Life 2.0: How People Across the Country Are Transforming Their Lives to Make Their Own American Dream

by Rich Karlgaard, Rick Warren (Foreword by)

Overview

“A delightful, and surprisingly moving, tale” -- Michael Lewis, bestselling author of Moneyball

“Karlgaard flies in with a companion concept to David Brooks’s On Paradise Drive” -- Tom Wolfe

“While counterintuitive to those on the conventional fast-track, Life 2.0 offers great promise to those who are open to personal innovation” -- Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School

“This fascinating treatise will make you think deeply, and may just give you the impetus to uproot” -- Tom Peters

“An original and exhilarating look at options many Americans don’t realize are now open to them.” -- James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

“Not only will it widen the horizons of your life, it could also renew your health and wealth.” -- George Gilder


Have You Found the Where of Your Happiness?

One of the intriguing things about the United States is the idea of the second chance, that when you feel stuck there is always a frontier you can cross to reinvent yourself. In Life 2.0, Rich Karlgaard used his own personal and professional midlife crises to look at the state of the American dream—the belief in continuous personal upward mobility—and where it stands in the twenty-first century.

At the ripe old age of forty-five, Karlgaard fell in love with flying and mastered the art of lifting up and bringing down a “2,500-pound aluminum box kite”—a four-seat single-engine airplane. As the publisher of Forbes he felt that he was doing too much armchair theorizing and didn’t really understand how Americans were responding to the changes that had started taking place so swiftly over the past few years.

So he put together his new flying skills and reportorial mission and flew around America to places like Green Bay, Wisconsin; Bozeman, Montana; Fargo, North Dakota; Des Moines, Iowa; and Lake Placid, New York, to gain some insight into how ordinary Americans are untangling the knotty problems of constant stress, crushing expense, and bewildering hassle that often characterize life in the nation’s urban centers.

He discovered their simple solution: they moved. What Karlgaard found on the road are fascinating and inspiring stories about people— those with a nose for entrepreneurship, a faith in technology, and the willingness to take a chance—who are finding the new American dream in places as far from New York City and Silicon Valley as you can imagine. Some of those people include:

• A burned-out insurance exec who fled his overworked East Coast life and settled in tranquil (yet dynamic) Des Moines
• A tool broker who traded his brick-and-mortar business in sunny California for a life in the Pennsylvania hills, where he relaunched his business on the Internet
• A road-warrior democracy specialist who conducts her worldly affairs from the low-key outpost of Bismarck, North Dakota
• A self-made millionaire who paid for his financial success with his first marriage and who did things differently the second time around by moving to smaller cities and focusing on family as well as work

Adroitly combining analysis of the economic and social trends challenging middle-class people with perceptive advice on how to escape the rat race of the coasts, Karlgaard explores the eye-opening possibilities of that huge tract of land often carelessly dubbed “flyover country.” Filled with stories of personal reinvention and triumph, Life 2.0 is the story of those who are living larger lives in smaller places.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400081318
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/27/2004
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	535 KB

About the Author

RICH KARLGAARD is the publisher of Forbes magazine and one of its three editorialists. His column, “Digital Rules,” focuses on the intersection of technology, economics, and public policy.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Trapped in a Cloud Cave

I push the throttle all the way forward to the airplane's instrument panel and begin rolling down Runway 31 at Fargo, North Dakota's Hector Field. The engine kicks in as my Cessna 172SP Skyhawk lurches forward and picks up power. At a speed of 60 knots, in response to a gentle pull on the yoke, the Cessna's wheels lift from the blacktop. I'm airborne.

Right away there's a bad omen.

Air traffic control says three National Guard F-15 jets are practicing touch-and-gos on the same runway, so I must keep a sharp lookout. A midair collision with a six-ton military kerosene burner capable of clipping along at Mach 2 would shatter my four-seat Skyhawk. The only thing left of me and my sorry encounter would be a four-paragraph story in tomorrow's edition of the local papers.

Ten minutes go by without incident, and finally I am out of harm's way. Across the Red River and into western Minnesota the air smooths out and I feel settled. First crisis averted.

What am I doing up here? That's a question I have asked myself countless times since taking up flying at age forty-five. Is this some kind of midlife crisis? Am I running away? Back on the ground, friends of my wife are asking the same question. What's he doing up there? I have left my wife and two young children for several weeks to fly a small airplane solo over the U.S. heartland.

Officially, there is a reason-an editorial mission. I'm looking for Americans who have fled high-priced cities and suburbs as a way of coping with a crummy stock market, a lousy economy, broken dreams, and post-9/11 terrorism fears. Americans "flying home" to their roots will constitute a major demographic trend of the early 2000s.

Or so I think.

