Vishen is the founder of Mindvalley, a world-changing firm in Kuala Lumpur, and the not-for-profit Awesomeness Fest events. I immediately found his company fascinating when I learned about it, as he’s led by a solid vision and desire to improve people’s lives. He spent a few years working in Silicon Valley, then took what he’d learned there and returned to his home country of Malaysia, where he built Mindvalley up as a model company that both improves the local economy and provides an incredible experience for their employees, who come from all over the world.

You can learn more about his mission to build the world’s greatest workplace and get enlightened ideas out to 500 million people by the year 2050.

Mindvalley serves as an amazing example for entrepreneurs around the world. You need to have, as Vishen calls it, a noble mission. What’s your big vision for the world?

So what’s really exciting is he has decided to “open source” his entire business, and even let us in on closed-door meetings that reveal Mindvalley’s financial data, metrics, insights into their copywriting, design, marketing strategies, and more. Why are they telling all? Watch here:

There is nothing for sale, you don’t even have to submit an email address for access. It’s all free, and truly open-source. You can see all the latest trainings on analytics, branding, copywriting, design, entrepreneurship, customer service, building traffic, launching products, and more here at Mindvalley Insights.

I know I’ll be checking back here and putting some of these resources to use in my business, and I just thought this was such a cool development that I wanted to share it with all of you. A few of my favorites I’ve watched and read so far:

• On building the world’s greatest workplace.
• How they made nearly $1 million on a niche blog in 18 months.
• 20 minutes on how to double your site traffic.

The Birthday Gamble

One more rotation around the sun! Yes, for those of you who noticed, March 20th, like every year, is my birthday. For anyone here in Thailand, we’ll be having a little soirée at our local pub here in Ao Nang, Krabi.

If you feel generous and want to do something for my birthday, then please consider making a small donation to In Search of Sanuk, the volunteer project run my my good friend Dwight Turner in Bangkok. You can learn more about him and his mission helping at-risk families and refugees in Bangkok here. Or you can also see the part In Search of Sanuk had in changing our friend Ryan’s life, as one shining example.

Help them hit their “Fun-Raising” goals for 2012 by making at least a one-time donation here through PayPal. I suggest you send in at least $28 (as it’s my 28th).

To sweeten the deal, if we hit $1000 in donations before midnight April 7th, then I’ll open up my Digital Nomad Academy for a few more completely full-ride scholarships again (as I did for the holidays). This time around though, it’s much simpler, if we bring in $1000 or more combined donations by midnight on the 31st, then the free spots will go first to those who make the largest donations (of $100 or more), and secondly to anyone who is also a past scholarship applicant who makes at least a $28 donation.

If you’re feeling generous like I am, then let’s share with In Search of Sanuk to help them continue the good work they’re doing to improve lives in Bangkok. And above all, have fun!

Go here to make a donation.

**UPDATE: I’m extending this opportunity for an extra week so that hopefully a few smart folks get the chance to do some good and sneak their way into DNA for significantly less than the going price of admission (minimum $750+). You have until April 7th.

Also check out Rodrigo’s review of his experience inside DNA—a past scholarship recipient—and what Tim has to say about how crazy you’d be to pass up this opportunity.

Other Bits and Bytes

I also wanted to share a few recent links and pieces of press, to say thanks.

John Bardos over at Jet Set Citizen recently compiled information from 14 digital nomads, bloggers, and online business owners to really answer the question: can you make money with a travel blog? John and his wife have just finished up a short location-independent trip to Chiang Mai, and are on their way through Australia, Japan, and back home to Canada. I hope we get the chance to finally meet in person next time! But, I think this is a great round-up that really addresses one of the biggest misconceptions many people have about how people like me and many other nomads and lifestyle designers make our money. Check it out here: How to Really Make Money from a Travel Blog – An Overview of 14 of the Biggest Names in the Industry

Florian over at 4-Hour Workweek Success Stories recently interviewed me about my “4-Hour Workweek” (more like a 4-6 hour workday really, but listen in to the interview to learn more about that!). Check it out here: The “Sexiest Lifestyle-Design Blogger” Cody McKibben Talks About His 4 Hour Workweek (and just to clarify, that is a joke from my About Page, voted by all the ladies of the world!

Also, a few friends have already spotted my cameo appearance in the latest issue of Business Punk magazine, one of the coolest web-entrepreneury mags in Germany. This month’s issue features Darth Vader on the cover, and a Q&A about me and my Digital Nomad Academy project. Big thanks to Christoph Stockburger for the article, and to founder/editor Nikolaus Roettger. And a warm welcome to any of you new readers from Germany!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: A Noble Mission, An Open-Source Business, and a Birthday Gamble

• When we were organizing events together in Bangkok, he proved it was possible to do good and have a blast at the same time.
• He showed me the secret recipe for absolute guaranteed happiness as we volunteered with children throughout Thailand.
• He has written here to show us how to be an unconventional giver, and he leads by example.

My best friend up in Bangkok, and fellow DNA student—Dwight Turner—is the crazy changemaker behind the grassroots volunteer organization In Search of Sanuk. He is an inspirational and unique character in the strange chaotic melting pot that is Southeast Asia. His love for others, and his dedication to helping children and families in need shines brilliantly in the darkness. If you’ve been following me here at Thrilling Heroics for long, you will have seen his name before, but somebody with some skill finally picked up a video camera and followed him around Bangkok to get a real tactile feel for what he’s doing to make this little corner of the world a better place, working hard to help urban refugees in Thailand:

I’ll let this quick 4-minute documentary speak for itself, so watch it. If the video doesn’t appear for you, click here to watch it. It’s only a few moments of your time, and I promise it will be well spent.

To me, Dwight is a shining example of the entrepreneurs—or social inventors—who are creating new realities that will shape the next century. He’s a selfless, hard-working, global citizen who genuinely cares about making the world a better place, and people like him are doing it, a little bit at a time.

If this short documentary has you inspired, then find out more about Dwight’s project and begin your unconventional giving by donating today. Give just a few dollars, a small sum that could very well have a major impact on the lives of an underprivileged family living in poverty.

Dwight is just the first of many incredible social inventors and changemakers who I hope to highlight here in 2012… But  Bangkok certainly wouldn’t be the same without him.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The Young Social Entrepreneur Shaping the Future Helping At Risk Families in Bangkok

1,076,955 rupiahs – and that’s just what I spent on 9 drinks one afternoon at the pool!

About one week ago, my girlfriend Emily and I returned from a relaxing 2-week break on the stunningly beautiful island of Bali.

Being back on the ground in Indonesia reminded me how much I really love traveling to places like Bali, Cambodia, and Laos, with very high exchange rates to the US Dollar. Who doesn’t love to look at the ATM screen and see balances in the several millions?

According to today’s exchange rates, if you trade in 1 US Dollar you’ll get 4,005 Cambodian riel. That means that if you have $250 in the bank, you’re a millionaire in Cambodia.

In Laos, your dollar is worth 8,030 kip, so for every $125 you’ve got a million in local currency.

It’s 9,174 to the dollar if you’re buying Indonesian rupiahs, so it only takes $109 to be a Balinese millionaire.

And amazingly, in Vietnam you’ll get 20,833 dong to the dollar, so if you’ve got $48 pocket change, you’re a millionaire.

Of course economics, exchange rates, and cost-of-living are things that are constantly in flux, changing all the time, but for now Asia is where it’s at. The biggest corporations all flock here to keep their expenses down, and smart individuals are doing the same. There’s nothing immoral about going where the deck is stacked in your favor, seeking work and a thriving lifestyle where you have the best chances. So why shouldn’t you?

I’m not a millionaire in the typical sense of the word—in US Dollars. But in Thailand, I’d say I’ve lived like a king for the past few years, at a fraction of the cost I’d need to lead a similar lifestyle in San Francisco, New York, London, or anywhere in the West.

So many people I talk to think that a permanent travel lifestyle would cost a tremendous amount of money and that it’s out of reach for them—but it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Learn how Steve Kamb got his round-the-world tickets traveling 35,000 miles, visiting four continents, nine countries and 15 cities for just $418. Or read how Nora Dunn, one of our faculty members at Digital Nomad Academy, has been traveling full-time around the world for less than $14,000 annually for several years.

Money and toys and possessions are all fun and good, but I think in the West we have developed a serious societal disease—in the middle class at least, a majority of people mistakenly accept the fallacy that those things are an end rather than a means to an end.

What you do while you’re on this earth, how much enjoyment you get out of it, who you are, and the impact you make (on the world, on the people around you…whatever scale you want to operate on) matter far, far more than the things you own, and the material shit you collect.

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”

–Tyler Durden, Fight Club

They have you chasing all the wrong things, wasting your time working a job so you can pay for shit you don’t need, while they call all the shots.

We’re still a small minority, but I see more and more people “waking up” and realizing there is another way to live. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned living abroad is that you don’t have to play by anybody else’s rules, and you don’t have to do things the same way everybody else around you does them.

I boarded a plane in San Francisco on November 25, 2008, with a one-way ticket to Bangkok and a crazy idea to come out to Asia to bootstrap my web development business while I enjoyed a much lower cost-of-living than back home in California. I’ve now lived in several different locations around Thailand and traveled to at least seven other nearby countries here in the region on a regular basis for over three years. Actually, I’ve been living abroad and traveling for exactly 1,121 days now!

