The Ancient Technology Founders Are Rediscovering: Vision Quests
Share
There's a question that haunts successful founders at 2 a.m.: "Is this it?"
You've built the business. You're making money, maybe serious money. On paper, everything looks perfect. But something feels fundamentally wrong, and you can't put your finger on what it is.
Ret Taylor lived that question for years. He was at the top of his field selling hotel furniture, fixtures, and equipment. He was winning by every external metric. But internally? He felt like he was selling widgets that meant nothing to him.
That dissonance led him to do something most founders would consider crazy: he drove to Southern Utah, parked his car along the Escalante River under the cottonwoods, and sat there alone for four and a half days. No phone. No music. No books. Not even a journal. And no food.
What he was doing (though he didn't have the language for it at the time) was a vision quest. And it changed everything.
What Actually Is a Vision Quest?
A vision quest isn't a wellness retreat or a meditation workshop. It's not a sabbatical or a vacation. It's something far more ancient and far more powerful.
Ret calls it an "ancient technology," and that framing is important. It's not spiritual mumbo jumbo. It's a tested, repeatable process that our ancestors have used across cultures for thousands of years to strip away noise and hear truth.
The basic structure: three to four days spent alone in the wilderness, fasting, seeking silence, solitude, and simplicity. That's it. No distractions. No escape routes. Just you and the land.
But beneath that simplicity is a profound framework with three distinct phases:
The Severance: You deliberately strip away your identities, roles, and responsibilities. All the "shoulds" that get heaped on you as a founder and entrepreneur. You sever yourself from the stories you carry.
The Threshold: This is the liminal space, the time on the land. You literally cross a physical threshold (often marked with sticks across a trail) and enter a space where you exist between who you were and who you're becoming. The etymology of "threshold" comes from where farmers used to beat wheat against the ground to separate the wheat from the chaff. That's what you're doing: separating what has value from what needs to be discarded.
The Return and Incorporation: This is actually the most important part. A vision quest isn't for you; it's for your people. Our ancestors were sent out to leave the village, sit on the hill, have a vision, and bring it back so the community could benefit. These days, your people are your family, your team, your company, your community. The vision isn't meant to stay on the mountain.
Why Founders Need This (And Why Now)
Modern founders carry an absurd amount of weight. Your team wants answers. Your investors want answers. Your family wants answers. Society tells you that you're supposed to have it all figured out.
But our ancestors didn't carry that weight alone. They had rituals, ceremonies, and rites of passage that marked transitions and provided clarity. We've lost that.
Ret's own story illustrates why this matters. He grew up in scarcity, literally moving three times in one year, spending February nights in bus stations. At 10 years old in that Albuquerque or Santa Fe bus station, he made a vow: he would reclaim his sovereignty and never be in a bus station again.
That vow served him well. He became an achiever. A grinder. Someone who was really good at doing really hard things. He carried that mindset into entrepreneurship for 20 years, and it worked. He found financial success.
But success built on proving you're far enough away from your deepest wound isn't actually success. It's just sophisticated avoidance.
The Denali Moment: When White Knuckles Finally Relax
Two weeks into climbing Denali, at 18,000 feet with two massive storms approaching, Ret had a decision to make. His business (Ned, a hemp wellness company he founded after that first vision quest) had just lost its line of credit. The bank collapsed, and they went from an easy revolving credit line to a fixed-term loan with real scarcity.
Lying in his sleeping bag at altitude, Ret realized his hands were clenched tight. White knuckles in his sleeping bag. And he thought: "That's how my life's been ever since that bus station."
He'd been rowing as hard as he could upstream his entire life. Forcing things. Aiming directly at the rocks and rapids and waterfalls to prove to himself that he no longer needed to be at that bus station.
In that tent at 18,000 feet, he let go. Actually released his hands and felt the oars slip from his fingers. He felt himself drifting backward, carried by the current, carried in the flow.
They came down from the mountain the next day. Ret told his partner he wanted to sell their company. They did, and it wasn't a great exit financially. But it was an amazing exit in every other way. It allowed him to move into what he'd always wanted to do: help other people find their path through rites of passage like vision quests.
The Technology of Truth
Here's what makes a vision quest powerful: it's not about thinking more or doing more. It's the opposite.
Every post should have an intention. Every business decision should be strategic. Every hour should be optimized. That's the founder playbook, right?
But sometimes the answer isn't in thinking harder. It's in getting out of cell reception. Leaving your phone behind. Leaving everything behind and severing yourself from those identities and roles.
When you're sitting alone on the land with no food, no distractions, nothing to do, something happens around the end of day two. The hunger fades. The body enters ketosis. Colors become more vibrant. And you start thinking more clearly than you have in years.
That boredom you feel at first? That's the medicine. That nothingness? That's where everything begins to happen.
The noise gets quieter and quieter until you can finally hear your own truth beneath it all.
What Happens Out There
Ret describes the experience this way: you're in a liminal space between the awake world and the asleep world. You're not quite sleeping, not quite awake. You're existing in this lucid state where emotions surge and dissipate. Extreme happiness, then extreme sadness. Your body is purging pent-up feelings from life in general.
