Wander With Wonder — Dom Francks
Here are the top 10 key takeaways from Dom Francks' conversation with Paul Millerd about finding aliveness through nature, unconventional career paths, and building a life of integrated wildness.
1. Parents as pathless path pioneers
Dom's formative story centers on his parents' bold decision to leave their corporate law careers in the early 1990s. When they were 35 and 30, they abandoned their partnership track positions to travel the world for nearly two years. At the time, this decision seemed radical and impractical to everyone around them.
The impact on Dom was profound. His parents consistently described this period as the best decision they ever made, despite the career setbacks it caused. This created a family mythology that normalized exploration and risk-taking. Dom grew up with the implicit understanding that taking time to explore life was not just acceptable but essential.
This early programming gave Dom permission to follow his own unconventional path. The safety net of knowing his parents had successfully navigated a similar journey allowed him to feel secure in his own explorations. Their story became a foundational narrative that exploration and wandering were legitimate life choices rather than signs of failure or confusion.
2. The inspiration deficit facing modern society
Dom and Paul explored the concept of a massive inspiration deficit plaguing contemporary life. Modern work promises surface-level purpose through corporate culture and meaningful mission statements, but fails to deliver genuine fulfillment. The stakes in most jobs aren't high enough to create real meaning or engagement.
This deficit becomes clear when contrasted with experiences like World War II, where people had crystal-clear purpose and stakes that truly mattered. Dom's grandfather flew 30 missions in B-17 bombers, experiencing the kind of collective sacrifice and brotherhood that feels foreign to today's world. Sebastian Junger's book "Tribe" explores how veterans struggle to return from war partly because civilian life lacks the intensity and clear purpose they experienced in combat.
The challenge for modern individuals is finding ways to create meaningful stakes and purpose in a world that often feels artificially constructed. Companies can't manufacture the kind of deep purpose that comes from truly high-stakes situations. This leaves many people feeling restless and unfulfilled, even when they achieve conventional success.
3. The necessity of manufactured hardship
Without natural challenges, society tends to create artificial ones through conflict and war. Dom referenced a podcast suggesting that young men particularly need intense hardship experiences to develop properly. Sports provided some of this manufactured difficulty in Dom's youth, offering brotherhood, shared purpose, and physicality.
The modern comfort crisis, as described in Michael Easter's book, argues that we must intentionally seek out hard things to feel fully alive. Dom's most formative childhood experiences came through sports and later through mountaineering. These activities provided the kind of challenge and risk that human beings seem to need for proper development.
Wilderness experiences serve as a contemporary form of rites of passage. They offer genuine risk, physical challenge, and the humbling experience of facing nature's indifference. Dom's month-long course with NOLS became transformative precisely because it provided real stakes and genuine difficulty. The experience created the kind of clarity and aliveness that comfortable modern life rarely offers.
4. Measuring worth by impossible standards
Dom discovered he had unconsciously made himself responsible for solving climate change as a measure of personal success. During a conscious leadership training, he realized he was teaching others "how to be perpetually dissatisfied with your career 101." The first lesson was making yourself responsible for an existential global problem and declaring yourself unsuccessful until it's solved.
This impossible standard created chronic dissatisfaction despite working at mission-driven companies. The work was valuable and needed, but Dom couldn't feel successful because climate change remained unsolved. His body carried the weight of this impossible responsibility even when his rational mind knew better.
Breaking free from this pattern required recognizing the absurdity of the standard itself. No individual can solve global problems alone, and holding yourself to that measure guarantees perpetual frustration. This insight allowed Dom to find more appropriate ways to contribute while maintaining his sanity and effectiveness.
5. Technology versus poetry mindset
Dom introduced Steve March's concept of relating to yourself as either technology or poetry. In most corporate roles, including software engineering, he was expected to function as a piece of technology—a code production machine with predictable outputs. This felt deeply unsatisfying despite his competence at the work.
Wilderness guiding and coaching allowed him to relate to himself as poetry. These roles engaged multiple aspects simultaneously: tracking weather, managing group dynamics, ensuring safety, and facilitating meaningful experiences. The work required his full range of capabilities rather than just technical skills.
