Naturally, Steve is a huge inspiration for digital nomads and location-independent types. But it really struck me when I came across this video of his presentation at Xerox PARC in 1989 about his solar- and human-powered journey on a custom-built technobike: he was an eager young guy like myself, extremely passionate about his work and about living life on his own terms, and forging new ways of working remotely from anywhere in the world.

Now he lives part-time on a beautiful, fully-loaded sailboat, a 44-foot steel raised-salon pilothouse cutter called the Nomadness, which is sure to induce envy in geeks and boat lovers alike. You can follow his sailing and digital nomad adventures at Nomadness.com and check out all of his experiments and projects at Nomadic Research Labs.

There has been a lot of talk about passion and responsibilities recently. My friend Jun is someone I know is really intrigued by the mobile lifestyle, but he recently wrote about the challenges of doing what he’s truly passionate about because of his responsibilities to family. Then “Nerdy Nomad” Kirsty asked if it’s selfish to reject the average lifestyle, and others’ expectations of you, to follow your passion.

The below essay from Steve is something that instantly resounded with me. (Perhaps it was the Pink Floyd opening!) In his words, “this little essay from 1992 captures some of the mad, driven intensity that is the engine behind creativity and growth.” Roberts touches on the desire to embrace those serendipitous moments where your life could take you down very different, alternative paths, rejecting the template lifestyle even if it means you go broke, and living life consciously and not falling into mediocre escapes. Steve Roberts is someone who has a few more years, a bit more wisdom, and a lot more experience, and I found this too powerful not to share with you.

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Passion: The Heart of Nomadness

Dangerous Influences

Maybe it’s the music, classic Pink Floyd penetrating me as I write this. Wordless memories overtake the present, obscuring it, rendering the computer puzzling even while practiced fingers perform their familiar little dance.  Perhaps madness lurks herein:  time is inside-out; the swirling vapors of time are suddenly real.  Guitars like scalpels part the callused years, revealing visions of terrible glorious color overlaid upon freight trains rumbling gritty in the night, memories of adventures and obsessions potent enough to raise gasps and gooseflesh… my first astonished discoveries, 20 years ago, that life is a thing of infinite potential.

I recall suddenly a day up Boulder Canyon, long ago, free-climbing far beyond my skills.  The rock, hard and hot against my cheek… my legs, vibrating with the tension of death’s leering proximity… and on top of it all, that crazy moment when reality gets lost among a dozen hotly competing alternatives – each convincing, each alluring, each equally fatal if mistaken for the real thing.  I grinned into the stone and inched impossibly upward, curiously disconnected, vision overloaded, abruptly FREE…

Yes, freedom.  That’s what is behind all this:  the exhilaration of walking empty-handed away from Somebody Else’s Plan and sticking out a thumb, leaning against the superstructure of a drawbridge for a thrumming three A.M. liftoff, dynamiting a love nest with walls where once were windows, releasing the brakes what-the-hell and flying with a shout down a mountain road, releasing reality and flying wide-eyed into the infinity of psychosensory unknowns… it all tastes of freedom.

Try, please, to capture this.  Reach into your past, before marriage and business, and examine the brief gaps between commitments.  Inside those gaps are subtle tears in the fabric – glimpses of wild seductive alternatives to everything you knew at the time… other realities inches away, dancing just out of reach, teasing you with infinite possibilities even as you turned dutifully from one chapter of your destiny to the next.

But did you let it lure you away?  Did you leap into the unknown and hitchhike off somewhere, not caring where, yearning for the sweet sense of movement and discovery?  Did you shock your family and chase a crazy dream, abandoning years of conditioning to let that spark inside you explode into flame?

And what about now?  Is the notion of staying ten years in one place depressing… but somehow inevitable?  Are you doing exactly what you want to do with your life, not only at this moment but at 9:00 Monday morning and tonight in bed?

The most delicious freedom comes from venturing beyond the assumptions that other people have made about you.  The real prisons are those of expectation:  denying the possibilities of your life in order to be what somebody else wants you to be.  I’ve watched brilliance tarnish, fade, and finally disappear in the murk of a stupid marriage.  I’ve seen those capable of pushing the big envelope waste a lifetime waiting for little ones with paychecks, rationalizing lost time with vague dreams of retirement travel and future ventures.  I’ve seen others, constrained by circumstances or interests to a steady job, discard all leftover energy in a nightly haze of television, alcohol, drugs, religion, or dull routine.