I’ve learned a tremendous amount in those 3+ years. A lot about myself, a lot about business, about the world, about other societies and cultures, I’ve met hundreds (if not thousands) of interesting people along the way…

The biggest benefit I’ve had on my side throughout all this time “offshore” has been my ability to leverage geo-abritrage in my business—working remotely with clients overseas (in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, France, Singapore, South America, and more) where I can bring in strong currencies, while I spend in Asian currencies where my money goes much further, and I get to take advantage of a much lower cost of living in Southeast Asia.

My advice to anybody who wants to live the high life for less is you must come to Asia.

Tim Ferris said in The 4-Hour Workweek, it’s not that we really want to be millionaires, it’s that we want to have experiences we think only millions can buy.

While we were in Bali, we split an amazing 2-bedroom villa with private pool and gardens with our friends Chris and Hannah, definitely a four-star, truly luxurious experience that far surpassed most accommodations I’ve ever stayed in, for only about $150 a night.

Emily and I had a spacious, serene villa and retreat oasis all to ourselves for a few days—an interior designer’s dream, every detail crafted with care, a true sanctuary hidden away from the noisy chaos of real life around us, where we enjoyed the quiet, stunning views of wildlife, rice paddies and forests up in the mountains of Ubud.

We had a brilliant two-story family villa in Seminyak for a week with the parents, spent the afternoons catching up with friends, soaking up the sun in private pools…

We enjoyed cocktails, beers, and sangria at the swim-up pool bar at the Potato Head Beach Club, voted as one of Bali’s top restaurants and bars, and the kind of ultra-posh hotspot that would easily cost several hundreds of dollars (or possibly into the thousands) if you wanted to be a baller in Miami, Los Angeles, or even Ibiza.

We lazed on comfy bean-bag chairs of Bali’s beautiful beaches, taking in breathtaking sunsets that lit up the twilight sky with brilliant reds, yellows, and golds.

Definitely a million-dollar sunset.

I see more and more guys (and gals, and couples) selling all their possessions and choosing to travel and move abroad to experience a different kind of life. More people are “waking up” to the realization that it’s not about how much crap you accumulate or what your net worth is on paper, but life is more about how much varied experience you accumulate, how much fun you have along the way, and how happy you are.

Check out how my buddy Mark and his friends went island hopping in Palawan on their own boat with crew, eating a delicious crab feast on their own private beach, and how he felt like a millionaire, all for just 35 bucks (flight included)!

Dan Andrews, another collaborator of mine at DNA, has built an incredibly successful business here in Asia—he has a huge 4-bedroom house in the heart of Bali’s happening Seminyak area, with their own pool, and maids and gardeners, all for only about $1500 per month, where he brings interns out to live and work with him on the Tropical MBA (which I just think is the coolest fucking thing BTW), living a fantastic lifestyle, hustling and building a great business like nobody else I know, all while they have a great time too!

Back home here in Krabi, Thailand, my girlfriend and I have an immense, modern 3-story, 3-bedroom townhouse on the quiet outskirts of town that overlooks breathtaking limestone mountains and lush green jungles for just $575 per month. And that’s splurging for us, in a big way, so that I have a spacious office where I can be productive and so we can easily host a big happy family during the holidays.

I’d say that the value you get for your money is incredible here in Asia. If I’d been living back home for the last three years, I probably would be going out on the weekends with friends, but living on ramen noodles and sharing a small apartment with roommates to get by.

Instead, we get to have a wonderful, fulfilling lifestyle, live in abundance, travel frequently, spend a tremendous amount of time with friends and family, all while we keep our costs down substantially. That means we get to do a lot more of what we love here than we might somewhere else.

Making a move somewhere like Asia or South America might be a way you can also spend more of your very limited, precious time making memories you’ll cherish, having new experiences, and building something (preferably something of your own—a business, a charity cause, a legacy, what-have-you). You only live once, so don’t waste it.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How to (Literally) Be a Millionaire and Live the High Life on the Cheap

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A digital nomad has the freedom to live and work wherever they choose. We make the most of this freedom by living out of a carry-on size backpack and travelling all over the world. A life of constant travel can make getting work done difficult though, and there are times when we need to settle down for a few months, rent an apartment and enjoy some home comforts and a solid internet connection.

We are always on the lookout for the perfect place to stop and work. We’ve tried Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Medellin, Colombia, but recently we have settled in a city that eclipses them all—Chiang Mai, Thailand.

The number of other digital nomads who have made this city in northern Thailand their temporary base is a testament to its appeal, and we’ve found that it has lived up to the hype. Here’s why…

Low Cost of Living

One of Chiang Mai’s biggest attractions is the high quality of life that’s possible for very little. With apartments starting from $160 a month, a delicious meal at the market for $1, a fresh fruit shake for $0.50, monthly motorbike rental for $60, laundry for $1 a kilo, and a large beer for $2, it is possible to live comfortably for well under $1000 a month, or even just $500.

Good Internet

Good internet is essential for a digital nomad, and it’s one of the reasons they flock to Chiang Mai. Most cafés and restaurants have free WiFi and the speed is good. It’s also very affordable to buy a local SIM card with a data plan.

Availability of Accommodation

There’s plenty of accommodation available to suit all budgets. The best thing to do is stay in a guesthouse for a few days and look around. Studio apartments without a kitchen (because eating out is so cheap) cost from $160-300 a month and WiFi and A/C is standard. A luxurious 1-bedroom apartment with a kitchen, pool, and gym costs $650 a month, although you’ll get far cheaper rates if you rent for 6 or 12 months. Electricity and water, and sometimes internet, is extra. We pay about $50 a month for electricity (using the A/C quite a lot), $9 for water, and $15 for internet (per computer).

Great Weather

From November to February the weather is perfect—clear blue skies with 30°C temperatures and low humidity during the day and lower temperatures at night. Things start to heat up in March, and the rainy season lasts from May to October—it doesn’t rain all the time though, and everything becomes lush and green.

Friendly People

There’s a good mix of Thais, expats, and tourists in Chiang Mai. It’s a university city, so there’s a youthful vibe and the education level is high with English spoken by many people. Unlike some more touristy parts of Thailand, the locals aren’t resentful of foreigners, there are no scams, and people are very friendly and helpful. We have had a flat tire on our moped twice and both times locals went out of their way to help us.

Delicious Food

Thai food is delicious, fresh and wonderfully affordable. Food stalls and markets are found all over the city where you can sample local dishes for $1 a meal. Thai favourites like pad thai and green curry are readily available, or try the tasty local speciality Khao Soi—egg noodles in a coconut curry soup topped with crunchy fried noodles [ed: this is perhaps the most delicious Thai dish of all! –Cody]. For vegetarians it’s heaven, with dozens of meat-free restaurants and even vegetarian stalls at some of the markets. If you get tired of Thai food you’ll find Italian, Middle Eastern, Mexican, Japanese, Indian, American, and more to satisfy your cravings. International food is more expensive, but even a splurge meal at one of the city’s best Italian restaurants cost us less than $10 a person.

Fresh Produce

If you choose to cook for yourself the markets are wonderful with a diverse range of high-quality, cheap fresh produce including plenty of tropical fruit. Chiang Mai is ideally located with access to produce from both a tropical climate and the cooler mountains, so you’ll find more diversity here than in southern Thailand.

Digital Nomad Hub

Chiang Mai has attracted many digital nomads so there is a ready-made community to offer support and advice to help you settle in, and perhaps even work together on projects.

Cheap Transport

The old city is compact and walkable, so if you stay there you won’t need your own transport. Renting a moped is cheap and fun though, and we love the freedom it gives us. If not, rides in shared pickup trucks (or songthaew) cost from $0.65.

Beautiful Scenery

Chiang Mai has a beautiful setting surrounded by hills and you’ll find shimmering golden wats (temples) on almost every street.

Lots To Do

There’s plenty to do in your downtime. You could visit one of the many wats; learn a new skill: cooking, massage, Thai language, or yoga; go rock climbing, white water rafting, zip-lining, or trekking to hill tribe villages; relax with a $5 massage; and even get up close with tigers or elephants. It only takes 20 minutes to leave the city behind and explore the waterfalls and mountains of the surrounding countryside. Further afield there are plenty of interesting places to visit in northern Thailand for weekends away.

Accessible

It’s a one hour, $60 flight from Bangkok, an international hub with cheap flights available all over the world. Chiang Mai is also only six hours away from both Myanmar [Burma] and Laos which makes border runs possible as a day trip.

Visas Are Easy To Get

Many people manage to stay in Thailand indefinitely by doing visa runs, or leaving the country to renew their visa every few months. It’s a great excuse to explore neighbouring countries like Laos or Malaysia. Most nationalities get a 30-day visa exemption when they arrive by plane, but if you want to stay long-term it’s best to get a 60-day tourist visa available from many neighbouring countries—the nearest is Vientiane in Laos. A double-entry 60-day tourist visa will allow you to stay for six months by getting a 30-day extension at the immigration office, and then doing a border run after three months.

Relaxed Atmosphere

Chiang Mai has a relaxed atmosphere in stark contrast to hectic Bangkok. It’s very walkable, the traffic isn’t too crazy and it’s family-friendly—there are plenty of expats and travellers with young children here.

Everything You Need

Although it’s not a huge city (around 150,000 people), it has all the facilities you need including lots of good cafés (and yes, there’s Starbucks), shopping centers, cinemas, cheap markets, and (important for digital nomads) Apple Mac stores.

