Experiential Billionaire: Build a Life Rich in Experiences and Die With No Regrets

By Bridget Hilton and Joe Huff

Our entire lives, we are taught to measure our wealth in currency. But when we reach the end, the number one regret of the dying isn't about money. It's about experiences they wished they'd had-but didn't.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Someday Publishing
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988837404

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copyright © 2023 bridget hilton and joe huff

All rights reserved.

experiential billionaire

Build A Life Rich in Experiences and Die With No Regrets

First Edition

isbn

979-8-9888374-2-8 Hardcover

isbn

979-8-9888374-1-1 Paperback

isbn

979-8-9888374-0-4 Ebook

This book is dedicated to Yasmine, Kai, Kilian, and Taco-Bear.

Their unconditional love has given us the greatest experiences life has to offer.

Contents

Introduction: Defining Wealth

PART I. Make Your Treasure Map

One. You Know How This Ends

Two. Envision Your Rich Life

PART II. Uncover The Path

Three. Take Radical Responsibility

Four. The Cave You Fear Holds the Treasure You Seek

Five. Make Someday Today

Six. Turn Negatives Into Positives

Part III. Build Wealth

Seven. Prosper Through Connection

Eight. Believe In the Make Believe

Nine. Unlock the Vault of Lifelong Learning

Ten. How to Live Forever

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction

Defining Wealth

It’s totally fine. Everything is fine. We’ll make it.

—Me, behind the wheel of a 1999 Toyota Land Cruiser, on the edge of a cliff, kinda not fine, and definitely not sure we’ll make it

As the right front wheel seemed to hover above the stormy depths of the sheer canyon below, I let out some nervous laughter, trying to reassure everyone in the car, myself included. Fail. My friends sensed my lack of confidence, and the quiet hush in the car surged to deafening silence.

We were on the main mountain road en route to Parc National des Volcans in Rwanda, and if making it there safely had been the only concern, we would have been okay. We could have slowed down a bit, stopped to enjoy the scenery, and waited for the rain to let up. But the mid-afternoon light was fading fast, and with word that we were officially driving in a tropical storm, it was a race to the top before the roads closed and we had to turn around and drive back down to Kigali. At night. In a monsoon.

Were the driving conditions the cause of my racing heart? No. The reward at the other end of this journey was a once-in-a-lifetime experience: a trek through a lush rainforest tucked between two volcanoes to find a family of silverback mountain gorillas.

But this book isn’t about traveling through Rwanda. In fact, although it’s full of stories from us, this book isn’t about us. It’s about you.

When was the last time you had a once-in-a-lifetime experience? What about just a memorable one? What about something you did for the first time? Was it months ago? Years?

Now, when was the last time you thought, I want to do that!…and then followed it up with a vague mental promise that you would do it someday, before pushing it down into the back of your mind? Last week? Yesterday?

You’ve probably got some good things going for you. Maybe you have a great job, a wonderful family, easy access to your favorite creature comforts. You look at your daily existence and think, Hey, it’s not perfect, but I’ve got it better than a lot of other people. I can’t complain.

Still, behind it all, there’s a nagging feeling that you should be getting more out of life.

For many people, complacency gets stronger as you get older and settle into long-term routines of work and family. You focus so hard on taking care of the business of life (which is not easy) that you stop exploring, learning, and making time for the things you just want to do. You tell yourself there will be time for once-in-a-lifetime later—when you graduate, when you start your career, when you get promoted, when you have more money, when you’re less busy, when the kids are a little older, when you retire.

But years go by, and someday is no closer than it ever was. In the moments when you feel time passing—maybe on your birthday, on New Year’s Eve, or in the quiet of a still night—that yearning for more hits you in the gut.

Don’t ignore it. You’ve been ignoring it your whole life, and it never magically disappeared. Time to stop waiting around and do something about it, now.