I am not a proselytizer for nomadics – or anything at all, really, other than what’s already inside you.  There are countless ways to explore that, and my own peculiar choices are obviously not for everybody.  But damn it, do you have any idea how much brilliance and wit rots away undeveloped?  We need to do away with the numbing influences of this mad age and start developing passion.  What could you teach others if you applied your skills and insights to whatever you love most?  Could you change the world if given a chance, even if only through a tiny increment in the evolution of intelligence?

Today’s assignment:  do something that involves risk, learning, awe, passion, courage, invention, insight, or the sweet sparking of another’s awareness.

Tidal Passion

Let’s talk about passion.  It’s a driving theme of nomadness, of learning, of life in general – it’s the crystallization of dreams, the lust for evolution, the antithesis of comfort.

Without passion, life is spent waiting… waiting… waiting for someone else to make it all seem worthwhile.

With it, growth is a way of life and you are in control.

Passion is not an intellectual notion, nor a psychological abstraction.  It often appears for a while in association with sex, but that’s not what it’s all about either.  Passion is raw and all-consuming, and can’t be replaced with religion, New Age interpretations of experience, academic compartmentalizations of the universe, pleasure seeking, or a romp up the career ladder.  It’s intense, almost violent; it renders everything else in life unimportant while driving you on a quest of personally epic proportion.

Something like that is not to be taken lightly, especially if you once felt it but now sense it slipping away.

The problem is that our cultures, in different ways, discourage passion – although not overtly, of course.  We’re politely encouraged to excel, to invent, to make something of ourselves.  But the people who actually do so have had to struggle past the boundaries of a society that offers up numbing entertainment, reduces education to the level of homogenization, discourages personal risk in its corporate world, applauds conformity, treats the exceptional as aberrations, and rewards the successful with that spectacularly sanitized mediocrity known cynically as suburban bliss.

There’s an abrupt boundary between the haves and the have nots, as far as passion is concerned.  You can’t just dabble in passion – it’s all or nothing.  Suddenly finding it makes you resent Christians for appropriating that otherwise useful term “born again”; losing it makes you feel dead.

No, there’s no such thing as a passion dilettante.  Your life is either driven by a grand, magnificent, all-encompassing design… or it isn’t.

What is possible, unfortunately, is to live passionately for a few years then suffer through the agonizing process of watching it slip away – without even knowing whether it’s recoverable.  It must be a bit like Parkinson’s Disease…  the mind goes, but slowly enough that you witness your own dissolution and understand perfectly well what it means.

I am discovering, however, that passion can be viewed as a tidal, and thus cyclic, phenomenon.  It has been in my life, certainly, with every ebb a slow tragedy and every flow an exuberant celebration of new growth.  I recoil from stasis with the fire of a new project… then burn out and fall back into stasis.  The question is:  how can one short-circuit this process and keep passion alive?  Could we survive nonstop passion, day in and day out?  Is endless passion even possible?  If we see it slipping, can we snatch it back?

One way, I think, is with landmarks.  For me, it’s a strange mix of favorite road music, an amusing juxtaposition of nomadic system design concepts, fantasies of magical encounters Out There, and a few freeze-frame images of intense romance or adventure etched like lightning flashes on my brain.

Another way to hang on to it is by spending time with passionate people – other mad, driven souls who brave the chortlings of the complacent, celebrate risk, and fear not the specter of bankruptcy.  It’s powerfully reinforcing stuff, and when you forget your own passion, a spark from someone else’s can reignite the blaze.

Yet another way is through obsessive learning:  peeking under rocks, exploring different cultures, chasing seductive unknowns, and emerging into the sunlight from the mine of your own specialties to exchange information with those in other mines (a process better known as consulting).  Learning is a delicious addiction, even though schools usually present it as a method of working for approval rather than daring to reveal the terrible secret that education is actually a magnificent form of play.  Satisfying your curiosity at every opportunity is a good way to keep your passion alive.

Now let’s list a few methods that don’t work:

• Making lists of things to do, especially if they represent the intellectualization of something about which you were once passionate.
• Perennially reshuffling your workspace, filing systems, business structure, software choices, circle of friends, or hometown – all in the name of correcting problems that are interfering with your pursuit of the Big Dream.
• Waiting for someone else to come along and solve your problems, or, if you’re wealthy, attempting to subcontract your quest.
• Praying, drinking, getting stoned, swilling coffee, playing computer games, watching TV, or otherwise engaging in any numbing and time-consuming ritual that by direct effect or superstition is somehow involved with soothing your psyche or warding off danger.  (Not that all these things are necessarily bad, mind you, they just don’t have much to do with passion… even though some of them feel pretty good.  Why, one day on a coffee buzz I broke 2 million in Crystal Quest and celebrated with a drink.)