Quality Healthcare

Healthcare is of a high standard with many doctors trained in the US, but prices are very affordable. A visit to the doctor including a blood test cost me $22.

Culturally Vibrant

While life in Chiang Mai is easy and comfortable, it is still culturally rich and glimpses of the quirkiness of Thai life keep things interesting—teenage monks in saffron robes texting on their mobile phones, entire families (including dog) whizzing past you on a moped, and standing up for the national anthem before films are shown at the cinema.

Great Local Festivals

The local festivals add to the city’s cultural richness. It seems like there is always something going on—the Yee Peng floating lantern festival and the mass water fight Songkran are just two of the highlights.

Are there any downsides to life in Chiang Mai? Well, it’s not by the sea, so it may not live up to everyone’s image of Thailand, although there are cheap direct flights to the islands, and I find my apartment pool helps keep the tropical vibe alive. If you love huge bustling cities, then Bangkok might be better for you, and although there is plenty of nightlife, it’s more relaxed than Bangkok or the party islands in the south.

For us, we’ve found the perfect base to take a break from travel and focus on business projects. It may well be hard to leave.

Erin McNeaney and her partner Simon sold everything they owned and left the UK in March 2010 to travel the world forever. They run a WordPress web design business on the road and have travelled to Latin America, North America and are currently in Asia. You can follow their adventures at Never Ending Voyage.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 18 Reasons Why Chiang Mai makes a Perfect Digital Nomad Headquarters

Do you daydream about quitting your job and traveling around the world? What about taking it a step further and building a location independent career, so you can live and work wherever you want to?

I can remember the first time someone labelled me a “digital nomad” on a major blog… Two-and-a-half years ago these were the words of Corbett Barr—back when his site was still called Free Pursuits. Corbett listed me among the top 10 Digital Nomads to Learn From, alongside Tim Ferriss and Rolf Potts—two truly incredible writers who inspired me to follow my own path in life—as well as huge A-list bloggers Chris Brogan and Mike Elgan, and big names in the travel blogosphere including Christine Gilbert from Almost Fearless and Chris Guillebeau of Art of Nonconformity fame.

I wasn’t quite sure what I thought of the label at first, although I was immensely honored to be among such incredible company. I was excited! Reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek and Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding had been a turning point in my life—those two books opened my eyes to whole new possibilities and put a fire under my ass to create a life of my own design, and try my hardest to enjoy every moment of it.

Not long after in late 2009, Jonathan Mead used me as a case study in his manifesto The Zero Hour Workweek, which played off of the ideas in Tim’s book, but took them even further to encourage people to build businesses that basically allow them to get paid to be themselves. Soon I was being interviewed about my live-and-work-anywhere lifestyle, and people started calling my story inspiring, and asking me about my travel experiences and advice for overcoming travel obstacles.

Sometimes I’m a bit embarrassed by the buzzwords (digital nomad, location independent… and lifestyle design… there’s another one!) but eventually I embraced the title Corbett had bestowed upon me. Who’d have known that just two years later I’d be running a business course called Digital Nomad Academy with the help of Corbett himself and several other hugely successful remote-control entrepreneurs I look up to!

Like many people, sometimes I feel like the small (but growing) online niche we’re in is a bit too cliquey, too markety, and sometimes people get big egos, or they feel under pressure to maintain the appearance like they’ve got everything figured out and their lives are just so cool.

I know, because I’ve been there… but I’ll be the first to tell you, nobody has it all figured out. I’ve been broke as a joke many times along my journey, I’ve been stuck up a creek with no paddle many times on my travels, I’ve experienced immense business failures, I’ve been stabbed in the back, I’ve been discouraged. But, this is an incredible life we’ve all been given, and I’m grateful for the amazing adventures and obstacles I’ve experienced. I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything.

I’m even more thankful for the people around me who have helped fuel this adventure. It has its ups and downs for sure—I was defrauded and went through several down months. I wasn’t confident everything might not collapse at times. I took a break from blogging and let some of my friends use this platform to share their writing and their projects with you (I see no point writing unless I actually have something to say, but once I conquer the challenges laid out in front of me, maybe then I’ll have something of real value to share about them).

But despite the challenges of living an unconventional life, I have no plans to quit traveling, meeting new people, and having new experiences anytime soon, to stop experimenting with my own businesses, to ever go back to a 9-to-5 if I can avoid it, to move back home, or to stop blogging about this weird journey. Living life your own way, you will definitely be confronted with setbacks, and the journey will be more challenging than living according to someone else’s prescribed path. But it is absolutely, 100% worthwhile. 

My girlfriend and I are fortunate to live for now in one of the most beautiful regions in the world, in a three-story townhouse surrounded by forests and beautiful limestone mountains, all for a fraction of what it would cost back in California.

Emily and I recently spent a week in Singapore, and it was the most fun I’ve had in months! We were trying to decide what country to visit for a renewed visa and I decided I really wanted to visit old friends there. She teases me that I can’t travel anywhere unless I know someone there, and when I thought about it, I realized it’s not far from the truth.

Undoubtedly when most people think about travel, they tend to think of places, monuments and landmarks like the Acropolis of Athens, the Roman Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, London’s Big Ben, Bangkok’s reclining Buddha, Krabi’s mountaintop Buddhist temple, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Each of these are fantastic places I’ve been able to see on my travels. But what really has made my travels remarkable are the people I have met and the experiences I’ve shared with them.

I became very close with my French professor in high school, who was also a huge influence on me (as far as my interest in travel, culture, art, music and languages). The very first time I traveled outside the U.S. was a trip with some classmates to France, and what made it special was the wonderful family I lived with for a week on the Mediterranean coast in Cannes, as well as the time I spent with Mssr. Hodgins and my classmates wandering around Paris.

London is probably one of my top three favorite cities in the world to visit. Although I really enjoy wandering around on foot through London and sightseeing, it wasn’t the London Eye or the Houses of Parliament that kept me coming back… it was because I first traveled there on my own to visit my cousin Ian, who spent a year as an exchange student there, and it was the fun crowd of college students I got to know—James, the Toms, Sarah, Dav, Elaine, and many more—when I visited him for two weeks that made my experience so special.

I traveled to Spain for a three-week Christmas and New Year holiday with my friends Paul, Tim, and Ryan. Barcelona was a stunning city with great food, equaled by the gorgeous views and historical Old Town on Ibiza (and it’s nightlife), but what really made the trip special were the incredible friends we made—Meye and Barbara, two amazing women who took it upon themselves to show us all the best restaurants and pubs in town, introduced us to friends, showed us the parades and the local Catalans celebrations, and invited us into their homes for Christmas dinner!

Greece, Turkey, and Italy are infused with history, vibrant culture, and amazing sights (especially for someone who studied history at university) but what made my travels there special were the memories and time I spent bonding with family.

When I first arrived in Thailand, it was two Thai friends I met—Poon and Om—who spent three days driving me all around Phuket on their motorbike showing me the sights.

Bangkok is a huge metropolis with great nightlife, great food, a big flag on the backpacker trail. But what made it so much fun for me was the people. I got caught up there for a year and a half eating cheap street food all the time with Migration Mark, Joel, Ryan, May, Nalin, Bank, and Aum, going out partying, and running fun monthly mixer events and volunteering with Dwight Turner, Christina, Craig Gonzales, and others. I remember the first day Sean Ogle landed in Asia, and we went with my sister and my friends Chris, Ryan, and Nick to explore the ancient ruins and Buddhas at Ayutthaya, coworking with David Walsh and Derek Johanson, planning a TEDx conference with Rob, Greg, Andrew, Chris, Karla, Fluke, and more.

Travel puts me face-to-face with friends—many friends I’ve known for many years from school or work, but also many who I’ve met and become friends with through running my business online.

In Bangkok, mostly through Twitter and the Bangkok Tweetups that Dwight and I would put on, I also was able to meet in person with awesome bloggers Dan Andrews, Adam Baker, Benny “the Irish Polyglot” Lewis, Gary Arndt, Matt Goult, Jodi Ettenberg, Jonny Gibaud, Marc Gold, Ross Hill, Kevin Revolinski, Wes Nations, Ryan Martin, Mark Powers, and many more.

Warning: I’ve linked to a lot of people in this post! But I want to share each and every one of them with you (I’m definitely missing more than a few, too) not to gloat… not because I’m some celebrity, but because I’ve been blessed to meet so many truly cool people from around the world—each of them working on their own unique, interesting things—and each of them has at some point or another in my travels made a profound impact on my journey in their own small way. Because of that, I do encourage you to check out each and every one of these folks and discover how they’re making the world a more interesting place. I owe it to them to share what they’re doing.

In Bali I met Kyle and Bessie Crum doing yoga in the rice paddies, Stuart McDonald eating ribs at Naughty Nuri’s, Jez Tryner for a drink, and spent time with my friends Jerm and Vie at their lovely condo.

In Kuala Lumpur I met Nomadic Matt Kepnes while wandering around hostels, Dwight and Mark and I met our travel buddy Agnes (who drove us at lightning speed at 11pm one night to see the cozy little town of Melaka, on a whim!) through Couchsurfing, and I met Hani Khaursar, Vishen Lakhiani, Brian Wong and others on a subsequent trip when I spoke at a conference.

Phnom Penh has been home to my two friends Brittany Sims and Caron Margarete who, along with some of Cambodia’s footballers showed me the town and made me feel right at home.

