honest, it's more that when I lost my father, I felt like the veil of society had been really lifted. So I'm like 16, 17, all my friends are thinking like you know where are we going what club are we going to this weekend like who am I going to kiss this weekend and I'm there lying in bed thinking like where is my dad like I know he's dead but where is he like this real kind of like existentialism of not understanding like these huge questions what's the point of life like why am I here what's going on here and within that I thought yeah the way that I saw society structured and I saw my family like you know only getting 10 day or 20 days off a year from this job that they didn't really seem happy with and like other people moaning they have to get up and go to work nine till five and I don't think there's any issue working like that if you're happy doing it but I was like if this life is so temporary like we are finite right we kind of live like we're infinite but we're not we we're temporary temporarily here in these flesh suits so it's like if I only have 70 years in this flesh suit I felt like I didn't want to do really anything that didn't feel enjoyable and as long as I felt like I was respecting other people and would find my way I felt like I'm just going to go and live a life on my own terms within the realms of you know I guess laws and respect for people around me and it just yeah it's really weird to say this now but I look back and I think losing I'm so grateful for the experience of losing my father because I think that was the ticking point for me to be like i'm going to go and live this life and existence that really is is the way i feel like i'm meant to be living almost like a legacy a positive legacy to your father who i know he struggled with addiction so there's an element of uh lack of a role model there for you so that that soul searching and those questions you're asking i imagine was quite a dark and lonely time definitely to then want to live life and i can tell there's a huge contentment about you.

5:08I can see a glint in your eye, skins glowing, and I know you live on a riverboat, which we're going to come to, so you are living life. You're having different experiences, if you like, to a lot of people that live in a sort of more of a confined environment. I want to go back to a time where it was probably quite dark, lonely, to then come flying out of that decision-making process that you made, where you then decided you are going to, because a lot of people have these thoughts of, I want to live life, I want to come out of what I'm doing, but they don't actually escape that so what was the mechanism for you I was like right I'm gonna I'm gonna go I'm gonna do this and what were the first things that you did do I think the initial thing was like I knew I needed to leave my hometown because I'd noticed like the people older than me who had like grown up in this hometown and like my grandparents and all their friends and like my parents and their friends they all were just in this like bubble and I was like I knew I needed to see what else was out there so I guess moving to university was my first step and that's I met my wife who I've been with now for 12 years since we were 19 and I would kind of like talking to her about all my thoughts and I was attracted to her because she has this kind of wild side as well and we kind of said like once we graduate let's just go and see what happens so we packed a bag we had our tent we'd saved up about four thousand pounds between us and we took a ten pound bus from London to Amsterdam and we got to Amsterdam when we said to family and friends like maybe we'll be gone for a couple of weeks maybe we'll be gone for a couple of months like we'll just see what happens and the more we were on the road for the first few months we were like just infatuated with everyone we were meeting and we decided to set ourselves this challenge where we wanted to try and hitchhike from Amsterdam to India so we were like no planes no trains no buses we're just going to rely on the kindness of strangers to pick us up and take us the whole way and it ended up being this five-year expedition with countless nuances and stories throughout it and yeah it really became this kind of like anthropological research project of human kindness because you know we're fed so much through the through the news and media so much negativity like if you look at the percentages of how much fear-mongering is on the news compared to how much positive things happen in the world is you know crazy it's like you get all of these terrible things that have happened and then the positive part at the end of the news is sport like that's the positive part and I just never made sense to me and I was like I really believe inherently that human beings are good and we were like let's put it to the test and we probably had over a thousand strangers pick us up every age color race background you could imagine and yeah we we went on this journey um yeah I love that so just just on that I want to keep this positive but just on the basis of the fact that there were say a thousand positive experiences and acts of kindness were there any negative uh experiences and and how did they compare if you like against the positive because there is a part of me i'm probably the dad part of me with two daughters where hitchhiking that's dangerous that's putting your your life potentially in into danger with people you don't know that could be psychos um and you did that for five years yeah So I just want to know almost like that sort of ratio of a thousand good experiences.

