I live in the “Gateway to the West.” We’ve got a 660-foot arch as a reminder that St. Louis was once a bustling frontier town.
It was from here that President Jefferson sent out Lewis and Clark on one of the most grueling and dangerous expeditions in American history. The city opened up the great unknown of the frontier and grew to become the fourth largest city in the nation by 1900.
St. Louis became a place for explorers, and even soldiers, to get equipped for the western frontier. This city’s early businessmen built their careers by outfitting others for the wilderness. Though some used it as a launching point to great adventure, most made St. Louis their resting place. It was easy to live on the border of the wilderness without having to actually enter it.
There is nothing wrong with settling into a good land and cultivating it, but there is something destructive about having a settler’s spirit—the mindset that exploration is something other people do and adventure is something we only read about.
It is OK to settle, it is not OK to become a settler.
Just like the title of Stephen Ambrose’s historical piece on Lewis and Clark says, it takes “undaunted courage” to enter into the unknown. We all love hearing the stories of these boundary-crossers. We may even daydream about being these type of men. But that would require risk. It’s easy to stay comfortable and to stop pursuing new challenges. It is much more comfortable to find a patch of land, work it and never risk discovering what’s over the hill.
Too many of us are settlers.
It is easy to settle for a less than challenging career. It is easy to settle for a less than intimate marriage. It is easy to settle for a less than satisfying relationship with your kids. It is easy to settle for being out of shape. Too many of us stand on the edge of the frontier, but retreat to the safety of the comfortable settlement.
Four ways to kill the settler in you:
1. Do the hard thing first.
I love to procrastinate. I am an expert at it. At the heart of procrastination is the unwillingness to tackle difficult tasks.
We all do this, because hard tasks take a ton of energy. Putting them off until the last minute is dumb because you have already expended the best energy of your day.
What if we actually did the hard things at the beginning of the day, month or year?
