Without a doubt, ACbert and I have the perpetual travel bug. I suspect she has the bug more than me because she enjoys all the planning leading up to the actual trip. Much of the fun for her is in discovering the perfect location at the perfect price. I just like the trip.

Our trips, however, aren’t how most people travel. Instead of a vacation, we call it a relocation. Instead of seven to ten days of solid vacation where we say goodbye, unplug, and turn on our email vacation auto-responders, we bring our laptops, only rent places that include internet, stay much longer, and continue to do work as usual, except our “office” view is much different and breaks/evenings/weekends are filled with adventure. Even little things like buying cereal are new and exciting if you are in a different country. You’d be surprised how remote you can get and still get internet. While in the past we’ve done an eight month relocation, the last two trips were a month each and that feels about right.

One of our life themes (kinda like goals but more a way of living verses an end point) is what we call The 3-2-1 Traveling Plan. What it means is that every year we do three extended weekend trips, two week trips, and one month relocation.

We’ve already started 2012 off strong with our January relocation to Utila, Honduras and an extended weekend trip to Vermont to ski with friends and another extended weekend trip with friends in the works.

So now back to Utila. It’s a tiny island off the coast of Honduras. Roatan is its bigger brother and where most people who come to the area go. We went one step further by riding on Captain Vern’s catamaran to and from Utila. The island is only seven miles long but has some of the world’s best diving and snorkeling. We spent the majority of our time about two miles outside of “town” in a tiny 250 square foot hut with 280 degree ocean views, and sounds, waking us up and putting us to sleep. We had more adventures than I have time to write about, so instead, below is a list of our highlights. If one sticks out to you, next time we see each other, ask and I’ll share.

• Taca Airlines Breakfast Service
• Seat Upgrades?
• 2 Hour Wait for Captain Vern
• Expat Robert Johnson (sand flies, cocaine, and toothless)
• Captain Vern’s ‘Front Row’ Seat
• A Whale!
• NYC Cable TV?!?
• Bogart The Cat
• R.J.’s Bar & Grill
• Booze Hound R.J.
• Another Rumanade Please
• The Locals
• Kid Golf Cart Drivers
• Caskets And A Dental Check Up
• Doh! Forgot the Kindle Cable
• Cheap Beer is Cheap Beer
• Imperial Wins Best In Show
• The Island Costco Run
• Country Music Shopping
• The Wednesday’s Boat
• Avocado Everything
• The Bootleg Library
• Island Mas
• Island Annie
• Mary Lee’s Tuk Tuk
• Morning Sunrise
• Bed By 9, Up By 6
• The Bug Infestation (Chuckie)
• “Are we over 500 Lemperia?”
• Eastwood the Eagle Ray
• Paloopa The Dog
• “Paloopa, Don’t Eat My Throw Up!”
• Paloopa Walking To Town
• Sally? Her Name Is Sally?
• $150,000 For All Tradewinds
• Plastic Washed-up Everywhere
• Cocktails On The Palapa
• Icabad, Ebob, Half-Tail, and Petey The Iguanas
• Jingle –> “Annie Colbert Expert Iguana Spotters”
• Tom’s Wealth Of Iguana Knowledge
• Land Crabs
• The Broken Sandal Walk
• Our Electronic Hiding Places
• The Moving Ghost Chairs
• Random Power Outages
• Joshua’s Camera
• Island Time
• Gill the Gecko
• Gecko Poop
• La Hucho Gang
• Bat Swram
• Instagram it!
• The Electrical Shower Handle
• Hopeful Hitchhikers
• Me Casa, Su Casa (Private Property)
• Too Many Drinks At El Picante (John)
• NPR Is Sponsored By The New School and Porgy and Bess
• Toasted Tortilla Shells
• Finally Natural Peanut Butter!
• The Biggest Chip Bag Ever
• Sh*t Mas Says
• Sh*t Annie Says
• Millie The Macaw
• “Is The Water Calm Today?”
• Butterball Turkeys
• Baby Crabs On The Curb Scramble
• The Water Shortage
• Where The Heck Is Coral View!
• The Secret of Coral View
• Societal Division At The Public Beach
• Hammock Work Day
• Oatmeal Mask
• “I Just Got Stung 3 Times, One In The Lip.”
• Roundtrip Private Island Snorkel #Fail
• The Pelicans Are Taunting You
• “Banana Spiders Are Harmless.”
• Jellyfish Killed My Wife
• Haircut On The Palapa
• Plata, The Local Rum ($2 Liters)
• Our Prisoner Passenger
• Let’s Play, Where’s The Shotgun?
• Stained White Diving Shirt
• “Can Glen Adopt Me?”
• “Now That We’re Heading Home…”(Cockroach & Spider)
• Bu-Bye Utila, Hu-Low 200 Student Leaders (Pace University)