Why We Wrote This Book

The we here is me, Bridget Hilton, and my business partner and best friend of the last 10+ years, Joe Huff. We came from Midwestern check-to-check households, without any connections. We didn’t go to college, we worked multiple jobs at a time, and we definitely didn’t win the lottery. Well, there was that time we both had two-dollar winners…but we immediately spent it on cheap happy hour beers.

Yet our adventures didn’t begin or end in a remote jungle searching for majestic creatures. Our memory banks now include chasing the northern lights in Iceland, stargazing in Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu, walking an isolated stretch of the Great Wall of China, riding motorbikes across Vietnam, living among monks in Laos, sneaking across the Tanzanian border to see cheetahs, stumbling upon cockfights in Indonesia, being interviewed for fashion magazines in Korea, swimming with sharks in Tahiti, riding camels around the pyramids in Egypt, floating weightlessly in the Dead Sea, modeling for a whisky company in a haunted Scottish castle, going reindeer sledding in Norway, working at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand, herding goats in Israel, bathing with snow monkeys in Japan, and meeting with people in all 50 US states.

How and why did we do all those things? Well, I can assure you that neither of us set out early in life on some high-minded philosophical quest to figure out the best way to live.

We grew up wanting to be rich, like most people who grow up with financial instability. Not experientially rich. Just regular old rich. Mansions and Ferraris rich. Or at the very least, the I can go out to eat when I want to kind of rich.

But along the way, something happened: our view of wealth changed. As our life journeys led us through many ups and downs, we discovered something crucial that most people realize too late. Something that should be obvious, yet is so often missed.

Our experiences are the true wealth of life.

This realization transformed our lives, and we believe it has the power to transform yours too.

People have financial advisors to help them with their money. We created this book to act as your experience advisors, because the more we learned, the more we came to believe that the most important work we could do was to help people build lives rich in fulfilling experiences.

What Is Wealth?

Imagine that you’re about to retire. You go to your bank to review your life’s worth of investments, but the bank teller just gives you a blank stare and says, Sorry, I can see you had an account open, but you never actually made any deposits. So, your account is empty, and it’s too late to start now.

Wait, what happened? You had planned on making deposits your whole life…but you just never got around to it.

Sadly, that exact scenario happens all the time with the most valuable type of wealth we can collect: our experiences. In our final days, we regret the things we didn’t do, not the things we did. When researchers from Cornell asked thousands of people at the end of their lives what their biggest regret was, the answers weren’t about money. An overwhelming 76 percent of participants said, Not living my ideal self.¹

Think about that. That means three out of four people in any room you walk into will regret not living for themselves—not doing the things they wanted to do.

We’ve been conditioned to think about the relationship between wealth and happiness a certain way our whole lives, and unfortunately, there are some pretty big problems with those ideas and how they influence our priorities.

It starts with the definition of wealth, which looks like this equation:

Wealth = Currency × a lot!

We’ve been taught to measure wealth in currency—dollars, yuan, pesos, pounds, whatever you use in your part of the world.

We’ve also been taught that if we build up enough wealth, we’ll feel safe and secure and therefore happy (i.e., mostly regret-free). That equation looks like this:

Currency × a lot = Happy!

But life doesn’t quite work that way. This is a truth we all know, because when people are on their deathbeds, they don’t assess their time on this planet in terms of material wealth. At the hospital, no one sheds a tear and asks, Can I please see my wallet one last time? Their tombstone and obituary don’t read, Died with $10 million in the bank. At the funeral, you don’t hear, I loved Bob—he was wealthy. The stocks he owned made him so interesting.

No. Bob’s coworkers talk about how they loved volunteering at the animal shelter with him. His kids talk about how they went to national parks when they were young. His wife talks about how they watched the sunset together every night.

They talk about Bob’s experiences.

Because in reality, the wealth equation we should all be using looks more like this:

Wealth = Experiences × a lot

Our experiences, not our bank accounts, make up the chapters of our life stories. Yet, we aren’t taught that. We’re taught to prioritize making money above all else—and the rest will fall into place. That’s why so many people wind up on the wrong side of that Cornell study, regretting the things they never did.

