Episode #67
Ep. 67: Life Is a Grand Adventure: Tim Christiansen on Family, Faith, Entrepreneurship, and Seeing the World Differently
What happens when adventure isn’t something you take a vacation to find, but a way you learn to live? In Episode 67 of Stories from Everywhere, Jill L. Ferguson sits down with entrepreneur, author, marketer, traveler, mountaineer, husband, and father Tim Christiansen for a conversation about what can happen when we deliberately step beyond the familiar. For Tim, that started early. Raised in an entrepreneurial family where turning 16 meant starting a business, Tim took a slightly different route: he decided he wanted to write a book. The result was Even If Your Toes Turn Purple, co-authored with his father, Rich Christiansen, when Tim was still a teenager. Today, he is the founder of digital marketing agency Adventure Yeti—a company he launched while attending Southern Utah University during the COVID era. Southern Utah University later recognized Tim and Adventure Yeti as the $10,000 winner of its 2024 S4 Competition. But entrepreneurship is only part of Tim’s story. He grew up in a family that believed in rites of passage, difficult experiences, service, travel, and intentionally exposing children to a world much larger than their own. At 10, Tim traveled to Nepal for the wedding of the Nepalese woman he considers his older sister and stood in the Everest region—an experience that profoundly altered the way he viewed other people and cultures. He still remembers watching a Sherpa guide kick rocks from the trail simply so the next traveler wouldn’t stumble. At 14, Tim climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with members of his family, learning firsthand that some of the hardest challenges are as mental as they are physical. Later, at 18, he left home for two years to serve as a missionary in Argentina, learning Spanish, living among people whose lives looked very different from his own, and discovering that service can take many forms—from helping build houses to helping someone change the direction of his life. Now 27 and raising a young daughter of his own, Tim is thinking about which family traditions he wants to preserve, which ones he wants to adapt, and how to give the next generation the same sense of curiosity, resilience, responsibility, and connection that shaped him. This wide-ranging conversation explores entrepreneurship, parenting, faith, travel, cultural differences, hard things, family legacy, service, and why the labels we put on ourselves and others can keep us from recognizing how much we share. Because beneath different countries, religions, traditions, languages, and circumstances is the same human experience. As Tim puts it, life is a grand adventure. Meet people. Dance. Smile broadly. And live it fully.