Today, I'm en route from Fargo to Green Bay, Wisconsin, on an instrument flight plan. I have chosen a path that will take me north of Minneapolis by forty miles. This morning I heard a report on the Weather Channel predicting late-afternoon thunderstorms moving up from Iowa. I'm anxious to avoid these troublemakers. This storm-the product of a summer cold front moving northward at 20 miles per hour-will contain lightning, hail, and possibly tornadoes. Such meteorological chaos is typical in the Midwest in the spring and summer. A river of warm, moist air collides with a solid wall of cold air. The roiling begins and in minutes thick gray vertical cumulonimbus clouds (thunderheads, they're called) can rise 50,000 feet or more. Hail is not uncommon, while severe updrafts, downdrafts, and 100-mph bursts of wind can toss a small airplane around like a beer can on a stormy lake.

Summer cold fronts are not to be mucked with. These nasties can even bring down a commercial airliner. On August 2, 1985, Delta Airlines flight 191, an L-1011 widebody jet, crashed near Dallas, killing most aboard. Among the dead was Don Estridge, the inventor of the IBM personal computer.

Whoa. Today is August 2.

Let's just forget about that.

Soon I'm cruising 9,000 feet over the town of Sauk Centre, Minnesota-hometown of novelist Sinclair Lewis, America's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and a deadly satirist of small-town America. My window is filled with deep blue sky, the sky of the mountain West, not typical of Minnesota. Below are cumulus clouds that look like snowmen, whose tops rise to, I'm guessing, 7,000 feet-2,000 feet below me.

The cloud tops will rise and grow tall as the afternoon rolls along. Summer weather in the Midwest is notoriously fickle. One sure bet is that cumulus clouds, once they appear, will grow taller as an afternoon progresses. It's also a rule of thumb that small plane flight under or through such growing cumulus clouds is to be avoided. The sudden updrafts and downdrafts can be teeth-shattering. But since I'm currently cruising 2,000 feet above the clouds, that's no worry. All is serene. With any luck I'll be landing in Green Bay in an hour and a half.

Not so fast.

Thirty minutes west of Minneapolis the sky changes from azure blue to battleship gray. A huge wall of clouds appears twenty miles off the right wing-it's that big nasty cold front. Damn; it looks closer than it is supposed to be. The Weather Channel said it would stay well south of Minneapolis. I am right now forty miles north of Minneapolis, and this thing is a lot closer than that. It is massive, solid, and gray-it looks the way a great battleship must appear if you're floating by in a rubber raft.

I think about asking ask air traffic control for a diversion to the north. A no-brainer, except that to my north sits another menace-a rising, blackening cumulus cloud, the type of angry formation that can quickly build into an isolated thunderstorm. It looks like Devils Tower in Wyoming.

But straight ahead, there is a large gap-a gap between the gray battleship and the Devils Tower. I decide to stay on my route and shoot that gap, working out the math in my head. My Cessna Skyhawk cruises at 120 knots. Groundspeed according to the instrument panel's moving map reads 134 knots, or 154 miles per hour, thanks to a tailwind. The gray mass should be moving north at 20 miles an hour-isn't that what the Weather Channel said? If so, the math works. I'll easily shoot the gap. No problem, in theory.

In flying, you learn that the only weather forecast that matters is the one you see out the windshield. By the time I get to the gap a few minutes later, it has closed. Completely closed.

Suddenly I am in a big cloud cave!

Now I have to tell you, this is the oddest experience-terrifying and magical, like a scary children's book. I can't see daylight, and yet I can see in front of me for at least a half mile. A giant cloud cave! Swirling milkshake hues of yellow and purple. To the left is that ominous gray wall, the giant battleship, closing in. Lightning bolts fracture the darkening sky.

I swallow hard at the lightning. My hands start trembling because now I've got another problem. The clouds underneath me, the floor of this damnable cloud cave, are rising like boiling soapy water and beginning to swallow me. I push in maximum power, pull on the yoke to climb. That brings the voice of air traffic control in my earphones. The controller is pissed at me. When you fly on an instrument flight plan you are supposed stay on your assigned altitude, no matter what. Air traffic's job is to separate you from other traffic, but the controller can't do his job if some amateur pilot is in the clouds freelancing. On the other hand, it's my sorry ass up there in the boiling clouds.

North of Minneapolis, exactly where I will encounter the heaviest traffic en route, I'm crazily busting air traffic control's assigned altitude. I'm climbing as rapidly as the little 180-horsepower plane will allow to avoid being swallowed by the floor. I plead on the microphone for air traffic's indulgence. The controller grumbles. At this point I no longer care, because I'm in big trouble. So I keep going up . . . 9,000 feet, 9,500, 10,000, 10,500 . . . and the whole cloud cave is closing in on me and there's lightning and turbulence, and I'm thinking this is really stupid . . . what am I doing up here? . . . how am I going to get out of this jam?