8:27Were there a few bad ones there? Yeah. Well, firstly, knowing you're a parent, my mum and my wife's mum are also like not the biggest fans of the expedition we were on. And they were proud of us. Were you honest with them about what you were going to do or did you mask that? I think they once it started, we kind of it kind of manifested and transpired like quite naturally. And I think they got used to it once it had happened. And we'd always tell them all these amazing things that had happened to us on the way. um i actually have a bit in my book talking about how whenever i tell someone this story the first thing they say is were there any bad experiences and i do feel like there is this conditioning that we seek i feel really bad for doing it but no no no i've done it i'm no no no and i will share them but i just i find it interesting as a topic right that we seek for that the negativity bias that we have within us of like the fear and the danger there were a couple of hairy experiences um nothing too traumatic like there was one certain situation but I always like to say it's I used to say to my mom sometimes if I get killed hitchhiking you better not tell people not to hitchhike because if 99.9 % of my experiences are good and I have one bad experience it doesn't mean that this thing is now bad and yeah I would say overall the opposite was shown like the amount of people that pick us up from the side of the road and then say do you want to come and stay in our house tonight like if you've got nowhere to stay or they would drive us like 20 miles further than they were going just because they wanted to help us out or it was just the kindness we were shown was so unbound by by all of these different walks of life it was it was amazing i love that do you feel that part of that experience you received connection from people that were lacking it themselves they meet a stranger who's good company who's pleasant who's clearly putting out um positive and friendly vibes and actually a lot of these people are lacking that so that extra 20 miles is a good example it's actually like where are you going i'm enjoying this i mean i've said it like that but where are you going i'll take you there because actually this is probably the best bit of my day yeah exactly that i think there was always an exchange like so the first two and a half years we only paid accommodation on two nights and the rest of the time we either had our tent where we'd wild camp or we'd use this website called couch surfing where it's basically people opening their home to travelers for free in exchange like a cultural exchange you hang out with them for a couple days and you stay in their spare room or whatever and all my friends would always be like why are these people wanting to do this and I was like they get just as much out of it as we do like we have grown into such a disconnected society you know we used to live in tribes you know and now it's like we live in these nuclear households the amount of people that don't even know the names of their own neighbors or the people up their own street and it's like can we have a bigger house with a bigger gate in front of it with we want to be in detached houses like god forbid we have like someone else's wall attached to our wall we're just getting more and more segregated tech's not helping as well right we can order food without going to a restaurant we can do so much now without leaving the sofa if you like which is isolating that's probably the word of isolating for sure and we really glorify like i've got friends in london that live in these big house shares and people are like why do you want to live with these people i'm like they're living in community they're making dinners together they're like inspiring each other right and I think by these people opening up their houses to us was it kind of was shaking up their daily monotonous life a bit and we were learning from them they were learning from us and it was just this with no money exchange which is always so beautiful and it just really felt like gosh this is how humans should be connecting with each other and it's crazy I'll tell you the truth when I got back to the UK which has now been six or seven years ago I got back it really unfortunately didn't take long and I really had to check in with myself once I was back here exposed to the news again exposed to the daily life again I would like could I remember the first like six months I'd walk around London like chatting to everyone the it wasn't that long until the fear started to breed back into me just because we're products of our environment right and I constantly have to check in with myself like when i sit down on the tube i can smile at the person in front of me and yes they might think i'm a weirdo or something but it's almost like a mission of mine to like break this barrier of disconnection uh because yes it's a sad part of it's sad to hear but i guess the experience you had on countless examples of seeing the good in in society means that you rise above that you're you're almost like the the ambassador to try and be out there and and demonstrate how you could behave do you get a reaction from people that um surprises you if you like on the positive side of things on the tube or going around in your own way because i think we're quite similar i put that out as well i was brought up like that so my parents would speak to everyone in every restaurant you know to the point where you're almost as a kid you'd be like can we go they were sort of taking the dress details of the waitress because they were sort of going to send us some clothes or something it's just like and i've seen that side but i've also I personally had countless examples where it's been super positive and you change someone's day just by smiling at them or what have you and then I've also had the people that really do not know how they cannot believe what you've just done or why did you say hello to me like why are you talking to me I don't know you and you can see it's a massive problem yeah I think one of my favorite sayings is like everyone's doing the best they can with the resources that they have so I always try and like yeah I'm often met with a lot of like um what's the word like standoffish but I don't take any offense to it because you know we don't know what resources that person has to be able to connect