The important thing is recognizing when your passion is slipping – and stopping it before it’s too late.  The trappings and rewards of past brilliance echo sweetly with the magic of days gone by, and it’s blissful to sail upon remembered waves if you ignore the fact that you’re not on a boat anymore.

Remember why you are.  Life is only once, and slips by so smoothly that you can get away with coasting through a whole career and still look pretty good.  Think about what you really want.  Grasp it with unshakable passion and focused desire.   Everything else is secondary.

© 1992, 2004 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs

Reprinted with permission

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Finding Your Passion and Living on Purpose

If you’re a reader of my blog, you know The 4-Hour Workweek is still required reading for leading a kickass life. But along comes The Zero Hour Workweek!

If you ever wanted to figure out what you’re passionate about and learn how to create your own dream job, Jonathan Mead has shared a brilliant ebook that you need to download right now and read. And it’s free!

Jonathan is the incredibly compelling author of Reclaim Your Dreams and blogs at Illuminated Mind. In The Zero Hour Workweek he tells his own story of how he liberated himself from a traditional job (which you know I’m all about) and started getting paid to be himself.

Society typically defines “work” as the stuff you don’t want to do, but have to do. Most people don’t know why this is the way it is, and they don’t take the initiative to question that assumption, so they accept that work is supposed to be a chore. But Jonathan recognized at an early age (like I did, like you did) that work and play shouldn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

“For a long time I didn’t know it was possible to stop participating. I didn’t realize that I could choose that, or something different. That was until I started testing this convention: the cultural consensus that work must not be fun.“

Jonathan figured out how to make work fun though, and that it is possible to get paid to exist! He’ll show you how to figure out what you’re good at and passionate about, and how to make money doing what you love.

“You have to choose your purpose. You have to choose the way you contribute value that is meaningful to others. You have to find a way to pay yourself for the value you share. “

He will show you how to create a clear, remarkable message that people resonate with. He will tell you why it’s important to use things like blogging and Twitter to find your tribe and build a community of enthusiastic people who share your passion.

You’ll learn how important it is to focus your time and your energy on the activities that will have the biggest impact, and build relationships with a core group of people who can hold you accountable to your goals.

If you want to get paid to be you, the key is that you have to find a way to provide real value to others while you’re doing what you love: maybe through selling an ebook or information product that you created, building a video training site, leading workshops, doing coaching, teleseminars, or consulting, for instance.

You’ll hear inspiring words of wisdom from folks who are are striving to live an authentic lifestyle, providing value doing what they care about: Danielle Laporte from White Hot Truth, Chris Guillebeau from The Art of Nonconformity, Glen Allsop from PluginID, Nathalie Lussier from Raw Foods Witch, and Charlie Gilkey from Productive Flourishing.

I was sincerely gracious to be a part of these Zero Hour Case Studies myself! I’m overwhelmingly honored to be included among these really remarkable people in the book.

When Jonathan asked me to contribute to his book, I thought to myself, “I don’t consider myself the next big lifestyle guru or expert.” I’ll be the first to tell you that it’s a long hard journey—one that I’m certainly still in the early stages of and one that I will always be on—because building your life around providing real value and what you’re passionate about is not a destination, it’s an evolving, changing exercise in personal growth. But Jon had some really spectacular questions for me that I thought you would find useful:

Why the World Needs People to Do What They Love for a Living

“People who love what they do simply do it better than people who are ‘just doing their job’! I don’t know yet if a world where everyone truly loves their work is possible, but I know that the individuals who make the biggest impact in the world and move society towards positive social change definitely tend to enjoy their work so much that they work 60-80 hour weeks. It doesn’t feel like work for them!”

If I Had to Start All Over

“I find that there are things you are good at, things that you enjoy doing, and things that you can get paid for. There is a small area where they overlap, and that is where your business will be most successful. To be honest, I got my start doing things I was good at and could get paid for but that I wasn’t that excited by. So it can be a struggle to reposition yourself and focus more on the things you enjoy. Try to remain focused on the things that you really enjoy and are passionate about from the very beginning and you’ll be on the path to getting paid to be you!”