From video gaming to play wrestling, play is a topic that has intrigued me for a long time. In fact, the concept of play is an inaugural part of our leadership training, Dance Floor Theory. I’ve been curious about how we are impacted by play from childhood and beyond, but I’ve never found a well written book on the topic because, unfortunately, it’s a topic that too easily can get fluffy without any scientific proof to back up claims. But Stuart Brown’s Play book surprised me with its perfect blend of theory and practice backed by multiple layers of research. If you’re looking for a nice introduction to the topic of play and how it can be helpful in all aspects of your personal and professional life, this is it.

Here are my money highlights:

Bears that played the most were the ones who survived best. Despite the fact that playing takes away time, attention, and energy from activities like eating

Play is simply practice for skills needed in the future.

People remember things better if they have a good night of sleep after learning something. Sleep and dreams contribute to this testing and strengthening of brain circuits.

Play, like sleep, also promotes the creation of new connections in the brain that didn’t exist before.

Play deficit can have same impact as sleep deficit.

Play creates new neural connections and tests them. It creates an arena for social interaction and learning. It creates a low-risk format for finding and developing innate skills and talents

Of all animals, humans are the biggest players of all. We have stretched the juvenile development program to a minimum fifteen years.

Play is a state of mind, rather than an activity

People have a dominant mode of play that falls into one of eight types. I call these play personalities. The joker, the kinesthete, the explorer, the competitor, the director, the collector, the artist/creator, and the storyteller.

If we let the play drive express itself well into adulthood, as we are built to do, we find opportunities to play everywhere. The brain keeps developing, adapting, learning about the world, and finding new ways to enjoy it

When we stop playing, we stop developing, and when that happens, the laws of entropy take over and things fall apart.

When we engage in fantasy play at any age, we bend the reality of our ordinary lives, and in the process germinate new ideas and ways of being.

Without play, [research] suggests, optimal learning, normal social functioning, self-control, and other executive functions may not mature properly

Play isn’t the enemy of learning, it’s learning’s partner. Play is like fertilizer for brain growth. It’s crazy not to use it.

Authentic play comes from deep down inside us. It’s not formed or motivated solely by others. The self that emerges through play is the core, authentic self.

Neuroscientists have shown that during puberty, a whole new set of brain genes that have been silent since birth turn on, creating a flowering of new neural growth and pruning of the cortical neuronal trees at a level unmatched since our early development in the womb. As the neural tangle works itself out, kids can see the world in unique and surprising ways. Studies have demonstrated that adolescents who are shown pictures of various facial expressions will often make very odd (and wrong) inferences about the emotions the people in the picture are feeling. Because of these odd perceptions of everyday stimuli, teens in some ways are living in a different reality from the rest of us. And it doesn’t just happen during the teens. This brain growth continues well into the twenties. This is especially significant as our society extends adolescence out beyond the traditional high school years.

In mythology, the returning hero not only comes back more mature and stronger, but also brings something new that is beneficial to the community

For all of us, “entering the forest where there is no path” and discovering our own path is an essential part of the transformative experience.