with someone but yeah like I always make a conscious effort to like ask the person that's scanning my shopping how are you or ask people in the like the waiters or the waitresses like how their days go in and there's been some really funny encounters actually like I went into a charity shop recently and I bought a t-shirt and I said when I got to the counter I said well no how are you and she was like I'm really sorry I don't remember where we met before I was like oh we haven't met I was I was just asking how you are and she was like oh and she couldn't believe that if we hadn't met before that I wondered like how she was but I love watching particularly people in the workplace when it's maybe more of an again like a monotonous role when you ask them like oh do you enjoy your job or something like breaking their state and this thing I had a period not too long ago where I wasn't actually in the best mental state and I've got this thing where I always like to tell the truth so when I got to Tesco's and the woman was like scanning my shop and she was like how are you and I was like oh I'm not great actually and she was like oh good and carried on scanning and I think because people are so used to hearing like how are you yeah good thanks you yeah good didn't register what I said and I was like wow how fascinating is this as well that we're again so kind of robotic now in our approach that even asking someone how they are isn't actually a question it's like a yeah this automated response it's slightly frightening and actually moving into the kind of the content creator side of you when did that start because you you've come back from traveling did you start that um during the traveling or did you start that when you got back i made a couple of videos when on the road but it wasn't like on instagram or anything we were just putting it like on facebook for friends and families so it was just your own personal kind of problem there was no thought about because where i'm coming to is kind of community yeah that lady at the checkout who's probably not talking to to anyone and not really listening not hearing but i'm curious to know where your sort of content to be like that started going out started to reach people where you started to realize you were impacting people from a positive point of view and realize you had a community there that you could impact and influence yeah it's really a strange one so when we spent a year living in india and a part of that for about 30 days i was living in an ashram and the idea was actually to learn like yoga teacher training but it ended up being so much less about like the physical yoga as we practice it in society and it was so much like it was a completely transformative experience there was a lot of what's called like yoga nidra which is these really deep kind of states of meditation where you access your subconscious and like I don't know like plan how you actually want your life to look and stuff it all sounds a bit wacky but like I wasn't really that into this before I went there I really thought I was going just to like you know learn how to do a good downwards dog kind of thing and really did not expect these experiences of really like tapping into my subconscious in a way of finding out how I want to be living and how I want to be showing up and this community element just kept shining through to me and I didn't really know what that was going to look like and we'd had experiences over those five years of living in communities like we'd lived in a off-grid community in Portugal in this forest for a while So we'd like tapped into different ways that community looks.

17:04And then when we came back from traveling, we kind of didn't really know what to do with ourselves. Like we felt like we'd learned so much. We didn't have that much money. And to be honest, the first time we came back, I really wasn't in a good mental headspace. I felt like I'd been searching for freedom externally so much and I'd found it like, you know, we could do whatever we want every day. we didn't really have a lot of money but we had ways to get by and make a bit of money here and there we barely knew what day it was what time it was and there was this moment where we were in the south of turkey in antalia and i was like lying in this hammock drinking a coconut and my wife put this photo of me on facebook and then all my friends started commenting on commenting on it being like you guys are so free like you're the epitome of freedom but a lot of my intrusive thoughts have come back at this time a lot of like existential stuff again and i was like how funny that like we have found freedom externally but we really I'm not in a good place and it was really this light bulb moment of like having freedom externally kind of counts for nothing if you don't have freedom internally which is a lot of the preface of my message and what my book's about so when I came back and started making content I was like the best way to share our life on the boat is to share it so authentically the highs the lows the struggles the vulnerabilities the existential thoughts that I still you know can get in bouts of at times it's really kind you see me as a a content man and most of the time I am but there's definitely you can feel that though that's a that's a vibration as much as a look and I think that echoes what you put out because in a world of inauthentic social content that's unashamedly you know people putting stuff out to try and be famous or to try and you know get views when actually there's there's just no substance to it and And everything, I had three or four people in the build-up to meeting you, sending me links to your Instagram saying, you need to meet this guy.

19:01You should talk to Adam. All in the last few weeks as well. And I think we should sort of elaborate on that. During that time, I've been putting out my own content about meeting Gareth Southgate, talking to him about the Dimbleby talk that he did, the Centre for Social Justice, Bospois Report, and the adolescence Netflix program coming out. And it's got people talking about the kind of crisis, particularly in young boys and where they fit in society and insecurities. And of course, that very much translates into men. And I think the key is looking for role models, looking for standout role models that are being authentic and saying as it is.

