To make life more exciting, copy Nellie Bly's 75-day deadline
To make life more exciting you rarely need a big change. Nellie Bly's 1889 race around the world shows the two parts that matter: a deadline and a witness.
Adventure is mostly paperwork: a date, a promise, and someone keeping score. The trip itself matters less than people think.
In 1888 Nellie Bly pitched her editor at the New York World on beating Phileas Fogg’s fictional eighty days around the globe. The office wanted to send a man. Her answer, as she tells it in her 1890 book: “Start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.” When the editor finally asked whether she could leave “day after tomorrow,” she said she could start that minute. She sailed from Hoboken on November 14, 1889, promising to be back in “seventy-five days and four hours.”
What makes a life feel exciting?
If you want to make life more exciting, you probably need a deadline and a witness more than a new city. Bly had both in bulk. The World ran a guessing match on her arrival time to the second, and entries reportedly ran to nearly a million. She landed in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes after leaving.
Strip out the steamships and the thrill came from a number said out loud and a crowd waiting to check it. A bored life usually has neither. Its plans are open-ended (“Lisbon, someday”) and private, so nothing can be won or lost by Friday. Even the most famous deadline essay started as a joke, but this part holds up: goals with no date get no urgency.
So shrink the voyage. Choose one thing you keep circling, give it a date inside a month, and name the friend who will judge it. Then write that date on the fridge where the friend will see it the next time they come over.