Don’t get us wrong—money is important. We are not here to say that you should quit your job, go hug trees, and start hissing at people who wear designer clothes. We all need money; that’s just the way the world works. And obviously, more money can facilitate more experiences. But, this book isn’t about choosing between having valuable life experiences and making money—it’s about how our experiences are the most important thing to invest in. After all, one of the top five regrets of the dying is indeed, I wish I didn’t work so hard.² We don’t have the data, but I’m pretty sure I wish I had fewer experiences isn’t on anyone’s list of regrets.

As Joe and I became more convinced that investing in experiences was the way to unlock a regret-free life, we soon discovered that experiences were even more powerful than we had suspected. A growing body of scientific research shows the correlation between novel experiences and success in all areas of our lives, including our health, happiness, and yes, even our careers.³,⁴ Studies have even shown that the personality trait of openness to new experiences (called neophilia) is strongly linked to a longer lifespan.⁵

This discovery sent us down a rabbit hole of questions. If experiences are the key to a longer, regret-free, and more prosperous life, why do so many people seem to get stuck in that soul-crushing place of endless routine? Why do so many people seem to want something better but somehow stay trapped in lives they never intended? And what makes people just stop looking for new and interesting things to do as they age?

So, we shifted our mindset around what getting rich really meant. If we prioritized, planned, and took responsibility for our experiential wealth over everything else, how would it affect our lives, health, careers, and relationships?

Research, Obsession, and Becoming Guinea Pigs

Joe and I answered that question by turning ourselves into experiential guinea pigs, trying every novel experience that we could. We studied with samurai masters, went dog sledding with the winners of the Iditarod, became beekeepers, hot air ballooned, learned to trapeze, performed stand-up comedy, visited sweat lodges, hunted and foraged for our own dinner, attended farm school, roasted our own coffee beans, made our own wine, and sampled local delicacies like hand-sized tarantulas, cow brains, 300-year-old Greenland shark, chicken sashimi, live octopus, and actual guinea pigs. (I could keep going, but I don’t want PETA to slash my tires. Thankfully, I’ve yet to see an ethical treatment of tarantulas group.) And we’ve surfed, skateboarded, biked, hiked, fallen down, and gotten lost exploring new places more times than we can count.

Our experiences weren’t just about us, though. Along the way, we’ve helped build schools in Guatemala, installed water filtration systems in Haiti, worked with victims of human trafficking in Indonesia, planted trees all over the US, given hearing aids to people in need all over the world, and helped others achieve their own goals, dreams, and experiences.

We’ve had tons of fun, but there has also been fear, failure, embarrassment, discomfort, and struggle. Not every experience was pleasant and easy. In fact, the most valuable ones rarely were—that’s what made them so transformative. Some of our most rewarding experiences were the ones that didn’t work out the way we had planned. And luckily, our happiness was not correlated to our finances—many of our best experiences happened during our worst times financially.

If that’s how we felt, how did other people feel? How could we learn from other people’s successes and mistakes? We started asking our friends and family questions like, What were the most valuable experiences of your life? What are your biggest regrets?

That led to us visiting retirement homes and having conversations with elderly people. Who better to share their wisdom and reflections from their time here on Earth? The experience was both moving and bittersweet, because the heartfelt stories we were told only served to confirm our thesis that regrets grow larger as time grows shorter. It inspired us to go bigger and conduct one of the largest surveys ever done on life experiences, with more than 20,000 participants of all ages from around the world.

What we found were clear patterns that led some people to become what we call experiential billionaires, while others wound up experientially bankrupt—and out of time. To write this book, we took those patterns and put them into actionable steps to break through the barriers to have the experiences we wanted most in life, such as gorilla trekking in Rwanda…which ended like this:

Twenty-four hours after our harrowing drive up the mountain in a tropical storm, we came face to face with a different kind of natural phenomenon. Well, face to ground actually. If we looked up at the wrong moment, there was a decent chance we could get our faces ripped off by a 400-pound silverback gorilla. Those were the warnings of Charles and François, whose lives were devoted to keeping these wild and amazing creatures safe from poachers. The gorillas might have taken direct eye contact as a threat, and there were babies to protect—extremely adorable babies that I had to hold myself back from cuddling.