19:42And I think that sums you up. I think that's what we need more of. Did you know that's what you were doing? did you did you did you you you did it for your reasons and you probably did it for almost for sort of a therapy side of things as well if you like and unashamedly not being selfish if you like but did you feel that did you feel that you were doing it for the right reason yeah I think when I started making content first of all I had no idea that like content creation or influencers or whatever you want to call it was a job I had no idea you could ever turn it into a business or a brand I was just making videos for fun um but I do like business I like entrepreneurialism and as I spoke about when I realized with my dad that I didn't want to do a job that didn't serve me the more I was putting this message out and the more I learned that I could turn it more into a brand that definitely excited me but I had kind of this like vow to myself that I would only do things that really aligned with me and felt authentic and in full transparency along the way near the beginning I didn't stick to those values because at the beginning I didn't know what this was going to turn into so you know I'd maybe be offered like a brand deal with like I don't know a vitamin company that offered me an amount of money to make a video and I just did it because I was like this might be over next week right and I might have never even used that vitamin before and I'm happy to kind of admit this because I know now years on it's never something I would do now so at the beginning it was really like I was kind of like the rest of my life just winging it and I had no idea what it could become but no I mean it's really really kind of you to to refer to me as these things but I don't even know if I I see myself as these things to be honest I think I it is very therapeutic and very um comforting for me to share what's going on in my head about myself and about life because yeah I've being vulnerable is just something that's always come quite naturally to me and I guess I noticed when I was receiving more and more messages from people I didn't know saying how much it was helping them kind of fueled me to want to keep doing it um but yeah there's i'm not really sure of my why i'm doing it but it just feels like the right thing to be doing yeah but it comes to an authentic place and i think in that world where um strength ultimately is being vulnerable and that's not something that has necessarily been embraced by men i think that's what a lot of men are now craving and i think you know to the extreme is Andrew Tate and making lots of noise and putting out a message that people are gravitated to and then the message is terrible the message is so destructive and causing some issues in society whereas actually the positive message of being vulnerable and just being someone that other people can relate to and want to feel that they know and that's probably the biggest compliment I can pay you is I felt like I knew you before we met because of things I'd seen and watched and built that sort of information coming into me through you.

22:34That's a skill. Thank you. And I think that's something if you haven't already really acknowledged or thought about, I think you should because that importance of role model in society is so important. Yeah, I think the man thing for me is, it's always been in the back of my mind of something I wanted to get into more like talking to men about men about what it means to be a man because I've had so many battles within myself insecurities around my body around like all things that I feel like aren't often as spoken about in the men's space and also like I was raised essentially by my mum and my sister so I was raised in a very feminine led household and as a straight man that also has like this really strong feminine side because of the way OSL was brought up basically in a house of like Spice Girls and period chat because it was just my mom's sister and all my sister's friends that basically lived in this house with me as like the only male and then trying to navigate how I'm this straight man with a very feminine side but also like tapping into my masculine side and my anger was really confusing for a lot of years and I think being able to just speak about that openly and speak about the influence that growing up in a female-led household had and the influence on once I got really honest with myself about all of my troubles and insecurities about being a man how much I was able to transform them and let go because I'd finally spoken about them but like so much of what goes on when we keep it inside of us you know it just manifests in the body it can manifest through stress illness suicide all these things physically and mentally right all of it and it's like when you I feel like if I can just talk about it so openly hopefully it will give other people the opportunity to even normalize it for them or feel like they can then speak to someone I guess undoubtedly I mean I was I was going to ask you I still want to ask you that that whole way of you leading by example putting yourself out there when you first started doing that vulnerable content there must have been you know sort of heart racing and so on because you're you're putting yourself in a place of judgment if you like which stops so many people hence that bottling up and then building up you know mental and physical illness if you like if someone was watching and listening to this and inspired by what you're doing what's the one piece of advice you can give about actually just getting going and starting that i guess my first thing would be just tell that one person that you know you can trust like when it came to my real existentialism that i've struggled with for so long it was actually on the side of the road in turkey we were hitchhiking and i turned around to Lauren, bearing in mind we've been together so many years at this point, and I said, Lauren, I'm scared of my own mind, she was like, what do you mean, and I was like, I basically had a breakdown and told her all these thoughts, all these intrusive thoughts that I'd had since I was a kid, and I'd never told anyone about them, and just saying them out loud felt like the most incredible experience, and it was like that moment, like I'm crying on my knees, and they're like the