Life on the famous side & Lessons I’ve learned

Lesson 1,The Pressure

More and more often I see young people striving to be famous, posting every part of their life on social media, showing their skills, hoping to get into the spotlights and become rich & famous.

When somebody ask me, I tell them you don’t want to be famous, or at least think it trough thoroughly…
What is the point of being ‘famous’ when all I need is 3 meals a day, shelter & real friends.
But then maybe I’m wrong, for some people it might be a lot of fun, after all I never wanted to become famous and was rather infamous to start with anyway..

Now, before I go any further I want to tell you that I hated being famous for years, I despised it, wanted to hide ( maybe it’s even a part of why I kept sailing away) I just couldn’t see the good part in it.
By now however I’ve learned to deal with it, and try to use my status for good. I hoped for years people would finally forget, however they didn’t.. So here I am trying to deal with the state I have and making the best out of it. Yes it has good points too 🙂 I have a big platform to show and encourage others to take the jump to whatever their dreams are. That failure doesn’t mean the end but in fact is one of the best ways to learn new things.By now I actually enjoy doing presentations because I see how it changes people and their life’s. I encourage them and they encourage me. I love teaching the skills I learned along the path of life.

On the other hand I find this brings along a lot of pressure, even though I have learned a lot along life’s path, I am still young and know that I may be wrong in some of the things I believe in so firmly. What if people don’t really think themselves and just follow what I say because I have the ‘experience’ what if they take whatever I am trying to say completely wrong and end up hurting themselves? I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone to do something dangerous. Crazy maybe, yes, but then well prepared and with some knowledge behind it…

It’s a few years ago now that I was listening to some new pop songs and realized the texts of the songs. I found them perverse, hateful and/or disdainful against other people. And then I saw little kids singing these songs and realized they look up to these people, whatever they do is their example. And quiet often what these people did was, well.. not exactly a good example.

Even though I was angry first at these public figures making fools out of themselves and giving that as an example to the world I realized we are all human, we all make mistakes but if your in the spotlights every little mistake is taken under the magnifying glass and send out into the world. It’s only normal to either break under that kind of pressure or to just not care anymore..

But as to everything there has to be a balance, one just needs to find it.

Lesson 2,How being famous doesn’t necessarily mean being rich..

Another lesson I learned, however not very quick is: when there’s something to get, you will not be the only there to catch it.
I was launched into media, sponsorship & lawyers – things I nor my family knew anything about. So of course we said yes when someone offered to become our manager. From there on our trust rolled down with lightning speed, after two managers, publishers & film companies had cheated us, leaving us empty handed the world suddenly looked much darker. Where had all the nice people gone?
After these failures I took charge and left no one in anymore. From early on I have managed everything myself – it’s been the best business school there is, but a very expensive one also.. As every mistake I make costs me, especially the mistake of taking the wrong managers.
Contracts with hidden words I did not know, people talking nicely around points, and still, I’m trying hard to trust people but I keep falling down again and again..

In many cases I realized I could start a court case against them but I simply didn’t have the energy and will to start yet another court case – I just wanted to live my life and keep sailing.
Now I do have to be honest and say I didn’t try really hard to become a good business manager because until now the business world just seemed to be occupied by lying cheating bastards and I didn’t want to become such a person!
Yes, I know now, they aren’t all lying cheating bastards, there is still good people – and I did also meet a lot of them and got lots of good advise 🙂 It just still doesn’t really attract me to become a hard business woman.

After all I’m already a captain, wife, motivational speaker, author, traveller, and still very busy chasing my dreams 😉
Maybe my dreams would be easier to achieve if I had been a better business woman, but I think if I had been a better business woman I wouldn’t have this new dream.

I still think that the love for money is what drives businesses. And after all that has happened to me and my family, I rather started to hate money and wanted to stay away from it. And that ‘wish’ did come true as I kept being screwed over and learned many hard lessons. In the end leaving us, well.. without money but many good lessons richer.

I really love living simple, I don’t mind eating cheap foods, sleeping in boats, tents or cars, showering in the rain and rivers, paddling in sun and rain to the toilet in the marina – for me this is much more living then staying in a hotel or living on a big posh ship and having everything one could wish for.

We lived like this for years, and then realized life is good, but sharing it is even better.
We welcomed friends and family, friends of friends and traveled with them on Guppy and in our Guppy car showing them a way of life they hadn’t seen before.

So we would work and earn some money and spend it again to maintain Guppy and on travels to show newly made friends and family our way of life and the beautiful places & people we have discovered.

This turned out to be yet another great, but also expensive school 😉 We learned so much about touring around with people that know nothing about sailing, camping, living simple, hiking, climbing and more 🙂

But it’s such a fun way to learn, it’s a big part of why we want to start this new project.
We realized how much fun it is to show people new things and how useful this can be in their life’s. We have seen this in Adults but even more so with the kids we’ve worked with over the last years. I worked a fair bit with some high schools in the outdoor program and we’re always happy to take care of our friends kids and take them on adventures to explore what they are actually capable of 🙂 We’ve taken several kids under which a three old on a ‘beginners cave and glow worm tour’ and we have also taken out a bunch of kids sailing, climbing and adventuring trough forests.

It’s a true joy, and we wish with all our hearts that we can find some willing sponsors to help us set up this program so we can make it our mission to share our joy and life lessons, showing the coming generation what this world has to offer and how they can make the best out of it.

Lesson 3,The media

So I actually started writing this because I recently got some mails from people, wondering why we are looking for sponsors and don’t just buy the boat we want. After all it’s clearly stated online and in some articles that I must have at least half a million dollars!

Wait..? what! – That’d be nice, however we don’t, and I have no idea why people write this kind of stuff on the internet like facts, which brings me to another hard lesson I learned as a ‘famous’ person over the last years.

There is a very close balance between being know as ‘loving attention’ or just being ‘ignorant and feeling to good for the world’ – which can very often be mistaken with people that are just living their lifes and are rather shy, I’m a little shy by nature and take time to warm up to people, but since I’m famous I’m not expected to be shy and therefore when I don’t talk to someone I must just be ignorant..

When I was in this stage of absolutely hating to be famous, of course I ignored the media and anything that came with it – after all I wanted to become unfamous again as fast as possible. However people didn’t forget me and were curious what I was up to, I very quickly found out that I needed to keep some updates and give some interviews otherwise journalist would just come up with their own stories about me, which very often were miles away from the truth and brought me even more trouble.

Which in fact is what it has done this time, not sure who is been putting it out there that we have half a million dollars but of course when wanting to find sponsors and setting up a fundraiser to start a new project this is not very handy…

I realize if I had done things right maybe I could have the money we need by now, fact is I was young and unexperienced and don’t have any of the money I ‘could’ve had – but I’m sure there’s some lying cheating bastards out there that are feasting on it now, and I just hope they are using it well..

After all, these people and turbulent years did teach me many good lessons, making me much richer in knowledge and wisdom.

I just hope to start over with all I know now and use it for our future and most of all in our new project & finding sponsors.

Laura