We stared in wonder as they made the hillside into their never-ending playground, tumbling, spinning, climbing, and rolling around, as toddlers do—just a few feet from us. Time stopped as we observed these majestic animals, with their astonishingly human-like mannerisms and emotions. It felt like we could have watched them forever.

But the forces of nature conspired against us once again. Dark clouds rolled in, the clouds turned to rain, then the rain turned to hail. Between that and the rapidly setting sun, we had no choice but to say goodbye to the great apes we had trekked all day to find. If we wanted to get down the mountain before dark (and we definitely wanted that), there was no time to waste.

As the sky beat hail into our bodies, we slipped and stumbled down the steep slope, adrenaline pumping through our veins. Getting lost in the Rwandan jungle would be easy enough on a good day, even more so in this uncharacteristically icy downpour. Who knew it hailed in tropical jungles?

We crashed into a dense copse of bamboo that offered momentary shelter from the storm and gave us a chance to take stock as we caught our breath. Rain jackets: good call. Shoes: completely destroyed. Apparently your average hiking footwear was not designed for a trek through the mountains of Parc National des Volcans. The guides seemed comfortable in their knee-high boots—they obviously knew what they were doing. Us? Not so much.

With the light fading, we were forced to continue down the hill, the onslaught of marble-sized ice leaving red welts on our bodies. But the mood in this real-life version of The Jungle Book wasn’t sour. It was downright euphoric. Of course, the hail stopped the moment we saw our car waiting in the distance. We just looked at each other and burst out laughing.

We knew we’d treasure this day the rest of our lives.

Life Isn’t Created to Just Be Maintained

Joe and I co-wrote this book, and we alternate chapters to share the individual experiences and perspectives that best illustrate each big idea. If you keep turning the pages, they will show you how to reorient your life toward meaningful experiences so you can make the most of your time on this planet. It’s not a bumper sticker telling you to follow your dreams. It’s a manual for building a life rich in experiences, backed by scientific research and filled with actionable takeaways. Our stories are just the vehicle to prove that you can make your life story into one you’re truly proud of telling.

In Part I, you’ll discover why building experiential wealth is the most important thing you can do for yourself, how to build the awareness of what you really want out of your one precious life, and the urgency to go after it. In Part II, you’ll confront the many reasons (ahem, excuses) why people don’t do this, and you’ll learn how to dismantle those obstacles for yourself. In Part III, you’ll explore the many ways you can build your life story: what to focus on, why each experience is important, and how to incorporate them into your days.

Staying squarely within the familiar routines of basic life maintenance (work, school, caretaking, chores, etc.) doesn’t just limit the richness of your life, it also limits the value you can bring to the lives of others, and the world at large. It might even limit your actual lifespan. So, if you want to get to the end of your life and feel that it was well lived, you can’t afford to waste a moment—you have to start now.

PART I

Make Your Treasure Map

Chapter One

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.

—Mark Twain

Joe:

What’s the best place to start when you are about to embark on the path to the most rich and rewarding life possible? The very end.

When we are born, we are all diagnosed with the same condition: death. It’s inevitable. You are going to die. Yes, I mean you.

I know what you’re thinking: Yeah, I know. So glad I bought a book to tell me that. But do you really know?

Most people bury this knowledge in the back of their brains and heap on distraction upon distraction—anything to avoid seriously reflecting on the fact that our time here is limited. We hide it away in hospitals and retirement homes. We pay lip service with bumper-sticker phrases like life is short or you only live once, but mostly we just suppress thoughts of our own mortality.

Bringing up this topic is considered bad form. Society operates under a silent agreement to keep any mention of our mortality off-limits. And when it happens—a friend gets in a car accident, a relative passes from a heart attack—you still might think,