By Lisa JoDean Crawford
Students have been known to go to extremes to pay
off their student loans, but Ken Ilgunas’
story might be one of the longest winding, quirky paths to financial freedom
and authorial success out there.
 |
| Ken Ilgunas |
In 2009, with $32,000 in debt, Ilgunas embarked on a
two and a half year journey to pay it all off by working strange jobs and living
in his van – all while attending Duke University with the goal of earning a
master’s degree without accumulating any more debt.
Like our last
post about Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton, Ilgunas began
sharing his adventures online with a very basic blog. The blog was never
intended to be his vehicle for success – the van with the mouse living in the
falling ceiling upholstery was there for that – but his friendly writing style,
uniquely humorous experiences and sometimes absurd attempts to live a frugal
lifestyle quickly caught the public’s attention, which led to multiple interviews,
published articles and eventual book deals.
 |
| Books By Ken Ilgunas |
After five semesters of courses, Ilgunas graduated
Duke in May 2011, moved out of his van and by December received the call he had
been waiting for – a tried and true offer for a book deal that would eventually
lead to Walden
on Wheels, his first memoir of vandwelling, published in May 2013. Since then he has published two other
books: Trespassing
Across America, which chronicles his 1,700 mile journey following
the Keystone XL Pipeline; and This
Land is Our Land, Ilgunas commentary
on how “America’s public lands are threatened by extremist groups and
right-wing think tanks who call for our public lands to be sold to the highest
bidder and closed off to everyone else.”
Now Ilgunas tours
the country selling his books and speaking publicly about his life
adventures and his passions. So, how did data play a role in Ilgunas’ life?
Since 2004, Ilgunas has been keeping records – data –
“chronicling what was going on in (his)
life: career thoughts, travel reflections, failures, success, goals, lessons
learned.”
Reflecting on this practice in a blog
post from 2015, Ilgunas said:
“I find that I am becoming more of a ‘data collector.’ One can learn a lot about yourself if you have introspective talents, but you can also learn a lot about yourself just by looking at the numbers.”
Ilgunas said by recording these
observations and analyzing them, he was able to find patterns, build a life
structure and strive to reach his goals. He added:
"But truthfully, I do live spontaneously. I've found that to live a passionate and spontaneous life is not to be 'a feather in the wind,' but to deliberately plan a passionate and spontaneous life. In other words, you must give your life the structure and space it needs to be able to make spontaneous decisions (i.e., saving for and meticulously planning out a six-month journey on which every day there'll be some component of adventure and spontaneity)."
Ilgunas’ success is a great example
of how accumulating and analyzing personal data can lead to making the decisions
necessary for growth and change in your life – both personally and
professionally. Without Ilgunas’ self-assessments of his own personal data, he
likely wouldn’t have found ways to make the financial, travel and publishing
decisions he did that left him down the path to be the success he is today.
Comments
Post a Comment