Here in Krabi, I spent considerable time climbing and beach partying with my friends Alicia, James, Vanessa, Peter, Jane & Toto, and I finally met in person with my blogger buddies Carlos Miceli, Colin Wright, Adventurous Kate McCulley, Backpacking Matt Kyhnn, and Shannon O’Donnell, who’ve all stopped by on their travels.

When I traveled back to the States this year, in Austin, I met up with Markus & Ashley, Nick Reese, Jenny Blake, Ridiculously Extraordinary Karol Gadja, Where is Jenny Leonard, Andy Drish, Andrew Norcross, Thursday Bram, Technomads Chris & Cherie, and many other good folks for a week of awesomeness while South by Southwest was on.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a host of inspiring folks like Ramit Sethi, Corbett Barr, Amber Zuckswert, Charlie Hoehn, Lorna Li, and serial entrepreneur Rajesh Setty (and I also had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Chris Ducker there, who usually plays an Englishman in the Philippines).

Los Angeles is or has been the stomping grounds of my very good friend Ryan, entrepreneur Jun Loayza, blogger Jonathan Mead, dating coach Jordan Harbinger, my friends Dariane Nabor, Laurenne Sala, and many other cool peoples.

In past trips to Singapore, I’ve met other cool nerds (like myself) Adrianna Tan, Ziqi Koey (who also just visited us here in Krabi!), Guyi Shen, and many more.

This trip, Emily and I had an incredibly fun time together…  we did all the touristy stuff: we walked all around the city on foot, stayed on the beautiful riverfront in Boat Quay, gorged ourselves on amazing delicious food from all around Southeast Asia and beyond, we hung out at the marina by night and took in all the city lights, wandered all around the big fancy new Marina Bay Sands resort and casino, went to a Salvador Dalí exhibit, to the cinema, briefly to a concert hall, and much more. But our time together there also reminded me that one of my biggest motivators is the people I get to share it with.

It was seeing my friend and singer Shimona Kee for her birthday and enjoying the hip young local music scene, having a lovely homemade dinner with Michelle at her impressive 16th-floor apartment, having a drink, a shisha and a catchup with my old friends John Berns and Martin, and getting to meet Derek Sivers in person (the very down-to-earth, engaging, but brilliant and wildly successful gentleman who founded CDBaby) to chat about travels, businesses, failures, and planting multiple flags (BTW you absolutely must watch this fascinating, short 8-part video series by Sivers). Getting to interact with, have fun with, learn from, and learn about all these fascinating people that are all doing their own interesting things—that’s what makes travel so much fun for me.

Running my business online has meant I’ve built friendships with people all around the world. Interacting with people through Twitter alone has connected me to dozens and dozens of new people that I’ve actually become real friends and done business with.

The point is, I’m just an average dude—but because of the way I choose to live my life, the way I run my business, and the way I reach out to connect with other people out there, I’ve had an extraordinary experience making new friends all around the world. The tools I’ve used to build an international network of friends and colleagues are also available to you.

Being location-independent, running a business online, and being on the move—living my life this way has opened many doors to people and experiences I wouldn’t have back in my “normal” life, that I would have never dreamed I’d have. My passion and what drives my journey is the interesting people I meet… making new friends and having fun new experiences with them, learning from them, and growing with them. Your interests, what drives you, and the life you want to have may look entirely different to mine, but whatever they are, there are millions of people you can connect with out there in this small little world of ours. The amazing journey I have had, like many others, is only an example of what anyone could do. You only need to start opening doors.

What journey are you on? What are the people, places, and experiences that have meant the most to you along your path?

If you found this interesting, and if you’re anything like me, click here to get some incredibly awesome (and completely free) stuff to add to your toolbox and learn more about my philosophy. You won’t regret it→

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Setbacks, and What Motivates Me to Keep Exploring & Experimenting

You see, you are in charge of your life. You are responsible for how your life looks today and what your future will look like.

Now, I’m not saying you can control every aspect of your life, but I think you know what I mean. We are all responsible for what we do and don’t do in our lives.

One of the best decisions I ever made was to find and go after my passion with relentless determination.

It’s very simple, but not easy.

If you’re ready to take one single step every day, you can reach your goals and live the life of your dreams.

1. Get Clear

The first step towards turning passion into profit is to get clear about what you want.

For me, this means setting goals that are specific, realistic, and that have a deadline.

What do you truly want from life? Do you want to contribute to humanity with your art? Or do you want to travel the world, experience new cultures, and share what you’ve learned with the rest of us? You can create whatever you decide.

There is always a way to turn your passion into profit if you’re determined enough to make it happen.

2. Take Action

Next, you need to be willing to take massive action. You need to be willing to take steps every single day towards achieving your goals.

If your goal is to travel the world, find out exactly how much money you need, what you need, and how you need to do it. If your goal is to travel to Thailand and live there for a year, find out how much airfare is, how much the cost of living is, and everything else that’s essential.

Then ask yourself what you have to do to make it happen. Start executing even if you don’t know exactly how it will all work out.

Something magical happens when you take action. Never underestimate the power of the universe.

3. Model People

One of the most powerful tips I can give you is to model people. What I mean by this is to find people that are doing exactly what you want to be doing, and do what they did.

If you do what successful people have done to become successful, you will become successful. It is inevitable.

This may mean emailing someone and becoming their friend. For some people it may mean joining a training course where you can get access to people that are already living the kind of life you want to live.

Whatever it is, avoid making excuses and take action. There will be no perfect time to go after your dreams, so you might as well start now.

4. Destroy Your Obstacles

Once you have a very clear goal of what you want to achieve, take a clean sheet of paper and write down the obstacles you think you will face on the path toward your goal.

What this does is it anticipates the bad stuff that will happen, and it lets you come up with solutions before you even bump into the obstacles.

This usually eliminates most of the obstacles right away, and makes the whole journey smoother.

5. Face Your Fears

Going after your passion is not a walk in the park. If it was, more people would live a life of passion and fulfillment.

Facing your fears is a simple as being determined to get to your goals with fears or no fears.

You can either succumb to your fears and live a life of mediocrity, or you can face your fears and live a life of true freedom. The choice is yours.

6. Baby Steps

Most people underestimate how much progress they can make in a few years just by taking one small step every single day towards their goals.

When you have your plan, and you have your obstacles in front of you, it’s time to brainstorm ideas of what steps you can take today to get closer to making a living doing what you love. Nothing remarkable needs to happen; you just have to start the journey toward your dreams.

7. Patience

This journey takes a lot of patience.

You will run into a lot of obstacles, you will have to face your fears, as things probably won’t go as smoothly as you’d like them to go. It’s all a part of the journey. And none of it really matters when you love what you do.

Turning your passion into profit is something that everyone can do, but not everyone has the determination or willpower to make it happen.

It is up to you to decide whether you want to live up to your full potential or not.

Henri Junttila writes at Wake Up Cloud, where you can get his free course: Find Your Passion in 5 Days or Less. And if you liked this article, you will enjoy one of Henri’s top articles, 33 Powerful Ways of Overcoming Fear.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 7 Simple Steps to Turn Your Passion Into Profit

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In October 2010 I moved back to Bangkok from Singapore for a very exciting entrepreneurial opportunity. I partnered with two Ivy League Americans—an ex investment banker out of Goldman Sachs and a Yale-educated lawyer. To me, that meant we could not lose. To you, you may be wondering why I didn’t run the other way when a banker and a lawyer walked into my life in Bangkok.

The Breakdown

The Ivy’s believed that one must spend money to make money, and spend money they did! After three months of horrendous fiscal irresponsibility, the team started to focus on closing sales and building a wonderful product. Unfortunately, by then, the Macbook Pros, fancy business cards, and virtual offices in three countries had taken their toll. Where was I during this obvious cluster-f*&k? I was right there telling everyone we were focusing on the wrong things. But when a millionaire banker tells me our financial house is in order, I listened.

Three weeks later the banker realized it was too much and stopped paying the team. Overnight, the night before Christmas, the night before a long break that took most of the team on holiday to visit family, to visit Cambodia, to prepare for the new year, he decided to not pay the team. Then he went back to New York to party with friends. I was in Cambodia, on a visa run, waiting to get paid to buy my ticket back to Bangkok. In a word, I was eff’ed. I sank so much of my time and money into a venture that up and left.

My reaction was probably typical; I spent a week freaking out, drinking and worrying. I may have grown a few grey hairs. But then I found an idea, an idea that had been floating for years but was never forced to application, and I acted on that idea. And then I earned 1,000 dollars with just one hour of work.

Below I will outline how things turned around for me in just one month—January, this year—and then I will give you a step-by-step plan to earn 1,000 dollars in 1 hour so you can create your future without having to be faced with feast or famine.

Week 1

I drank so much alcohol and smoked so many cigarettes, I am ashamed; I called, cried, and screamed at Korean placement officers because I wanted a teaching job in a Korean kindergarten; there were coffee addicted rambles and fear induced ennui; I realized I had enough miles to get home—one way—and enough to pay my student loans for two months, if I stopped eating today. Train wreck.

Peeling onions is an excellent way to hide sadness.

Week 2

A new hope. Rewadee Khamkhieo came to my rescue; she has a friend, she told me, that needs a teacher. I’m not a teacher, I explained, to which she told me, “at the moment, you are nothing. Take this and we take the database from the old company and you start your own company. Look, I’ll help.” Help came when it needed to come, a job (a weak job) came when I needed it to come, and a database came from where it always was, but the initiative to use it came from a new hope.