side of a motorway in Turkey, but it was like, that was the beginning of everything, so you know, you don't have to make a video and post online about how you're feeling but just telling that one person i think is is just the beginning and sometimes even the end of all of it because i think the more we let it manifest the brain and the mind is so good at creating habitual loop patterns and it will just keep reinforcing to you the same thought again and again and again and really start to control you until you just physically express it yeah god you articulate so like a cork flying out of a bottle that's been shaken for years feels amazing and and the irony being it's never it's never going to be as big a deal to someone else as you think it's going to be you know like the way it's going to be received particularly by someone you love is only going to be of compassion I hope yeah I predict I get that a huge part of how you live is being around nature and being in the fresh air quite literally I mean you know from the minute you pretty much come out of any room on your riverboat you're in the fresh air how much of that do you think is good for your mindset because there's a lot of people I know that swear by getting out in nature having a walk removing themselves from the life we've certainly built ourselves around tech and being around kind of an urban lifestyle if you like is that a key part of your wellness I think for me it's actually a bit of a paradox because when we live or we function in the city it's so easy to be distracted by everything and when you're in the stillness and the silence you're really confronted like with your own thoughts and feelings so I think it's it's been definitely a very calming and integral part of my growth but at times it's also been a really scary introspective and like isolating part of my growth and I obviously completely agree that nature is an incredible thing for our well-being and everyone should be going to Parksmore and doing this but on a really honest vulnerable and personal level there's times when I'm like just get me to London because I'm like at meetings and with friends and at dinners you know when you're actually sitting there in the silence of the forest it's it can be also scary because we often don't take a lot of time to sit and listen to our own thoughts there was that amazing study I don't know if you've seen it where they they got all these people in a room one at a time and they basically said ask them how much they'd have to be paid to get an electric shock and none of them wanted to do it and then they're also asked like I might not be quoting this exactly right but the other option was they can sit alone in this room there was nothing in the room for 15 minutes with their own thoughts and if they wanted to get out the room they could press the button and get an electric shock but they didn't get any money and I think like something like 75 % of the people couldn't sit with their own thoughts for 15 minutes and I think about 80 % of them were the men and it's this idea that we don't give ourselves the time to to do that so yes although sometimes when I'm sitting in nature it can be quite confronting it's all for me a part of the human experience and a part of the the growth of getting to know yourself better I guess that's fascinating it's super interesting talking to you and I know that you've written a book tell me why you wrote it and tell me when it comes out I wrote it because I felt like I really wanted to give people this idea that they can really the veil they can lift the veil as well and like live a life of exactly how they want to live it and I also wanted to write it because I felt some people look at me and see me as like this epitome of freedom for them and I am just like a perception or like a figment of their imagination like I had this experience a few weeks ago where I was sitting on top of the boat one morning I wasn't feeling that good mentally and people would walk past and they'd be like you know you are living the life like oh I envy you so much and it's so funny because right in that moment I was not I was not having a good time in my mind and what they're actually saying I believe when they look at me is like you are embodying something that I wish I could have in my life but that doesn't mean they need to like you know quit their job hitchhike around the world or get a boat it could be they need maybe need like a new hobby or they need to like adjust something within their relationship so I wanted to write this book to help people look inside themselves and find what freedom looks like to them internally rather than just like admiring all these characters that we look at online and there's a whole chapter called like taking the first step so just literally like what is the very first thing you can do to start making changes to live a better life of course rather than being like i'm gonna quit my job i'm gonna leave my marriage i'm gonna fly to thailand it's also extreme right and it's not very sustainable scares people right yeah and it's also something you're probably not going to do so it's like let's just keep me and my dream like really far apart but i wanted to create something that had really actionable insights into self-reflection i guess what's it called it's called floating home and when's it come out it's out it's currently available for pre-order um which is really exciting so i'm going to be talking about over the next few months and then if it's pre-ordered it will be in your hands in august cool final question for you there's so much experience and perspective you already got the book's coming out what have you not done and where do you see your whole destination going now and what you want to try and achieve good question um to be honest i have no idea and I'm kind of happy about it.

30:41Yeah you're enjoying the journey right? Yeah it's like yeah I if you would have told me a year ago that I'd be writing a book that was going to be published I would have laughed if you would have told me five years ago I'd be living on a boat and like documenting my life about it I would have laughed so I think I'm just going to see what happens. Yeah but we must stay in touch because I really enjoyed talking to you and thank you a lot for the time. Thank you for having me. Thank you Adam. Thank you. Thank you.