It's Time for a Pivot.... Part 3

If you haven't already read them, please go back and read Part 1 and Part 2 of this post which you can find here and here respectively.  When we left off, I was taking a critical look at the decisions I've made over the past few months, and staring to look ahead to our upcoming plans.  With that, here's part 3:

I have barely played any poker over the past month because I have been planning and preparing to go with Katie so we can pursue our Divemaster certifications together.  We plan to leave in mid to late February or early March, and hope to spend 3-6 months out of the country.  We would like to start in Costa Rica, where it will be possible for me to get set up playing poker online and possibly build a network with the relatively large community of poker expats that live in the Playas del Coco area.  We have already been in touch with a dive shop regarding Divemaster internships, and we hope to nail down those details in the near future.  Our next step after achieving Divemaster in Costa Rica is completely up in the air, but we are excited to plan that step together while we are there.

I can't even begin to describe how excited I am for this next journey, because it brings me back to the reason I left my job in the first place, allows me to pursue something that I already know I love to do, and allows me to share my experience with someone amazing.  Not to mention it gets me into tropical weather in the winter and let's face it... fuck New England winters.  It also sets us up well for our "long term vision" which may be a complete pipe dream right now but who cares, pipe dreams are the reason we are taking this risk in the first place.

Our "long term vision" is really just a vision for the next 3-5 years.  We both love diving, we both love travel, we both love warm weather, we both love each other, I still want to make a living for myself as a professional poker player, and Katie wants to use her skills to make a difference and help people (she is clearly the more right-minded person between the two of us).  We envision ourselves finishing our stint in Central America with the certifications and experience we need to be hired by dive shops where needed.  We're picturing us finding a place in the Miami area where we are within striking distance of some of the best diving in the country, as well as some of the best poker games in the country, all while living in a vibrant culture that we both love.  We plan to spend about half of our time there, while the rest of our time is spent traveling to dive destinations around the world that have either live or online poker scenes that I can play in.  Katie will focus mainly on earning income through her dive certifications, and I'll supplement my poker income when needed by picking up diving work during busy seasons.

I know this all sounds crazy, and that's because it is, and that's what makes it awesome.  Those same things can be said about pretty much every entrepreneur's dream before they started the next big thing, and that's exactly how we're treating this.  What we end up doing probably won't look anything like what I wrote down in this blog post, and that doesn't matter.  What matters is that we're embarking on this journey together, and that we are risking everything along the way.  I really look forward to keeping you all posted as we get going, and I can't thank you all enough for the support you've shown so far.

And to kick off this whole ordeal, I finally got around to putting together a video of the trip we took to Roatan in September that got the ball rolling:

P.S. Silly me for thinking I could use this part of my lap for my laptop....