Week 3

I got very sick from a week of drinking and stressing, but pushed through the illness to attack the mailing list we acquired from the old company. I called hundreds of people in a matter of days and actually set up several meetings. Those meetings were not just successful, they were epic. In one day I sold a $1,000 TOEFL course and a $350 recurring monthly geometry tutorial—350 USD for 2 hours per week for at least two years. I felt a spring in my step, but I still didn’t have enough money in my pocket to eat more than ramen and water.

Week 4

I taught the class, rebranded my website, learned how to set up MailChimp, wrote a compelling eBook on MBA admissions and created my first e-mail marketing campaign.

Then I earned 1,000 USD in 1 hour of work.

Success! Finally!

So How Did I Earn $1,000 in 1 hour?

I have spent the last 9 years perfecting my craft. I am an education professional—a professional counselor, consultant and tutor. I am able to turn C students into A students, I am able to get grammar goofs into graduate school, I am able to get new grads into top MBA programs. But I’ve always worked for someone else. Until now.

The reason people can charge a lot of money for their skills is because those skills took years to develop and the person is an expert. If you want to start earning money on the side, do it, but don’t expect a lot of money at the beginning until you are excellent at your craft. Whatever you do, make sure the client gets much more personal value from your service or product than she pays. I could not provide that value years ago, because I was not good enough at my craft. Now I am, and I can charge accordingly.

And I do. The $1,000 in 1 hour is not a trick, or a joke. It’s a testament to hard work, will power, and a little luck. After lunch one afternoon in January, I was preparing geometry flashcards for my weekend student. At the same time, I realized that my e-mail campaign had produced maybe a 6% click-through rate to my website. That wasn’t cool. So to remedy the situation, I logged into MailChimp, read all of the tutorials, and created a promotion for my website and my tutorial services. I sent the email to my list of 137 prospective students at 4:45 PM.

I then went to meet my student for a Starbucks tutorial. At 5:30 PM I received a phone call from a mom that received my email. She wanted to buy an SAT course for her son.

1000 dollars in 1 hour.

Lessons Learned

The love of a friend, of a lover, of a husband, wife, girlfriend or best friend cannot be replaced. You must foster it. Because when you hit your lowest, only those that truly love you will come to your aid. Helping you find a job, that’s important, but giving you the confidence to get back on the horse and keep on trying, that’s the important thing.

To pick up the phone and call 100 Thai people to set up face-to-face meetings on her first free weekend in months, that’s care, that’s agape. That’s the love. And I came out of my shell, out of my bedroom, where I had spent days drinking and sleeping, and I entered a new world. You need to foster those close to you, because honestly, there is no such thing as solopreneurship. You do not do it alone.

The face of success

Rewadee taught me that I could have been doing this on my own since the beginning. She taught me that many small steps equal one big step. She taught me that I could succeed.

You need your Rewadee. You need your confidence and shoulder. Because without it, you really are on your own. And alone is a terrible place to be.

The whole point of this article is to show a very quick coming of age. It’s not about having to get a job, because jobs are essential. It’s about what you can do when you try. It’s how the sense of urgency and need creates a very distinct will to win. It means that you don’t have to lose when things don’t go your way. It means life can sometimes suck and you can get out of it unscathed.

I was screwed over by some business partners. So what did I do? I freaked out for a while, as is natural, but then I got up.

How was I able to get up? Because I had a network, and close friends who were willing to help support me. Rewadee got me out of my problem. She saved my ass.

What did we do? We realized my hidden talent, built a product based on my skills, and sold that product to people who were already interested in buying it. We took a job at a school to get a work permit.

I built a website—CraigGonzalesTutoring.com—to sell my product. Then I took a list from my old company, a pseudo-ethical dilemma that I overcame because I truly care about my students and my old company certainly does not. This care manifested itself in an email sent out to 137 people. After 5 bounce-backs and 2 unsubscribes, I sold a $1,000 course for about 1 hour of work.

What lessons can you take from this?

• Find what you are good at
• Practice selling it to people—freelancing is a savior when you are on your own
• Get yourself ready for the worst
• Employment is not a bad thing, because having a safety net is important
• Nothing is easy and nothing comes quickly. Cody has spent years building a relationship with you as loyal readers. I spent years developing my academic skills. You have done something for years. Spending 6 months traveling does NOT make you a location independent expert—it just makes you a savvy saver and slightly adventurous dude.

You CAN do this and you CAN live this lifestyle, but you HAVE to learn skills that are helpful to other people and you HAVE to learn how to get people to value paying you for those skills. I utilize the internet to sell services that I deliver in person—I am NOT location independent. I am very happily location dependent on the coolest location I have ever been to. And you can be too.

Final lesson: If you aren't helping someone, you don't deserve to win.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How to Turn Misfortune into $1,000 in 1 Hour

You and Your Laptop Can Be a Multi-National Corporation: 7 Ways Location Independence Can Make You Cash Money

The incredible cocktail that Skype and the Four Hour Work Week has created, and the resulting proliferation of location independent professionals and entrepreneurs has been a total game changer for many. For me, it’s meant the chance to travel the world while I grow a business. A dream come true. 5 years ago I didn’t know this sort of thing was possible, and in many ways it wasn’t. There weren’t the Cody’s of the world showing how it can be done, internet connections in developing countries sucked… I mean SkypeOut was launched in 2006!

A lot of people think blowing off to Thailand to run your consulting business is faddish. A flash in the pan. More of the same.

Bullshit.

Because the costs to re-location and globalization are trending, at a very fast pace, towards zero, businesses and entrepreneurs will more and more focus on optimizing their location. It’s a question I’ve started to ask myself more often as the years go by: am I in the right place? (How deliciously existential!)

I’m assuming most of us are are all sold on the incredible personal advantages of living a location independent lifestyle, but what about the incredible business advantages? Multi-nationals have been taking advantage of offshoring for decades, and now you can do it, by yourself, with your laptop. Here are some key ways being location independent can help your business.

1. An extra 40K in personal income. WHAT?! (For US citizens) Did you know that if you can keep your pretty buns outside of the USA for all but 30 days in a calendar year (and establish some sort of permanent residence overseas recognized by the IRS) you don’t have to pay taxes on your first $91,500 of earned income? Hot damn that’s HUGE! Saving money is easier than making money, and this is a huge opportunity to save a bunch. [Cody: remember we're not lawyers or tax professionals here, so start with this article from the IRS and consult a professional.]
2. Personal sustainability. If you are on this site and you’ve got an itch to explore the world—to do something exciting—but instead you decide to “pay your dues” and start a business that doesn’t consider your passions, you won’t be getting your best, most enthused, most productive self on a daily basis. Despite what people say about automation and processes, you are more than likely the most critical element in your business. Get yourself excited and passionate about your lifestyle, and I believe you’ll see it on the bottom line.
3. Set up corporations in tax-friendly countries. Tax rates in countries like the Philippines are much lower than in the west. Why not run your operation from overseas? Even if your main entity is in your home country, you can use your foreign corps to increase your spending and reduce your tax load. (If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of how this works, subscribe to my blog, I’ll be showing how I do this in the coming months). This is the type of financial landscaping that was previously only realistic for rich dudes and big corps, now you can implement it in your business.
4. All your travel is 35% cheaper. YEP, that’s right world traveler. If you are traveling on your business, every single line item is up to 35% cheaper (depending on your tax rate). That’s because you are spending money before it’s taxed by your government. That’s balla!
5. Insource your talent. Universally, travel is one of people’s biggest desires. Tap in to that by offering intelligent people a seat next to you on that train. If you are living a remarkable lifestyle, and running an interesting business, people are happy to be compensated with experiences rather than cash. This can help you scale your business faster, and I promise you’ll have tons of fun in the process. Check out my Tropical MBA internships to see how this can work.
6. Outsource your talent. You are probably well aware of how outsourcing to places like China and the Philippines can help your business by keeping your labor costs much lower as you scale. Why not go meet those people? Make them a part of your business and life. It’s fun, and you’ll learn a ton and be exposed to opportunities you can’t predict.
7. Cash Runway. Got an idea? Got a buddy? Got some programmers? Ready to make that start-up happen? If you are sharp, you can survive for 6 months in Southeast Asia on $5,000 bucks in relative luxury. To an entrepreneur, runway is freedom. It’s the chance to be creative, work hard without distraction, and build something great.

I’m out of reasons… those of you doing this overseas, what other advantages have you come across? I’m taking notes!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 7 Ways Location Independence Can Make You Cash Money

I’ve been running a location-independent online business for nearly 4 years now, and I’ve been asked time and time again why I don’t have a product or a coaching program of my own yet about the digital nomad lifestyle I live.

For ages, I thought I didn’t have time, or that I was too busy with my own client projects.

But a few friends and I got together and finally started to bring things together, and they kicked my ass into motivation mode. One day I asked you if you’d be interested in learning how to become a digital nomad. And lo and behold, between email messages, blog comments, survey responses, and more, I’ve received hundreds and hundreds of enthusiastic responses from around the world!

I just didn’t anticipate a response like this. This is the biggest idea I’ve ever put out there, and it’s had the biggest reception! Your surge of support was encouraging and exciting and unreal and inspiring and overwhelming and humbling and scary.

And for the first time in a very long time, I got really excited about something new.

Readers sent in 220+ detailed, lengthy, thoughtful, amazing responses. In your survey responses, you told me what you wanted in a Digital Nomad training program.