On Empowering Your Tribe

“Build your community wisely. Use tools like Twitter and Facebook to connect with like-minded people. Answer comments and emails from your website. Be helpful, answer questions (LinkedIn Answers, Twitter search, and Yahoo Answers are good for this). Address complaints and misunderstandings amicably. Find and empower the biggest influencers in your community—let your followers shine!—and continually, graciously thank and reward your True Fans!”

Those are just some of my thoughts on the Zero Hour idea, just to give you a taste of how much Jonathan’s philosophy resonates with my own. But don’t stop there! Jonathan’s writing, ideas, and advice are about 17 times better than mine, and he’ll key you into finding your “secret weapon” for Getting Paid to Be You.

“Getting paid to exist is about eliminating the lines between ‘work’ and ‘life.’ It’s about demolishing the disconnect between the value you create for others on the one hand, and the passion and natural talents you have on the other.”

The Zero Hour Workweek will reframe your definition of work: it doesn’t have to be a chore, it’s the exchange of value with others. So what value will you share with the world?

Steal this ebook: The Zero Hour Workweek: How I Liberated Myself from the 9 to 5 By Getting Paid to Be Me

Feature photo by Diego Cupolo.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: In Your Face Tim Ferriss: Escape the 9 to 5, Work a NO-Hour Workweek & Get Paid to Be Yourself

1. A while ago I remember you were very keen on going to study at Stanford. Are you still with that goal?

2. What new changes are you planning for Thrilling Heroics?

3. If you’re planning to detach your income from your time (as so brilliantly put by [Steve Pavlina in this podcast]) how do you plan to do it?

I ask these questions out of curiosity and as I too am facing them in my own version of things, I’d like to hear your approach to them. To be more specific, I’ve had a long-running goal of going to film school, I’m currently in the process of making some changes to my blog and I’m interested in the concept of detaching my income from my time.

I thought these great questions deserved a little more in-depth discussion, and they give me a perfect opportunity to recommit to my mission here at ThrillingHeroics.com and share some of the plans for its development in 2008, so I’m happy to answer them here on TH with this post!

Revamping Thrilling Heroics for 2008

New Developments & Directions
Some great news — ThrillingHeroics.com has recently been accepted as one of the first handful of blogs to join the new Brazen Careerist blog network! I’m deeply flattered to be chosen by Penelope Trunk and the guys at Employee Evolution, and I’ll be honored to work alongside some other fantastic Gen-Y career bloggers.

Thrilling Heroics has evolved and changed over time alongside my interests and pursuits, and it will continue to do so, but I remain committed to my central mission: to inspire and empower others to pursue their dreams and goals in the face of adversity. The discussion is concentrated more in the direction of personal and career development now than it was at the birth of this blog in 2006, but the central message is the same, with a new twist: namely, Thrilling Heroics is a career-oriented resource for college students and young professionals, with a strong focus on leadership, personal development, productivity, personal finance, entrepreneurship, and “lifestyle design.” Above all, I am passionate to encourage Generation-Y readers to pursue their dreams with reckless abandon!

TH started out with strong foundations in green business and social entrepreneurship. But whatever your interests, what remains central to the purpose of Thrilling Heroics is to empower the members of our generation to “think outside the box” of traditional work and traditional business, and really take advantage of all the things that are at our disposal to achieve our wildest dreams. Yes, that’s right — the ones you had when you were a kid. The world is your oyster! Whether your goals are to save the planet or to be the next CEO of GE! Join with other college students and young leaders who want to excel, make their dreams reality, and change the world. Watch as I experiment with entrepreneurship, living the mobile lifestyle, and practicing personal development and growth. Follow my adventures by subscribing to the blog, and share your own adventures as well!

New Format & Improved Features
For 2008, I will renew my commitment to sharing great content with you here at TH regularly, and the strong focus on career development and personal growth will hopefully manifest itself in several ways over the next few months: you should see a fresh, new, more personal design; articles will be organized into new categories and more useful chunk content; I’ve selected a new motto based on input from dozens of friends and colleagues; and I’ll continue to work hard to bring you great interviews within two new series: “Bright Young Minds” with young professionals who are making a difference, and “Proven Success,” a series where we’ll learn from the successes of established entrepreneurs and leaders. Check in later this week for an exclusive new interview with “Duff” McDuffy from Falling Fruit TV — Conscious Media for People Who Care!

