How My Uber Driver Ranked Me in His TOP 5 Most Impressive Passenger Stories
Coming back to Greece is kinda like a check point of how far I’ve come. 🚩🇬🇷
My Uber driver said I’ve made his TOP 5 of most impressive passenger stories he’s ever heard.
(I like you right back just for the mere fact of being interested in other humans and their stories, Mr. Driver.)
Families in Greece are very much codependent and interconnected.
As much as I love and am eternally grateful for my parents and their support, it never occurred to me that I should let their opinions about how to live my life affect my decisions whatsoever.
⚡️ In other words, leaving Greece at 18 to live a wild life, far beyond any realistic sociocultural standards or expectations—deviating from the mainstream path— a life that I could at best descrive like a “scrapbook of experiences across the world”, was what rang natural to me.
NOT doing what I felt in my heart and bones was calling me felt Ilogical and irrational. ⚡️
🌻What’s logical to me is following one’s own true calling,
🌻one’s own inner voice,
🌻one’s own thirst for meaning.
Living a life that doesn’t feel meaningful, one that conforms without bringing fulfillment, while eroding belief in one’s potential and the validity of their dreams, is almost like dying before you die.
And I wanted to live.
Layover in LAX, 7 Sept. 2024
Along my journey, I received a lot of support. From my parents, from the person who would become my husband, and from strangers in their 40s who said, “You’ll return the favor to a 20-year-old, too, one day.”
However, I did not go on this journey BECAUSE I had support.
I went because I was unwilling to settle for less, and live year after year wondering “What if?”
I went on this journey, despite whether or not anyone would support me (and with some savings I’d put together since I was 12, ready to figure it out).
I was alone with my fear when I went to India at 21.
I was alone with my fear after being mugged and hospitalized in Colombia also at 21.
And I was alone with my perseverance and my unwillingness to ever ever ever give up on my inner voice KNOWING where I should be, in Colombia, in Mexico, in Ayahuasca ceremonies.
Grit comes first. The rest comes second.
In other words, the WHAT and the WHY come before the HOW.
You figure out WHAT you want and WHY doing it will shape who you want to be. Plus why NOT doing it will either lead you in the opposite direction of your dreams, or the opportunity cost isn’t worth it. And you decide to go for it.
As the quote goes, “Jump, and the net will appear.”
🌻 This is genuinely the mindset that got me traveling the world since I was 18.
🌻 The mindset that makes me prouder and prouder of the person I’m becoming.
🌻 The mindset I coach others through.
In simple terms, it’s about going all-in on those inner voices that believe you CAN do it—the ones that sign you up for therapy, that bring you to yoga classes and sound healing, that guide you to eat a healthy meal.
🌻🌻🌻
My whole work, and my entire experience here on earth, is rooted in the curiosity of discovering who we can become when we commit to believing there’s greatness inside us,
in finding out how good it can get when we commit to putting in our best selves.
That’s why, from time to time—like this past August—I exhaust myself with jet lag, invest more than I earn (oh, and I even made the biggest investment in myself to date on a new mentor and mastermind, because that’s how seriously I take this work and put my money where my mouth is), and squeeze in as many workshops, conferences, and awe-inspiring connections as I can fit in, all for the chance that one new idea could transform the way I think, be, and coach. Highly recommend this crazy, wild, irrational, illogical way of doing life, btw. 🤪
Take care.
May you remember who you are x
With heart, love, and gratitude
Alexandra