You said you want one-on-one coaching. You want an incredibly selective application process. You want case studies of those who’ve been successful. You want direct access to them. You said you want supervision, and marketing advice, and troubleshooting guides, a yearly conference, and so many more great and helpful things.

In addition to the exclusive business course we’re building, we also promised to share a bunch of cool free resources, and dozens and dozens of people wanted Digital Nomad Case Studies. So today, if you are on our DNA list, you can get a free report with profiles of several top digital nomads:

Cody McKibben from Thrilling Heroics

I’ve traveled to 25 countries, including all of North America, France, the UK, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, and more. I’ve been running my web development and online marketing company remotely from Southeast Asia for over two years now. You know me. Let’s move on…

Dan Andrews from Lifestyle Business Podcast

Dan and his partners have a series of niche manufacturing businesses with offices in San Diego and the Philippines, and has become a leading authority on outsourcing. He is based in Manila, and has spent significant time in Boracay, Dumaguete, Manila, Cebu, and Puerto Galera, Philippines, as well as Thailand and Bali. Meanwhile he co-hosts the #1 podcast for lifestyle designers and lifestyle entrepreneurs, The Lifestyle Business Podcast, and sponsors the Tropical MBA internship program.

Corbett Barr from CorbettBarr.com

Corbett started a major Silicon Valley tech company, raised $3 million in venture capital, had employees and the whole bit, when he and his wife decided to take a six-month sabbatical to Mexico. Now he has built his own small business around ThinkTraffic.net and his personal site, earning over six figures a year and spending half the year at home in San Francisco and half the year either in Mexico or elsewhere. This summer they’re headed to Croatia.

Adam Baker from Man Vs. Debt

Adam, his wife Courtney, and their two-and-a-half year old daughter Milligan spent over a year living and traveling abroad, in Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. They spent a year preparing for their trip, selling all of their possessions, and paying down $18,000 in consumer debt, so Adam brings a lot of insight into personal finance and minimalism. Now they’re voyaging out from home state of Indiana to wander around the United States in their newly-purchased RV.

Nora Dunn from The Professional Hobo

Nora had a successful financial planning practice in Canada when she realized her life’s dream to travel extensively around the world was passing her by. In 2006, she sold everything she owned to travel the world full-time and has already set foot in 15 countries while she works as a freelance travel writer. Her travels have taken her to Hawaii, across Asia, Australia, throughout Europe, and now she is starting the new year in New Zealand.

Jeanne Dee from Soultravelers3

The “Soultravelers3″ are a digital nomadic family into their fifth year of an open-ended world tour. They were living the American dream, with a large, ocean-view California country home, but when they had a child in 2000 they decided that a permanent travel lifestyle would give them more time for bonding and freedom. They’ve raised their daughter to be tri-ligual in Chinese, Spanish and English, and they’ve now seen 38 countries on 5 continents, usually spending their winters in Asia (they are currently in Penang, Malaysia), and summers in Europe.

Andrew Hayes from Sharing Travel Experiences

Andy launched two online ventures at once. Sharing Travel Experiences is an online travel lifestyle magazine where he puts to use many of the skills he developed when he used to do a lot of writing for clients, and Travel Online Partners is a tourism marketing company that he has spent time working on while he’s been in Spain, Canada, and California in the last year. He is also an iPhone app developer and a published travel author.

Brooke Ferguson from Business Backpacker

Brooke was running her own business consulting company in Northern California when she decided to move her clients online and work remotely. She continues to coach clients one-on-one to turn their businesses into something that support their ideal lifestyle. All while blogging, rock climbing on the weekends, and earning her Divemaster certification. Brooke will serve as DNA’s curriculum director, and brings to it her comprehensive, all-inclusive self-mastery and business building system which she developed over the course of four years working with clients one-on-one.

Michelle Dale from Virtual Miss Friday

Michelle is a mobile entrepreneur, mother of two, and the virtual assistant behind VirtualMissFriday.com and VirtualAssistant-Live.com. She left a high-paying job in the banking industry and left the UK to move to Egypt for two years. Since then, she took her VA business from a one-person operation to a 6 figure offshore company while living in Luxor and in a few different parts of France. Michelle currently lives in Spain, and will be making her way to Italy later this year.

Drop Your Email in the Signup Form Below to Receive Your Free Digital Nomad Case Studies Report

(Note: If you’re already on the DNA email list, you don’t have to sign up again, you’ll be getting this in your email inbox very soon.)

Get on the DNA waiting list! Plus get our Digital Nomad Resources Guide and Case Studies Report absolutely FREE:

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But people didn’t just want case studies of successful nomadic entrepreneurs. You asked for direct access to them. You said you want supervision, and marketing advice, and troubleshooting guides, a yearly conference, and so much more.

Looking at all the feedback to what we’ve been bringing together at DNA made me realize the immensity of what we’re about to do. Nothing like what we’re about to at Digital Nomad Academy exists. There is no rulebook for what we’re going to put together for our students there. And we’re going to blow every other product or community in this niche out of this universe! (Sorry guys)

This is going to be so much bigger than I had originally imagined. I’m going to need to cancel some plans this year, stop doing my normal client work for a few months, and pour my time and energy into DNA. This will be an undertaking for all of us because we’re not just talking about a 6 session class, followed by some Q & A sessions. We’re talking about a comprehensive all-inclusive training program.

All of the individuals profiled above will be Digital Nomad Academy Faculty Members.

That means they will each participate on weekly coaching and mentoring calls, and you’ll get the chance to ask them your questions directly.

Not only that, but this is just the first round of faculty announcements. We’ll have many more successful online entrepreneurs, nomads, and niche experts involved to contribute to the vast amount of knowledge and training we’re putting together for you at DNA over the course of 2011!

Do You Want to Learn Directly from These (and Many More!) Successful Digital Nomads?

If you do, then here’s what I want you to do next: drop your email in the sign-up form up above on this page and we’ll send you the free report “10 Real-World Digital Nomad Case Studies” (as well as my last freebie, the Digital Nomad 101 Resources Guide), and you’ll get a chance to learn more about how you can be mentored directly by myself and all of these experienced nomadic entrepreneurs and many MORE!

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 10 Digital Nomad Success Stories, and How You Can Learn From Them…

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When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Maintaining relationships as a permanent traveler and entrepreneur has it’s challenges. I’ve been puzzled as to how to broach this topic here, but I recently parted ways with my (now ex-) girlfriend.

Nikki was (and always will be) a stunning, inspiring, ambitious woman. We met in Bangkok, she had built her own successful business, we saw four countries together in the last eight months alone, and together we got a beach house on beautiful Koh Phangan island in the south of Thailand. In many ways, we were the perfect travel couple. I thought I’d found the love of my life. So it’s hard to share with the whole world when you fuck something that good up.

Maybe we rushed into things. Maybe our hopes were too high. Maybe we were too alike—both A-type, hard-headed entrepreneurs, both accustomed to the ever-changing permanent travel lifestyle, and both very stubborn. We both had outside stresses, and moving from a busy city with literally hundreds of friends we could go out with nearly every day of the week, to sharing a home together for the first time, together nearly 24/7, on a small island where we didn’t know anyone, we had a few fights that escalated from bad to worse, and eventually I left Koh Phangan.

In retrospect, I don’t even remember what our arguments were about. Average disagreements, minor hurt feelings, money worries, but they would spiral out of control as we provoked each other to higher and higher stakes back and forth. Occasional fights are inevitable in long-term relationships. But perhaps we hadn’t had enough time to fully figure each other out, or maybe we both still need to learn how to handle those misunderstandings and disagreements properly with a more mature discourse.

Over the course of several months I had adjusted my business and scaled back on a lot of the projects I had been doing on my own (to clarify, she didn’t ask me to do this) to help her expand her magazine online and across Asia further. She had wanted me to potentially partner with her more officially on it, and we’d had plans to travel to South America in 2011 and do similar business there…

So when we went our separate ways, not only did I walk away from a girl that meant a tremendous amount to me, but I also became a homeless “digital drifter” again, and reverted back to solo entrepreneur. Because I had dropped a few big clients and discontinued some of the services I had been providing over the months, it’s put me at a crossroads in my business: what direction do I go? What opportunities do I get back into? Do I search for new clients or reinvent things and do something entirely new?

Not being in a committed relationship also puts me back in a position where I could almost go anywhere in the world, which is actually scary as hell. The decisions are paralyzing.

We’ve all had experiences like these—it was actually another breakup over three years ago that pushed me to move overseas—and I’ve had countless emails from readers in similar situations, who also experienced a breakup, or some other big life change.

But these big changes that we experience—losing someone you love (through a breakup, the death of someone you care about, or otherwise), having your career or your business thrown in disarray, experiencing a huge change in your living situation before you’re ready for it, trouble in your family, misunderstandings with your friends, and many other similar things—they can also bring out massive fears that—if you don’t overcome them—will put you in a rut for months or years, and may destroy you.

We may feel fear because of an experience that has happened in the past which triggers fear in the present. We might feel fear of uncertainty, or fear of the unknown. Or, we may even be frightened of doing what we’ve always wanted to do with our lives—a kind of nervous excitement, if you will.

[…] Fear is debilitating. It keeps us at a distance.  It stops us from moving forward.  It holds us back.

Our natural instinct when we begin to feel fear is avoidance.  Many people will go to unnatural extremes to avoid their fears, rather than dealing with their fear, and moving forward.”