Then I see a patch of mist below.

I key the microphone and tell Minneapolis Approach: Cancel my instrument flight plan! I must get out of this cloud! I pull the throttle back to idle and start diving at a steep 2,000 feet per minute. I do about three full diving circles down, slip through that small misty hole-is that the Mississippi River down there?-then level out at 3,500 feet. That's where I stay: flying under this mass, flying for my life, flying all the way to Green Bay.

On the ground, I check into the airport Sheraton, sit at the bar, slug down two Jack Daniel's shots with Corona Extra chasers, go to my room, and watch the Weather Channel. The announcer is talking about that nasty cold front I jousted with in Minnesota only an hour ago. It indeed contained the classic brew of lightning, hail, and tornadoes. The storm now was in central Wisconsin upending trailer parks, shoving power poles through windows, inflicting the usual midwestern summer . . . hell.

In a sober moment before the booze transported me to a sodden slumber, I tried to remember just how I had got myself into this mess.

Foreword

Never in history has any other group of people had as much freedom to choose where they want to live as Americans do today:

 

Our government gives us the liberty to live wherever we want.

 

      Our prosperity gives us the capacity to live wherever we want,

 

Our technology gives us the ability to live wherever we want, and,

 

Our diverse American landscape gives us the opportunity to live wherever we

want.  You can choose practically any climate, any environment, and any

population density -and still live-in America

 

This is a privilege that should not be wasted. There is no reason for most Americans to live in a place they dislike, or is harmful to their health, their soul, or their family. We are free to move.

 

In choosing a community to call “home” we’ve been blessed with an amazing array of options to select from. Our nation is a smorgasbord of cities and towns of different sizes, styles, surroundings, scenery, social opportunities, and support systems.  What we often overlook, however, is that there are serious financial, emotional, and even spiritual downsides to the most popular locations while there are great advantages to be found in less populated cities.  For instance, status is always accompanied by stress.  Uptown is usually uptight.

 

Every place has a pace. It is foolish to ignore this fact. Some cities run at warp speed; they never slow down and they never sleep. They live on caffeine and adrenaline, and

everyone always seems in a hurry. It’s exhilarating  but exhausting.

 

Other cities stroll along with a slow saunter, like the lazy river that flows through the middle of many of them. Everything happens at a more moderate tempo. Just as some communities are passionate; others are peaceful.  Recently more and more people are rediscovering the advantages of living in the smaller, less-expensive, and family-friendly communities of America’s heartland. My friend, Rich Karlgaard has chronicled this trend with real-life stories in this wonderfully engaging book.

 

I resonated with many of the stories in this book, having grown up in a very small town (less than 500 population) in the countryside north of San Francisco. It was the best of both worlds.  We had the slower pace of rural living, but could drive to the cultural amenities of the city in just a couple hours.

 

In The Purpose Driven Life, I consider the question “What on earth am I here for?” This book considers another important question: “Where on earth should I be living?”  Your life has a context. We live on location, not in some vacuum. In considering your life’s purpose, you need to think, not only about what you’ll do, but also where you’ll do it. Make an honest assessment of how you are shaped and identify the environment that best suits the purpose, passion, and personality of your life.

 

As you read these stories you many find yourself caught up dreaming of living a simpler, healthier, more purpose-driven life, in one of these hidden treasure towns. If so, I urge you to spend some time reflecting on your alternatives. Is where you live worth the stress? No one is forcing you to stay where you are. It’s your choice.

Editorial Reviews

As the publisher of Forbes and with an extensive background in Silicon Valley, Karlgaard might be expected to have particular insight into how Americans rattled by the bursting of the dot-com bubble are coming to grips with their tightened circumstances and creating their own minirecoveries. His book's problem is lack of focus-is it a personal account of his learning to fly a small aircraft so he can fly state-to-state to meet local success stories, or is it a more detached observation of the economic forces driving folks out of the coastal metropolises to find "larger lives in smaller places"? The two halves never really gel, and though the economic aspects of the story generally hold sway, his own stories overshadow the perspectives of those he's reporting. The compelling story of a woman who retires from the State Department to do freelance foreign political consulting out of Bismarck, N.D., for example, is interrupted by Karlgaard's telling of his high school crush. A tail-end list of "150 Cheap Places to Live" creates further fragmentation, but it is one of the book's most valuable sections. There's definitely a thought-provoking story to be told here, but it's debatable whether Karlgaard has succeeded in putting the pieces together. Agent, Wes Neff. (Aug.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly