Aspiring Filmmaker Channeled His Inner Alex Honnold To Make a $15,000 Home Once

It has been almost 5 years since Free Solo came out, and rock climbers have since been obsessed with the notion of charting the El Capitan. But charting the notoriously difficult rock in Yosemite National Park isn’t the only legacy of rock climbing legend Alex Honnold. The free soloist, now 37, has left his imprint on rock climbing forever. Such is his aura, that his influence has also made an impact outside the rock climbing community. A perfect example of it would be, when aspiring filmmaker Zach Both simply started living on the road, in a van he bought for himself. This was 2 years after he watched a 2014 video of Honnold.

Zach Both worked as an art director at a 3-D printing startup in Boston. In 2016, he left that to pursue his dream of being a filmmaker and hit the road. But in order to live, while on the road, he took inspiration from Honnold.

A Eureka moment for Zach Both

After watching Honnold’s video, Both had an epiphany about the way he was living. He said to SLATE, “Before seeing the video, the thought of living and traveling in a van had not occurred to me. This wasn’t some life-long dream of mine that I had been planning for years”. However, all it takes is one singular moment of creativity, to change one’s life.

Both did exactly that. He bought a 10-year-old used Chevy cargo van from Craiglist. The advantage was that it cost him only $4000. But turning it into a home required work. For the next 10 months, Both worked tirelessly on the renovations. With help from his father in carpentry and from his mother in sewing, Both had turned his van into a room with a bed, couch, and curtains in windows.

READ MORE – Free Climbing Icon Alex Honnold Actually Climbed the World’s Tallest Building Just Like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol

After several more embellishments, his home was ready. It cost Both around $15000 overall, but it also saved him a monthly overhead of $700. This epiphany was interesting, given that his source of inspiration, Alex Honnold, didn’t particularly enjoy the lifestyle.

Something strangely common in Honnold and Both

After living for nearly 14 years in a van, Honnold once said that he doesn’t particularly love it. While it started out as an economic constraint for the rock climber, it soon became an occupational hazard for him, in a way. Both’s epiphany becomes interesting here, since he too chose a lifestyle that would require him to be outdoors very frequently. His ambition of being a filmmaker is both daring and praise-worthy.

While Honnold and Both pursue different occupations and chase their own dreams, there’s a lot one could learn from them in choosing this lifestyle. The comfort in living with oneself, sacrificing a lot, and making compromises in early struggling years, is something any aspiring achiever will look up to.

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