We almost didn’t go.

We were on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, and it had been raining for days. The Old Man of Storr was the one thing Marissa really wanted to do, and we kept watching the weather, hoping for a clean window.

It never came.

So we went anyway.

The wind was blowing hard enough that the view kept disappearing. Fog would swallow the mountains, then shift just enough to reveal them again. The trail was wet. The weather was rough. Standing up there in all of it, I said something to the camera that I didn’t realize would stick with me:

A little later, the fog opened. Marissa looked out over layer after layer of mountains, water and cliffs and said it was one of the best views of her life.

It would be easy to turn that into a line about how the best views are always at the top of the hardest climbs.

Maybe.

But that’s not the part I keep thinking about. That hike is a pretty good picture of our whole life on the road. Almost everything we do started out feeling like a rainy trail we almost skipped.

Travel is hard. Filming it as your primary source of income is harder. Doing both while raising two kids who are with you 24/7? Now that I’ve written that down, it sounds absolutely insane.

But most days it doesn’t feel insane anymore. Not because it got easy. Because our definition of hard moved.

Autopilot

In 2015, Marissa and I had a house, jobs, a young daughter and a pretty obvious path in front of us.

Nothing was terribly wrong with that life.

We weren’t running from a bad life. We were walking away from a life we could already see.

The path in front of us was well worn. We knew what the next ten years looked like, and they looked a lot like the last three. Somewhere in there, life had started happening to us instead of being chosen by us.

So we sold almost everything we owned and went from roughly 2,000 square feet to less than 400.

I don’t remember either of us saying, “We need to do something hard.” But looking back, I think we both knew we were ready for something that would ask more of us.

It did.

Driving felt hard.

Backing felt hard.

Moving constantly felt hard.

Traveling with one kid felt hard. Then two. Then 50 states. Then overseas. Then filming all of it for a living.

None of those ever became easy. A 500-mile travel day still isn’t fun. But it doesn’t feel impossible anymore.

That’s the weird thing about hard. We act like it’s a fixed measurement.

It isn’t.

A lot of the time, hard is just the distance between what you know how to do and what you’re learning to do.

Harder than I thought

I hear from people who finally hit the road after dreaming about it for years, and a few weeks later they say some version of the same thing:

“This is harder than I thought.”

Backing into a campsite takes 45 minutes. The first long travel day wipes them out. Something breaks, they get lost, and they snap at each other. Somewhere underneath all of it is a scarier thought: Maybe we made the wrong decision.

That’s when it gets tempting to treat the hard part as evidence.

One terrible backing attempt becomes “I can’t back an RV.”

One exhausting travel day becomes “We can’t take long trips.”

One mistake becomes “Maybe we aren’t cut out for this.”

Sometimes those conclusions are correct. A bad financial decision is still a bad financial decision. A lifestyle you hate does not magically become good because you suffer through it. You don’t get extra points for being miserable.

But “harder than I thought” does not automatically mean “I chose wrong.”

Sometimes it just means you’re new.

Hard or wrong

So how do you tell the difference?

I pay attention to the direction.

The first few backing attempts are ugly for everyone. The question is whether attempt ten is better than attempt one. Usually it is.

If the thing is getting more manageable, you’re probably building capacity. If it’s getting heavier, more damaging and less worth it, that’s different. That’s when hard might really be a warning.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for misery.

I like air conditioning.

I like Amazon.

I like GPS.

I am not volunteering to churn my own butter to build character.

The goal isn’t a harder life. The goal is not letting one hard week decide what you’re capable of.

Three things

Here’s what 11 years of this has taught me:

Notice the direction. How hard something feels today matters less than which way it’s trending.

Choose meaningful hard. Hard is worth it when it’s taking you somewhere you actually want to go. Hard just for the sake of hard doesn’t earn you anything.

Remember what used to be hard. Driving a big RV. Living in a small space. Changing plans. Traveling overseas. When the next thing feels impossible, your own history is the evidence.

Hensley and JJ

I don’t really care if Hensley and JJ grow up wanting to RV. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.

What I hope they carry with them is evidence. Evidence that they can be nervous and still go, that they can be uncomfortable and still figure it out, and that something can be harder than they expected without it meaning they should quit.

Someday when they run into something that feels impossible, I hope their first thought isn’t, “I can’t do this.” I hope it’s, “This is hard. We’ve done hard before.”

That’s what I think about when I picture the fog opening on Storr. Not the view, as incredible as it was.

That we almost didn’t go. And we went anyway.