So much of parenthood is just getting by, making sure the meals are balanced and the schoolwork is done, trying to teach responsibility and generosity, right and wrong. But there are times when we pass on knowledge about what really matters in life, about how to look someone in the eye and shake their hands with confidence, about how to have vision, set goals clearly, and have the discipline to attain them. As we adults tell kids these things, we sometimes get a glimpse of our own best selves and how we might live our own lives better. Part of the joy and pain of being a parent is seeing our own parents in ourselves, seeing their good parts and flaws repeated in our voices. The joys and pains also come from seeing ourselves in our kids.

The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.

The quality that work and play have in common is creativity.

Play is nature’s greatest tool for creating new neural networks and for reconciling cognitive difficulties. The abilities to make new patterns, find the unusual among the common, and spark curiosity and alert observation are all fostered by being in a state of play. When we play, dilemmas and challenges will naturally filter through the unconscious mind and work themselves out. It is not at all uncommon for people to come back not only reenergized, but also with fresh ideas for work.

When brainstorming is going well, it is also play.

On an individual level, your creativity also needs to be protected, not only from outside critics, but also from your own internal critic. Allow yourself to be abundant in your creativity, at first not making judgments about what you think, feel, or do.

Most of the time, we have so internalized society’s messages about play being a waste of time that we shame ourselves into giving up play.

If you make the emotion of play your North Star, you will find a true and successful course through life.

As James Michener wrote in his autobiography: The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he’s always doing both.

Those who played together, stayed together. Those who didn’t either split or, worse yet, simply endured an unhappy and dysfunctional relationship.

Jokes are the minimally invasive surgery of a relationship: they penetrate to a deep emotional level without leaving an entry wound.

When we put people in love into the imaging machine, the areas of the brain that lit up were the same as those that light up in people on cocaine.

Couples that made a point of doing things that were new and unfamiliar had a much higher satisfaction measure than the couples who spent time doing familiar things.

The television comes on and play stops. Interaction is no more. The story line is set by the box, and the kids are now merely along for the ride, motionless and mute. Single-player video games are similarly attention hogs and socially isolating.

We adults are too quick to step in to stop such play.

Play, by its very nature, is a little anarchic. It is about stepping outside of normal life and breaking normal patterns. It is about bending rules of thought, action, and behavior.

Play shows us our common humanity.

Making all of life an act of play occurs when we recognize and accept that there may be some discomfort in play, and that every experience has both pleasure and pain. That is not to say that bliss is suffering.

Comedy and play are a universal language, accessible to all ages in all cultures.

Play is how we are made, how we develop and adjust to change. It can foster innovation and lead to multibillion-dollar fortunes. But in the end the most significant aspect of play is that it allows us to express our joy and connect most deeply with the best in ourselves, and in others. If your life has become barren, play brings it to life again. Yes, as Freud said, life is about love and work. Yet play transcends these, infuses them with liveliness and stills time’s arrow. Play is the purest expression of love. When enough people raise play to the status it deserves in our lives, we will find the world a better.

Next up is Integrity by Henry Cloud.

Click here to read my previous book reviews.

Click here to visit my virtual bookshelf of books read.

Click here to follow me on Shelfari.

1) Country Music Serenade

The main grocery store in town is owned and operated by locals, but don’t expect to find any local music playing while shopping. Instead they will serenade your ears with classic recordings of country greats like “Waltz Across Texas” by Ernest Tubb and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” by Waylon Jennings.

2) Cornflakes Meatballs

When I think of all the wonderful ways to consume cornflakes, meatballs and salmon loaf might be somewhere near the never part of my list. But FANS doesn’t think so, so they printed the recipes right on their box. Between Part 1 and Part 2, you’d think I was hating on FANS, but turns out they are a modern company and even have their own website.