Other features in the works include my definitive guide to networking, an introduction to lifestyle design, and further discussion of leadership, travel, personal finance, and personal growth. I’ll be serving up more consistent updates and sharing new, exciting content as I write from my experiences with personal entrepreneurship, and experiments with remote work, living the mobile lifestyle, and geoarbitrage. This is an adventure, so come along with me for the ride and learn from my successes and failures!

Help Me Create a Community for Young Professionals Who Want to Rock Their Careers!
I’ll be looking for guest writers that are interested to share their own stories. Other young bloggers who want to help encourage college students and Gen-Y workers to reach for their dreams, apply here! And to encourage user participation and build a true community, I’d like to potentially set up community forums to continue the discussion beyond the blog posts! That’s up to you guys too, though, so please help me spread the good word about Thrilling Heroics and tell your friends and colleagues. Get involved in the comments, submit your own ideas, and help me encourage our generation to kick ass and take life by the horns! Remember that my mission is to build your confidence to succeed, and to help you realize the freedom and flexibility to invest your time doing what you are truly passionate about.

Cody’s Entrepreneurial Roadmap

Freelancing & Entrepreneurship
To answer questions 1 and 3 above, let me start with the personal side. In the last three months, I left my traditional office job to pursue my true passion and I have been experimenting with freelancing and entrepreneurship. This is why I’ve been somewhat absent from Thrilling Heroics recently — I’ve been very busy with my freelance web development projects and laying the foundations of a business! I now work solely as a freelance web designer and consultant, building WordPress-powered blogs for professionals and small companies. I enjoy serving all kinds of clients, but work particularly well with other professional consultants who want to build up their personal brand, authors and columnists interested in transitioning to a web 2.0 platform, or speakers and coaches who seek to build an online community of raving fans! Some of my recent projects include Life Beyond Code, Moving From Me to We, HighlyObsessed.com, and TomAlexander.com.

I am in the very beginning stages, but my eventual goal is to incorporate and build my own web design company. In the next few months, you should see a full-fledged new business and website dedicated to my freelance design services, and at some point I may need to build a team from among my network of designers and creative-types — or outsource to other freelancers to help me increase my project capacity. This is not something I plan to do for my entire career, nor is it the only project I plan to have going at any one time, but over the next few years my end goal is to create a business that I own. The advantage of being owner, as opposed to president or CEO of a company, is that you profit from a company without necessarily having to run the business. (Not that there isn’t work to be done — but you hire smarter people to maintain things for you.)

How To Automate Your Income
Now to truly separate my income from my time, I plan to generate products that can bring in recurring income. You create it once, and see the profits from it repeatedly. Zen Habits has a great article on automating your income that discusses turning your service into a product:

Do you currently provide a service? If so, you have to devote many hours each week to provide that service. However, if you can turn that service into a product, such as a book or DVD or web site or CD, you can create it once and sell it over and over. Brainstorm the best way to create a product that gives customers the same information or skills that they would get from you in person.

Leo also goes on to speak about other forms of automated income:

Instead of creating an information product, you could create a real-world product, such as a gadget or nutrition product. Freelance designers can turn your idea into an actual design, and contract manufacturers can turn the design into a product. Other types of automated incomes include real estate, online retail businesses (including an eBay business), affiliate marketing, a blog, and a membership-type website. There are many possibilities. Find ways to turn your strengths into a revenue generator.

On my new web design blog, I hope to provide valuable free content, such as WordPress and business blogging how-to’s and instructional training videos that will attract both web design contracts and point users to products like website templates, podcasts, and eBooks that they can purchase from my site.

How To Get Into a Top University
Finally, I do still plan to apply to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, but not for a while. Once I prove myself with a few more years of career experience, either through the success or failure of my business and other professional pursuits, I feel I’ll be more qualified to work alongside other entrepreneurs and young leaders at one of the world’s best B-schools! I still maintain my strong interest in studying green business and social entrepreneurship at the University’s Center for Social Innovation and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, but of course, coming from a not-quite-so-prestigious state school, it will be quite a challenge. For anyone who wants to apply to a big, competitive university, the keys are to show your dedication to achievement and personal growth, and to convince the program’s admissions officers that you’ll do great things with a degree from their school. Also, it doesn’t hurt to build relationships with faculty or with members of the alumni network from the school you hope to attend! Here are more valuable tips from Penelope Trunk.

I’ll be sure to post more about my personal goals and my 2008 resolutions very soon, so stay tuned for that before the New Year if you’d like to learn more.

