Hello friends,
I am inviting you to share a journey with me. I turn 65 this year, and my goal for 2025 is to experience at least 65 adventures before the calendar is complete. I have many reasons to do this, but I want to start with the most important one: friendships are incredibly valuable to me. As you read through, adventure is really just a mechanism to describe a goal of renewed and expanded friendships with so many of you. It is the people I am having the adventures with that really matter most.
65 adventures in one year!
That is more than one per week (1.25),
and will require some work, planning and lots of help!
Before we gt any further, I need to acknowledge and express admiration for Sherry – who encourages me in so many of my crazy ideas. I could not begin to consider taking this journey without her support. I also could not do this without my children, Ali and Cam, who have taught me more about the meaning of life than anything I ever learned in school.
You may be wondering,
“what is an adventure, anyway?”
I am glad you asked – because I need you, my friends to help keep me honest. I am starting off with this definition (subject to refinement as we go). Each official adventure will occur during calendar 2025 and include at least one (hopefully more) of the following elements:
- Doing something I have never done before, or at least not done for a long time.
- Visiting a new place, or doing an activity in a totally new place (or a place I have not been for a very long time).
- Sharing activities with people who have not done/been there before or with people I have not connected with in a long time.
- Gathering a group of people who may not have ever met or been together before.
- An activity require substantial learning, creativity or innovation.
- In other words – get Larry out of his comfort zone!
Why now?
2025 is an exciting year for so many reasons. Due to the pandemic, I did not get to celebrate my 60th birthday, and I thought a one-night celebration of my 65th would be too short to have the lasting impact I am looking for. Also, as I recently stopped working, there is a self-challenge here to open up my vision of what a retired life can be. Can I shed my life-long obsession with my own productivity, and use this time to re-invent what retirement can mean for me? What new and lasting hobbies, ideas or friendships can I create through this process? What will I find that is new that I will carry into the future?
Come along for the ride!
I am inviting you to join me on this journey in four different ways: 1) Suggest adventures that I should do, or new things we can do together. 2) Join me on an adventure. 3) Be my judge and jury. Identify what really is an adventure and whether I am pushing hard enough. I want your feedback. 4) Read the blogs that accompany this website. I will report not only on the adventures themselves, but also on my journey along the way, some things that are coming up and thoughts about being 65 and entering a new stage of life.
Welcome 2025. Looking forward to sharing some adventure together!
– Larry
May 16, 2025
I am now four months into this experiment and almost exactly one-third of the way to 65 adventures. I’d like to share some of what I am learning along the way.
Most importantly, I realize that if you read this blog without knowing who I am, it might all come across as very materialistic. As if I am pursuing pleasure for it’s own sake in a selfish way. I am not that kind of a person, and I genuinely do not want my self-challenge to feel transactional, either to my companions or you, my reader.
To be a bit vulnerable here, one of the difficulties is to fit these activities in with all the other things I do in life, including my dedication to community and quieter time with family and friends. That is in addition to all the necessities of life, paying bills, managing investments, caring for others. Being a good father, husband, son and citizen. If I could frame the way I’d like this experiment to be viewed – as a guy trying to force himself to do more, to be out there, to expand relationships and take on new challenges.
I have worked extremely hard my entire life, dedicating every working moment to work, family and community – trying to find the right way to balance all of these. Yes, we took fantastic vacations! Yes, I walked the girls to school (and ice cream!), Yes, Sherry and I found some quiet time and Yes, I dedicated myself to whatever job I was doing. Balance was always the key and it is important now as well.
This journey I am now on is challenging. It requires planning, reaching out to people I may not have seen in a long time. Organizing people who may resist organization. Juggling what is happening this week with what will happen in three months. Being creative. Working around the weather. Being flexible. And it never stops. More than one adventure a week, every week. Take a few days off and I fall behind. It is really a crazy idea, and substantially difficult to do.
So, why do it at all?
There are so many good reasons: 1) I really have no clue about how to retire. So these adventures are really a tool to force me to focus on what possibilities a retired life could have as its components. 2) By nature, I’d rather follow a pattern and do the same things each week. Without work, what is setting the rhythm? Through this process, I am teaching myself to plan and experiment. 3) Sherry and I are reconnecting with people, rekindling old friendships and making new ones to try to discover who might be the players in this next stage of our lives. 4) Sometimes we need challenges to break habits, and to form new ones. 5) Lastly, I am a very private person, and to be this open to the world is way outside my comfort zone. That in itself is a teachable moment.
I hope this helps to explain some of my thinking, and I hope you are enjoying the ride alongside me. Thanks for being my companion. Just forty-three more adventures to go!
Update: July 8, 2025
We are now midway through the year and I have completed 38 adventures! That is truly a cause for celebration. I have quite a few more teed up for the next couple of months – and I am looking forward to them, and towards making progress towards this ridiculous goal.
I actually want to use this space to be thankful, because this journey would not be possible without so many of the pillars supporting me. To have the time and resources to pursue this is a gift that I do not take for granted.
I have already mentioned Sherry and my family, but let’s broaden our lens a bit more:
If you go back in time, you will learn than both of my grandfathers were hard workers who sacrificed for their families. My Father’s Father used to work in the candy industry and stories have been told about him carrying large boxes across Brooklyn delivering them to the stores that were his customers. My Mother’s Father worked as an aircraft mechanic. Neither man went to university, but both ensured that their children could. In the process, they instilled a work ethic and desire to grow that clearly got passed down to me. My father’s mother – also stressed education and hard work, working as a seamstress and pushing the family to achieve. Both of my parents had a passion for creativity, were careful with money and dedicated to their family.
I am also grateful for the mentors I had in my career: Bill Claghorn at Adwar Video, Thom Forbes at CCR Video, Dave Schmerler, Tom Wolzien, Dave Rabinowitz and others at NBC. All of them invested time and trust in me, and helped me grow to become the leader I could be.
I had countless teachers and supporters along the way, both at public school, synagogue and eventually university. Each of them took a chance on me and sometimes gave me creative assignments to open my eyes to something bigger.
Lastly, I do not for one second, take being born in the USA for granted. I lived at a time after the world wars and I was too young to be drafted for Vietnam. For most of those years we have had a working democracy, a strong economy and I was fortunate that our savings could compound under those conditions. In other words, some of this was just simply luck.
Thanks again for following along. This has been an incredible experience and I feel happy and blessed to have you all in my life.