3)  Cruising The Strip in a Pimped-out Golf Cart

Utila has one main road with zero traffic signs and no legal driving age. Couple that with the fact that people own Golf Carts to get around and you now know what most of the kids in town do for fun. They cruise the strip in their pimped-out golf carts. Ok, their carts aren’t pimped out, but ACbert and I would love to bring the pictured cart above to Utila and cruise the strip in style…

4) Paloopa our Friend

She’s (actually might be a hermaphrodite) covered in ticks, will bite your feet, go crazy after touching salt water, and might have a mild case of rabies, but if you can get past all that, she’s extremely cute and loving. She comes to check on us 2-3 times a day…every day. She just wants love. This picture is the only time during the whole trip she wasn’t moving so fast that we couldn’t snap a picture! We named her Paloopa on our own because we didn’t know her real name, but yesterday, I met her owner (an expat) and found out her real name is…drum roll…Sally :-/.

5) Avocado Heaven

If I could inject a steady stream of only two food items into my body to live off of, it would be peanut butter and avocados. I love avocados, but in NY they are, at best, $2 per avocado. In avocado heaven, also known as Utila, Honduras, they are just under .50cents for each perfectly rip creamy avocado! You better believe we’ve been figuring out ways to incorporate avocado into every meal.

Between Facebook, multiple Twitter accounts, Google+, Google’s address book, and our internal CRM system for Swift Kick, I have so many different names for groupings of the people I follow, that it was getting extremely confusing to bounce between each network. I know my network is my net worth and it’s paid me back infinity+1, but that only happens when I can access the correct network at the correct time. So I set out to determine a default list of groupings that I could use across the networks. Here’s where I’m at…

PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS:

• Student Leaders
• Student Affairs Professionals
• Alumni Professionals
• Entrepreneurs
• Investors / VCs
• EO Members
• Speakers
• Education PR People
• Other Education Folk
• Other Professionals
• CrowdFunding / MicroFunding Professionals

PERSONAL CONTACTS:

• Family
• Extended Family
• Colberts
• NYC Friends
• Chicago Friends
• College Friends
• Highschool Friends
• Forum Members
• TechStars NY
• Swift Kick
• SuperCamp

ORGANIZATIONS:

• Student Affairs Accounts
• College Accounts
• Alumni Accounts
• Alumni Organizations
• SA Organizations
• CrowdFunding / MicroFunding Organizations
• Other Companies

OTHERS:

• World News / Info
• NYC Happenings
• Randoms

It’s now 11:05pm and I still don’t have access to my main work email and according to friends who’ve been previously locked out by gmail, it usually takes the full 24 hours to unlock the account. So now I’m looking at 24 hours without access to my main work email on a non-holiday Tuesday. I know this a 1st world problem to be ranting about, but…

In trying to figure out why my account was locked down, I looked back over their five reasons…

1. Nope – well that I know of, I don’t check my Spam folder
2. Nope – nothing more than usual
3. Nope – unless someone tried to hack it without me knowing
4. Tried this, didn’t work.
5. I haven’t done anything new to the account lately

Though no one is going to die over this issue, there’s a real cost in lost productivity. I can imagine if this happened and did end up causing a real issue that Google would have lawyers come knocking.

I want to know why my account was locked down, but all I get is this generic page.
I want to contact Google, but the page only directs me to a community help forum.
I want Google to see I’ve been a user for a long time and, unless my account was hacked, realize this is ridiculous.

None of that’s going to happen. I’ll go to bed hoping I didn’t miss anything too important in my email and tomorrow morning around 11:30am, my account will magically be unlocked and life will go on.

Really Google? Come on. This is my work account. I’m not forwarding the latest LOLcatz to everyone in my address book. I’m doing work. Work that leads to revenue. Revenue that pays my salary. Salary that I use to…you get the idea.

I have so many things to worry about with growing a business, this isn’t one I need nor want.

Going to bed annoyed. 

No matter what time of day it is and no matter what I’m doing, I’ve always got my business in my mind. Sometimes it’s consuming 100% of my brain, other times it’s 50 or 10%, but no matter what it’s always there. I can be buying garbage bags at the grocery store and while walking down the aisle I’ll be thinking about a new idea for AlumniChoose. It happens everywhere and with everyone. My default is to have it churning in my brain, so if I’m going to turn it off I have to really consciously tell myself to do so.

The up side is that my brain does wondrous things when it sits on a problem for a while. The down side is that I’m never 100% present with the people and things around me unless I force myself to do so. I want to feel bad about that, but it hasn’t hit me yet. Maybe this is an immaturity thing that I will discover once older.

“Think your favorite celebrity posts awfully clever tweets? They’re probably written by Annie Colbert”

1) Do You Have a Costco Membership?

Once a week (Wednesdays) a boat arrives on the island filled with supplies from the main land that then populates the various store shelves. The funny thing is that most of the product sent over is Costco brand. On Wikipedia it shows the closest Costco locations are in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Florida. I can only image someone going to Costco to buy produce for an entire island of people. That’s one huge shopping cart.

2) 1976 Cornflakes

By looking at the box, you’d think it was made in the 1970′s, but this box is indeed a current box that is good to eat. The manufacturers must have just decided it wasn’t worth their time to update the design because, after all, the best designs happened in the 70s, right?

3) The Bootlegged Library

Believe it our not, our tiny little island has a library with books and DVDs you can rent out. The selection of DVDs is actually rather large and fairly current too. But you’ll notice, by the picture, that 90% of the DVDs are bootlegged copies. If your conscious can handle that, then this is a great resource to kill some nights at home.

4) What’s better than Rum? Cola Rum!

I don’t drink pop (soda for my east coast friends), but if you trick me by putting a little rum in there, I’m sold. Yes, that is a straw coming out the top that I drank it with. Free Cuba!

(This was written by request to be included in an upcoming friend’s book)

During my childhood family vacations that took us far west away from the flat plains of Chicago, I used to love rock jumping with my brothers.

We’d find a rock, put a leg back to wind up, jump, and land safely…most of the time. Then on to the next rock.

Usually the jumps were pretty easy and at a length I’d done a thousand times, but occasionally we’d get to a rock that was at a length I’d never done before. My mind would race. “Will I make it? It’s too far. You can do it. There’s only one way to know for sure!” And off I’d jump. At some point, mid-air, my eyes closed and all my focus was on hoping my feet hit solid ground…instead of my face. Success! Off to the next rock I went.

As an adult I don’t physical rock jump anymore, but in growing my business I do mental rock jumping all the time. The biggest difference is unlike my childhood where I could see the rock and how far the distance was, in mental rock jumping, I only have guesses as to how far the jump is, or if there’s even a rock to land on on the other side. This is the entrepreneurial leap. This is the moment when the idea of uncertainty, or the unknown, either propels you forward in a quest to know the answer, right or wrong, or holds you back out of fear.

I jump a lot, but leap only once in a while. I love the quest of the unknown. It’s exciting, and unlike with real rocks where I could end up in a hospital, the damage of mental leaps is only what you allow it to be, and for some people it is far worse than anything a hospital can fix.

My latest leap was to start another web tool called www.alumnichoose.org. It was expensive both in upfront costs and in opportunity costs for not focusing my energy elsewhere. I did the usual market testing that one would expect for a new idea and all signs pointed to a green light. So I put my leg back, wound up, and leapt. I’m still in the air today.

All my data, research, and vision shows me that there’s a landing rock on the other side, but I won’t know for sure until it actually happens. But here’s the trick. It may never happen. I may never fully feel solid ground and so in-flight becomes my new ground. All the sudden everything changes.

By not needing to worry about my landing rock, I can more freely, and happily, enjoy the never ending quest of the unknown. Now I find myself leaning into the uncertainty I encounter, with my eyes wide open, because in flight is the exciting part, it’s where life happens.