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I will be leaving to travel overseas at the end of the week (spending the holidays in Spain), but read my upcoming interview with Duff McDuffee — Co-Founder of Falling Fruit TV, philosopher, life coach, and yogin — in the next few days! Duff will share some great thoughts on things from conscious business to GTD to Buddhism!

Thanks again to Gautam for the great questions! Gautam Valluri is a friend from the blogosphere, a sharp young filmmaker, writer, and designer in Hyderābād, India. He does some fantastic exclusive interviews at BrokenProjector.com.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: It’s Time for Some Thrilling Heroics: Commit to Pursuing Your Wildest Dreams with Me in 2008!

I left my full-time employment at Sacramento State University almost two months ago, after which I took a short break while my broken hand was healing. I continued to do my freelance web design, and then I also took a temp job with my stepmom’s company in Roseville. I worked just four days a week helping the scientific company rebuild their website. The experience was valuable, and the people were great. But I was still working in a cubicle, taking assignments from someone else without having any creative input. When I stepped back and thought about the bigger picture, this still wasn’t getting me any closer to the lifestyle and the career I truly desire.

So I left that job after only three weeks, even though the pay was great and I was making more in four days than I had in five days per week previously. I decided that if I don’t devote myself–all of my time and energy right now–to doing what I really am passionate about, I may very well never take that big, scary step. Right now, when I’m young and have no car payment, no mortgage, no wife, no kids–that is the time to take a risk and see if I can work for myself or start a company!

I’m tired of being an employee. I know I haven’t done it for very long compared to some of you, and I haven’t “paid my dues.” But, I know that’s not the life I want. I want to be in control of my own time. I want to be in charge of my own personal and professional development. I want to decide what tasks inspire me enough to take on. I just had to realize that I have skills that other professionals are ready to pay me for! In some areas, I have a lot of knowledge that can benefit others. So I started designing small webpages for professionals and small businesses. Creating blogs as public relations tools for small companies, and doing technical consulting on the software and programming used to create and run them (I work with the WordPress open-source content management system, so if you or any of your friends need technical assistance, consulting, or web design, please get in touch!).

So I’ve been working on my freelance web design and business blog consulting full-time for a week and a half now. It’s a brand new experience that I’ve just started, and I realize that it will take some time to adjust to (and it will take some time to be lucrative). Other reasons that I decided to quit “work” and eliminate a few other things from my plate right now include focus on healing my fractured hand, keeping a schedule that agrees more with my own circadian rhythm, and practicing a healthier lifestyle…so I am perfectly happy to take it slow and accomplish one goal at a time. But in the first week I have already experienced a few of the challenges that await me: we become so trained in school and the traditional workplace to accept tasks from someone above us–staying motivated and determining the priority of tasks is a new experience to get used to; and the workplace does provide one thing even I can’t live without–interaction with other people! Adjusting to the frequent social isolation of working for yourself/by yourself is tough too.

Regardless, I chose to make the change. At least for now. I enjoy the work that I do–I am able to keep learning and growing, I get to be more flexible with my time, and I get to work with new, diverse groups of people from time to time. I’m self-employed, and my long-term goal is to set up the infrastructure of a full-fledged, legitimate business. Start my own design and consulting firm! It’s a lot of work–defining specifically what products and services I offer and what I don’t, conveying that concretely for the non-technical client, refining the business process, setting up the DBA and tax paperwork, and possibly writing a business plan and trying for a small business loan. Maybe I will fail…but either way I will learn a LOT along the way.

I’ve also studied a lot about automating my income, lifestyle design, and geo-arbitrage. Tim Ferriss talks at length about these exciting concepts in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. And I recently came across an older yet fantastic podcast from Steve Pavlina in which he discusses moving away from trading your time for money. Eventually, I would like to shift my paradigm from thinking of myself as merely self-employed to being a business owner. As Pavlina discusses, the idea is to detach your time from your income, put your income on autopilot, through generating information products for instance, that can earn you residual income, even while you sleep. Or I could develop my web sites further, and try to monetize them. He says how his multiple streams of passive income allow him to spend the bulk of his time doing what he is passionate about, regardless of whether or not it is profitable. Eventually, I would love to develop this business structure, so that my work is less of a means to pay the bills, and more a way to express my passions and continue to learn and grow.

Keep me in your thoughts. Your motivational words (and small contributions to my startup fund!) mean a lot. =)

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Experimenting with Career Options