Then something shifts. You slip into complete serenity and peace.
The land takes care of you. You wake up on the second morning after thinking the snake might bite you or the rock might fall on you, and you're alive. You say thank you to the land. The next night gets easier.
And clarity comes. Not manufactured clarity from another framework or business book. Real clarity about what matters. About what your next chapter needs to be. About which stories you've been carrying that no longer serve you.
The Return: Where the Real Work Begins
Coming back from a vision quest isn't like coming back from vacation with a tan and some perspective. It's more disruptive than that.
When you meet the most authentic version of yourself on that land (when you strip away all the performance, all the compensation mechanisms, all the survival tactics) you can't just go back to performing the old role.
The behaviors that served you for years might fall away. The control mechanisms that kept everything together might not fit anymore. The version of you that your family, your team, your partners knew suddenly feels like skin that's too tight.
That's not comfortable. For you or for the people around you. They're not used to this version. They got comfortable with the other one.
But here's the gift: you develop an internal compass that tells you what's a "hell yes" and what's a "hell no." You stop wasting time testing things or figuring out if they'll work. You know in your body what's right and what's wrong, both subjectively and objectively.
That sensitivity? Most of us lost it years ago in the grind. The vision quest helps you regain it.
Who This Is For (And When)
Ret is clear about this: a vision quest isn't for everyone at every time. It will call you when you're truly at a threshold.
Thresholds in life look different for everyone:
- You've achieved the success you thought you wanted, but something feels off
- You're facing a major transition (selling a company, starting a new one, becoming a parent)
- Everything on paper looks perfect, but your heart is screaming that something's wrong
- You're standing at a crossroads and can't figure out which path is yours
- You've been forcing things for so long that you've forgotten what flow feels like
Our ancestors marked these thresholds with ceremonies and rites of passage. We don't do that anymore. Most men never have a moment where someone tells them: "We see you differently now. You're a man now." We spend our entire lives in adolescence, burning down parts of the village just to feel the fire.
A vision quest marks that threshold. It acknowledges the transition. It provides the container for transformation.
The Contradiction of Hard Things
Here's something interesting: Ret still believes in the value of really hard challenges. Misogi-style endeavors where you only have a 50-50 shot at success. But his relationship with them has changed.
He used to do hard things to prove he was enough. To get further away from that wound of the bus station. For the Instagram post. For the internal validation that said: "See? You're not that scared kid anymore."
Now he does them for alignment. To show himself that he's aligned with his path. The roadmap he's looking for now is joy and ease: what comes easily to him that might not come easily to others.
That's the shift. From pushing upstream to being carried by the current. From forcing to flowing. From proving to being.
The Practical Reality
Vision quests aren't solo adventures where you just wander into the wilderness and hope for the best. There's structure, preparation, and community.
Ret spends time with participants before they go out. They discuss fears: fear of snakes, fear of being alone, fear of not eating, fear of what might come up when the noise quiets. All emotions stem from two places: fear or love. The work is moving from fear to love, not from love to fear.
When participants return from their three days on the land, they come back to a group. Six or seven other founders who just went through the same experience. They share their visions. They witness each other. They hear: "We see you differently now."
That witnessing is crucial. That's what we haven't received as men, as boys, as founders. Nobody told us we're different now. Nobody marked the passage.
What Ret Found (And What He's Doing Now)
After selling Ned and spending two years exploring what's next, Ret is now wholly focused on vision quests. He's done three himself and is now leading others through the experience.
He describes it this way: "I've found my thing. I'm no longer searching. I spent so much of my life searching. Is this my thing? Trying different things out. I've had three businesses, exits, a million business ideas like you guys. It was all around that conflation of self and business."
"But I've found my thing. I've been like a hunter with a bow that's drawn. And being on vision quests, I have found my target. Now I'm letting arrows fly."
He plans to do this for the next 35 years. He's 46 now, and this is his path.
The Question You're Asking
If you've read this far, you're probably asking yourself the same question Ret asked in that bus station, on that first vision quest, and on Denali: "Is this it? Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?"
The answer isn't in another productivity hack or business framework. It's not in working harder or thinking more. Those are the oars you've been gripping with white knuckles.
The answer might be in letting go. In getting out of cell reception. In sitting with the land, with silence, with yourself for three days until the noise quiets enough that you can hear your own truth.
Our ancestors knew this technology worked. They used it for thousands of years across every culture. The technology hasn't changed. We've just forgotten how to use it.
Maybe it's time to remember.
If you're feeling the call to explore a vision quest, you can reach Ret Taylor at:
- Instagram: @rettaylor_
- LinkedIn: Ret Taylor
- Website: rettaylor.com
- Email: rettaylor.com
- Phone: 646-438-0298
He's planning vision quests throughout 2026 and works with each person to find the right time and the right group. There's an intelligence to the way these groups come together. Everyone is a piece of the puzzle that fits perfectly.
The call will come when you're truly at a threshold. When it does, you'll know. It'll be a hell yes before you even think through the logistics.
That's when you go.