The poetry approach embraces three-dimensionality and physicality that office work typically lacks. It allows for the integration of disparate skills and qualities rather than narrow specialization. This holistic engagement created the sense of aliveness and meaning that purely technical work couldn't provide, even when that technical work served important environmental goals.
6. The power of parallel career paths
Rather than making dramatic either-or decisions, Dom maintained parallel careers in both climate tech and wilderness guiding for nearly a decade. This approach avoided the pressure of having to immediately replace one income source with another. The permeable membrane between these paths allowed for gradual transitions and reduced financial risk.
This strategy worked partly because software engineering provided a reliable income floor. Dom could take contracts when needed to fund his wilderness education and guiding work. The parallel approach also allowed him to test his assumptions about what truly energized him over extended periods.
The model challenges the common narrative that career changes require burning bridges and making dramatic leaps. Dom's parents had demonstrated that exploration and return were possible. His own experience proved that you could gradually shift emphasis between different types of work while building expertise and confidence in your preferred direction.
7. Developing pathfinding intuition
Dom's metaphor of following barely visible trails in the Sierra Nevada illustrates how pathless path navigation works. In high alpine granite basins, the trail often disappears among rocks and decomposed granite. Finding the route requires developing an intuitive sense rather than relying on obvious markers.
Experienced hikers develop what Dom calls "Sierra Spidey sense"—a felt awareness of when they're on or off the trail. This intuition comes from time spent in the environment, learning to read subtle cues that aren't immediately obvious to newcomers. The skill is location-specific; Sierra expertise doesn't necessarily transfer to other mountain ranges.
The pathless path operates similarly. The more time you spend exploring unconventional routes, the better you become at sensing what's authentic for you versus what leads you astray. This navigation skill develops in the body as much as the mind. It requires patience to develop and trust to follow once developed.
8. Nature as embedded reality rather than escape
Dom emphasizes that we're always embedded in nature, whether in a van at a mountain base or walking through an urban park. The tendency to think we need to "get to nature" misses the fundamental reality that we're always part of natural systems. Even in cities, we're surrounded by imported trees, weather patterns, and seasonal changes that we often overlook.
Paul's experience in Boston's Public Garden illustrates this perfectly. After years of walking through the park, a friend pointed out that every tree came from a different country—an incredible diversity he'd never noticed. This awakening moment showed how much natural wonder exists in places we consider thoroughly civilized.
Simple practices can restore this awareness without requiring major lifestyle changes. Dom suggests daily offerings to the natural world: touching a tree during a walk, burying tea leaves, or simply pausing to acknowledge our dependence on natural systems. These small acts can meaningfully shift consciousness and restore connection to the more-than-human world.
9. Addressing the root of environmental crisis
Dom's current work focuses on what he sees as the foundational issue underlying all environmental problems: our sense of separation from the natural world. Climate scientists and policy experts increasingly recognize that technical solutions alone won't suffice without a fundamental shift in consciousness. We must see ourselves as embedded in rather than separate from the natural world.
This perspective transforms environmental work from managing external problems to healing a fundamental relationship. When people reconnect with their place in natural systems, they naturally begin making different choices. The work becomes less about convincing people to care about abstract environmental issues and more about helping them remember their inherent connection.
Dom's Vivify program operates from this premise. Rather than focusing on carbon reduction metrics or policy changes, it helps participants develop integrated wildness—bringing the aliveness they find in nature into their daily lives. This approach aims to create the consciousness shift that enables more effective environmental action over the long term.
10. Building sustainable transformation through preparation and integration
Dom's Vivify program structure reflects his understanding that standalone wilderness experiences, while powerful, often lack lasting impact without proper preparation and integration. The four-month program includes three months of preparation, one week in the wilderness, and additional integration time afterward.
Participants spend months making daily offerings to the natural world before their Sierra trip. They develop practices and frameworks that prepare them to go deeper during the intensive wilderness week. This preparation ensures they arrive with a foundation rather than starting from scratch with a group of strangers.
The extended integration period allows insights and experiences to settle into daily life rather than remaining as isolated peak experiences. Dom references the idea that "knowledge is a rumor until it lives in the muscle." The longer structure creates space for transformation to become embodied rather than merely intellectual. This approach maximizes the lasting impact of the intensive wilderness experience.