–Brooke Ferguson

The Fear of Uncertainty

I am a firm believer that the only thing that holds you back from getting the things you want in this life is yourself—or, to be more precise, your fears.

Fear is a product of our evolution—it’s a survival response, a remnant from caveman days when we needed to remain alert and move our asses to avoid getting eaten by sabertooth tigers. But life in modern society is pretty cushy, and that inherent fear and anxiety response isn’t so useful anymore. At least I haven’t come across too many sabertooth tigers.

You’re never going to completely remove the fear. But you must master the fear if you want to be successful in life and attain your goals.

Most of us fear failure in some form or another. A lot of people stay in their 9-to-5 jobs because they fear the unknown—not having that paycheck to rely on, or they fear their own ability to go out and find enough paying clients to make a living. I experience that fear every month! Or you might fear that people will think your idea is stupid, that no one will buy. People will laugh at you because you choose to walk a different path—the unconventional path.

“Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

–Timothy Ferriss

But it’s not going to kill you to fail. Ask anyone successful how they got there, and they will undoubtedly tell you about the many, many failed ideas and failed attempts they made before they became an “overnight” success.

Failure doesn’t have the same sharp teeth and claws that it used to. If you’re trying to do big, remarkable things in business or in life, then failure is unavoidable. It’s part of the journey, part of the learning process. And in fact, failure is only going to teach you what you didn’t know already, and it will teach you lessons to apply in your next attempt at success.

One lesson that really made a huge impact on me early on, from Ramit Sethi, is that if you’re not failing at a few things each month, then you’re not trying hard enough. Ramit keeps a folder for failures, and he’s a New York Times bestselling author now.

Mountains from Molehills

Any big life change is going to feel like an insurmountable goal before you actually achieve it. The more you think about it without taking action and getting started, the more you will build it up to be a huge challenge in your head.

I remember before I finally pulled the trigger and packed my bags to live abroad in late 2008, I was scared shitless about leaving my comfortable surroundings. I thought I might end up spending a year in Asia in complete solitude. Boy did I turn out to be wrong though! I have friends now that I would never have back home—millionaires, media personalities, nightclub owners, authors, folks from all industries and from every corner of the world.

my 2nd day in Bangkok

I made it out to be a much bigger obstacle in my head than it really turned out to be. There were plenty of challenges, as I arrived in Beijing, China, just as the Bangkok airport was closed down by political demonstrations, and they wanted to turn me around and send me back to California.

But once I was moving towards my goal, once I was on the road traveling, I was surrounded by a completely new world—foreign languages I didn’t understand at all, different social norms—and it forced me to be resourceful. I had to learn and overcome the challenges, and in fact it increased the rate at which I was learning new things and becoming more resilient.

How to Royally Fuck Up a Sure Thing

Alright, so how to actually deal with the fear…

First, I want to tell you how not to deal with your fears. This is something that I’ve probably done over and over again, and one of these days I’ll have to learn that if I want a different outcome, I have to change my behavior. But I’ll share it here so hopefully you can learn a lesson from my failure.

So to go back to the breakup, a huge fear that I’ve recognized in myself is the fear that I’ll never find the kind of companionship I want—someone to share my life with. I’m not ready to settle down in one place, and I know I’m not mature enough to get hitched just yet, but I’m pretty serious when it comes to dating, and I’m looking for the right woman to join me on my unconventional journey through life—with all the ups and downs of travel and business thrown in there.

I tend to be extremely loyal when I find someone that fits—sometimes too much so. But a common fear that crops up in my relationships is that my other half isn’t as committed to the partnership.

In Nikki, I found someone who was exceptionally like-minded—she also enjoys the unleashed travel lifestyle and has the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Very rare, but we understood each other pretty damn well. We made an incredible couple, and had a brilliantly fun time, something I’ll always be thankful for. We were almost sickeningly cute at times, I’m sure.

The huge mistake I made, though, was letting the fear take control at the first sign that something was wrong. Seth Godin calls it the lizard brain—the fight or flight tendency.

When we fought, all my biggest fears came out: that she would leave me, or maybe that I wasn’t good enough for her, and that even if we did work things out, get through the argument and come to an understanding, eventually there would come a time when I wasn’t able to keep her happy and the relationship would fall apart anyway.

So rather than fully committing myself to working things out, getting through the argument and working at it to come to an understanding, which is the mature thing I should have done, I let my past experiences dictate my behavior, and I acted out of fear. I said things I didn’t mean. And at the end, I was the douchebag who walked away from her, because I feared she would dump me, and I was desperate to avoid that pain (real or imagined).

I feared a certain outcome, so rather than working hard at it and being there the way I should have, I overreacted out of fear and prematurely severed the relationship because I feared an unknown future. When I realized what a mistake I’d made, I spent a week or two trying to persuade her back with logical reasoning. This is exactly the opposite of what you should do. There’s no reasoning with someone to love you; I’d already lost her trust.

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”

–Peter Ustinov

Moral of the story: if you really want something, don’t let fear take the wheel and go into fight or flight mode. Don’t react and be a jackass when you fear an unknown outcome. Instead, stay reasonable, keep a cool head, hang in there and keep working hard, taking the steps necessary toward what you want. Because you never really know what will happen—you can’t predict the future—but a lot of people sabotage themselves, almost subconsciously, so that they don’t have to experience failure if they don’t get what they want.

This applies to relationships, but also to pretty much everything else too. Don’t do this!

Keep Your Options Open

No matter what fear you’re facing, the biggest element is that we all fear we will be ruined if we fail. Life will be over!

But that’s just not true. What you need is to figure out your options if everything goes horribly, a backup plan, if you will. A lot of times we have these fears because we don’t know what alternate options we have. So you need to spend some time and think about your options.

Tim Ferriss calls it fear-setting: you need to spend some time and think about your options if the worst case scenario happens. Try writing down exactly what would happen in the absolute worst case, if you completely and utterly fail at your goals. Then map out as many paths to recovery as you can, or alternate solutions to achieve your goal.

A few weeks after my breakup, I sat down and put together a mindmap with some of my biggest fears right now at this stage in my life: what direction to go with my business, money troubles, my fear of loneliness, and yes even the fear that I’ll never find the Mrs. Right.

Once I did this, I actually realized how many friends I had coming through to visit, how much fun was in store, I realized how many different business opportunities were already open to me, and new income streams I could start if I put in the effort, I even realized a lot of the positive things about my breakup and being on my own again. It made a huge difference in my attitude, and gave me the energy to look for new possibilities and keep pressing forward.

Once you define your worst possible outcome, and brainstorm solutions for it, you’ll see that in most cases failure will be much easier to come back from than you might fear. This should help remove a lot of the uncertainty for you in any area of your life.

Surround Yourself with Good People

I was exceptionally fortunate that I had a good friend not far from where I was: Brooke Ferguson was just a few hours away in Krabi, Thailand. I took a bus to see her, she helped me get my feet back on the ground now that I was homeless, she listened to all my braindump about what had happened, gave me lots of helpful insight, and we even got some momentum going on an exciting new project.

Several friends have actually come to visit in the last two months: Craig Gonzales, who wrote here about friendship and location independence recently, Colin Wright, Carlos Miceli, Ross Hill, Dwight Turner, Matt Goult, and others. Some were there when I needed someone to discuss my breakup and my fears with, and slowly, through many conversations, I was able to learn some important lessons and understand my mistakes a bit better.

Markus from LivingOnImpulse.com & Dwight from InSearchOfSanuk.com

Some of them were there when I just wanted to go out for drinks and a fun time. A couple joined me on the renowned rock climbing routes in Railay Beach, Krabi (which itself, like skydiving, deals with my fear of heights. Staying active, or getting involved in a new activity can be a great way to challenge yourself in new ways and overcome unique challenges that you can then also apply in other parts of your life. Like losing a toenail after four hours of climbing, and then having to climb through pitch black caves and abseil down a 100-foot limestone cliff barefoot!)

abseiling barefoot over West Railay Beach

A rare few will excel at helping guide you through your own mental process, which is exactly what Markus Urban was able to do with me when we met for a few days of food, drinks, adventure, fun, and deep conversations.

Don’t compound your fears by staying isolated from the world. Often, if you can talk things through with people who you trust, they’ll help you see new things you didn’t see on your own. Getting the support of good friends, or family, can help infuse you with the courage you need to overcome your fears. And remaining present, honest and open to old and new people around you will frequently present new opportunities that weren’t there before.

Stare Fear in the Eye

It’s likely that what you fear most is what you must do. Steve Pavlina says that whatever you fear is not really an obstacle, but a challenge that you must face:

“The reward for facing fear is that you get to be fully alive. When you turn towards your fear, you feel the breath of life blowing straight at you, and it’s very refreshing. You feel awake and energized. It’s not that you become an adrenaline junky. You simply realize that you can’t let fear stand in your way if you want to live your life consciously. Being afraid of something is no excuse for not doing it.”

–Steve Pavlina

All the big things you want to accomplish will stir up your fears to some degree, and it’s only by confronting those fears head-on that you’ll ever overcome them and achieve anything remarkable. If something seems impossible, then break it down into smaller parts, and start today on the first one that will get you going the direction you want to go.

By breaking down your huge fears into small pieces and taking action every day, you’ll start to build up resilience and tenacity in the face of those fears. And every time you have a small breakthrough or a victory over something you fear, you’ll gain more and more momentum to continue on and take on bigger and bigger challenges.

I finally decided to take initiative on a big, impossible dream I have of hosting some kind of an entrepreneurship, personal development and lifestyle design summit in the Southern California desert—a sort of unconference and retreat with inspiring, like-minded people who want to create radical change in their lives and build meaningful businesses.

As soon as I started sharing this idea with the right kind of people—a few folks who I really look up to and a few individuals who crossed paths by serendipity and shared an understanding of what change I want to make in the world—I started to get positive feedback from some who are also interested to participate and make something happen, which has given me new motivation to put in the attention and effort and make this one of my central projects in the coming months. (More on this soon, but if you want to learn from and collaborate with some remarkable people for a week in Palm Springs, say around mid-April when Coachella Music & Arts Festival is on, drop me a line.)

And in the dating arena, I’ve simply forced myself to keep being social, going out and meeting new people, bonding with new friends, and already I’ve found that there are plenty of great women out there to meet and plenty of potential for new relationships when the time is right, and maybe my huge fear that I’ll spend eternity alone isn’t true after all.

Are You Avoiding Doing Something Out of Fear?

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

–Wayne Gretzky

Consider what you have to lose by not taking action. Will you get another chance at this? Are you happy with things as they are now, or are you miserable? Will you choose unhappiness over uncertainty?

The key to achieving your wildest goals in life is to overcome the fears that hold you back, and to question your assumptions. The more certainty you require in life, the more you will be let down and unhappy. The people who succeed are the ones who accept that much of life is uncertain, and every day will serve up new challenges. Sometimes you’ll feel prepared to handle them, but most of the time you probably won’t. You must learn to adapt quickly to change, seek out how you can turn uncertainty to your benefit, and stop being a victim—but instead start looking for the lessons you can learn from life’s challenges to make you stronger.

Here are four lessons I’ve learned as I’ve overcome big challenges and faced my fears:

1. If you feel pulled towards something, embrace it and race toward it.
2. Big life changes are never as scary as you make them out to be in your head at first.
3. No matter what happens, you will adapt to new surroundings and new things in your life surprisingly quickly.
4. Even if your plans don’t unfold how you want them to, at the very least you will experience growth and learn valuable lessons along the way.

The willingness to risk the comfort of the familiar in order to find your true happiness is the path to living a remarkable life.

“Winners expect and embrace failure as something that will remain constant throughout their lives. No matter how successful they are in whatever they do, they will have the failures to go alongside it.

Every winner out there has had to first become a Master of Failure before enjoying the winning side of life.”

–Kevin Abdulrahman

There always have been and always will be a small subset of the population who lead remarkable lives. They choose not to allow fear—of the unknown, of uncertainty, of failure—to hold them back from doing big things. They take action in the face of fear. The question is: will you choose to be one of them? Will you overcome your fears and live a remarkable life?

If So, the World Is Your Oyster!

Image: Anton Balazh

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How to Keep Kicking Ass When You Lose Everything

Songkran water festival with Gary Arndt & the blogger gang

This week I finally want to share a fantastic interview I did with Gary Arndt from Everything Everywhere. You may be wondering where I disappeared to, I’ve been meaning to get this interview up for about a month, but unfortunately personal life took the driver’s seat for the last few weeks.

But today I’m excited to finally share this with you. I met Gary while he was in Bangkok, Thailand, for a couple months earlier this year. Coming from Wisconsin and Minnesota, Gary made his first trip around the globe when he sold his internet consulting company in 1999. Then he made it his mission to travel the world on a more permanent basis and left the States in March 2007. He’s been nomadic ever since and has visited over 70 countries in the last three years, traveling solo.

His blog has been recognized as one of TIME’s Top Blogs of 2010, and his work has recently been featured on Huffington Post. Gary and I got into some great conversation. Here are some of the highlights:

• 0:30 – Gary’s experience traveling to 70+ countries in 3 years
• 1:24 – Little-known secret destinations in the Pacific: Micronesia and more
• 3:33 – What it’s like to be a full-time solo world traveler
• 4:42 – The trap of over-thinking your trip before you go & how travel forces you to grow
• 5:50 – The vacation mindset versus the nomadic, permanent traveler mindset
• 6:30 – How Gary went from his parents’ basement to founding a successful tech company
• 8:50 – How he sold his company and leveraged it to take his first round-the-world trip
• 10:28 – More about Gary’s top travel blog Everything Everywhere and how he went from less than 100 visitors a day to one of the web’s top travel blogs
• 14:22 – Networking in the travel industry and how to get other people to pay for your travels!
• 17:50 – How Gary abandoned SEO practices and made it into TIME’s Best Blogs 2010
• 20:05 – Lessons he learned from 3 years of traveling the world (feature on Huffington Post)
• 21:40 – How the news makes people fear the “outside” world, and how the world is actually a pretty safe place
• 24:13 – Why Gary got kicked out of the island nation of Kiribati and changed their visa laws!
• 26:00 – About his new book deal (and how to use a blog as a marketing platform for publishing your own book)
• 27:28 – Gary’s beef with the lifestyle design niche and bloggers who don’t walk the walk (the importance of experience and credibility)

[Apologies for the rough video quality: it's late night for Gary so he looks like a ghost illuminated by his screen, and it's a bit choppy at one or two spots because I'm recording from a beach on Koh Phangan!]

Gary will be in Las Vegas next week, speaking at Blog World Expo at Mandalay Bay Convention Center on October 15th. Make sure to connect with him on Twitter to track him down wherever his world travels take him! He’s also instrumental in the This Week in Travel podcast.

If you liked learning about Gary and his Permanent Travel Adventures, click here to discover Case Studies of several more Successful “Digital Nomads”→

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 70 Countries in 3 Years: An Interview with Permanent World Traveler Gary Arndt

Cody, Brooke Ferguson & Craig Gonzales in Krabi, Thailand

But It Makes Us Seem Cool!

Having friends throughout the world makes me feel pretty cool. I remember having a coffee conversation with a group of friends in Memphis, Tennessee a few years back. We were on our way to the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago and got tired of the drive, so we stopped for some drinks with a friend. While chatting, our host dropped the “My friend in Georgia…” line. The young, arrogant boaster in me had to say, “oh yeah? I’ve been to Georgia…”

“Uhm… I meant the country,” she said while rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, me too. I spent time in Tbilisi after visiting my Peace Corps volunteer friends in Moldova and Azerbaijan,” I proudly remarked.

Shit like that is cool: To know what she is talking about, and to know that she thinks she is the only one who knows what she’s talking about.

There is a very real pride in knowing people around the world. The exoticness rubs off. It is like being attracted to the Brazilian exchange student or the British au pair. We are cool by association. Being from Texas is not cool if everyone around us is also from Texas, so we glean the coolness from our association with the Spanish, Qatari, or Thai friends that we have.

In addition to feeling cool, worldwide friends make our personal and professional lives more fulfilling. We can operate business remotely, we can rely on a warm bed and a tasty meal, and we can gain powerful insight into local business markets.

My young arrogance was not simply to seem cool to other people, though that was part of it, rather it was to make me more professionally capable and more culturally aware. But developing friendships takes time and energy. Networking is hard work, and if you know too many people, you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin.

The only surefire way to do this is to spend extensive time internationally. Spending several months in a new destination seems a requirement for this sort of true international experience. Sure, on my last trip to Darjeeling I met a lovely Tibetan lady in my hostel, but she is not really part of my network. She is someone I sometimes “like” on Facebook.

Superficial, one-off relationships are not what I am talking about.

But I Chat With People All Over!

We have conversations on the web: chat through MSN and Facebook, comment and communicate on Twitter and on blogs, and expose our language skills to those in language exchange programs. That is nice, but it is not what I am talking about.

Online friends share ideas. Good ideas—intelligent and helpful ideas. Relationships you maintain with other people online can be good, but they’re different from relationships with in-person friends, true friends.

Online friends are like study buddies or colleagues that enjoy each others’ company. The communication is intellectual, idealistic, or sophomoric. However it works, it’s narrow and important.

In-person friends do share these intellectually stimulating conversations, but they also share experiences. Money blogs and relationship blogs have individuals bearing their souls, so I am not saying web friends cannot be intimate, but true in-person friends grow together. They watch football together, go tubing together, eat breakfast together, and go through relationships together. They grow through time with each other in a beautiful way. This is something online friends cannot have, really, and it is something that some perpetual travelers and lifestyle designers may not realize we miss.

We spend time building a network, responding to blogs, and chatting on Twitter. But this is only a band-aid used to fill a very real void. Our “friendship void” makes us reach out however we can. In some cases, it is to people on the web. This is a very real experience and a very real problem.

Meeting online friends in real life (Cody, Carlos Miceli, Colin Wright, Ross Hill)

[Craig's] Personal Experience

The words ‘I’ and ‘me’ get thrown around far too often in blogs, but with that said, if I want to play the game, I should at least read the rulebook. I formalized my opinion based on the following experiences:

• While I was in high school. I had a core group of high school friends. I was part nerd, part bully, part social magnet, and part crescent fresh dude. I made many friends in high school. Most of my friends went to the same colleges, universities, military, or jobs after school. They all knew each other. I went to a school where I knew nobody. I left my friends behind for the great unknown.
• I went to university and had to make new friends. I stayed in contact with my high school friends, but they kept their relationships going. Throughout the four years of college, as I built new relationships and developed strong social skills and bonds with beautiful friends, my old friends grew closer. What I left after four years, they continued for eight.
• Upon graduation, I decided to go to graduate school. I didn’t know anyone in this new city. Most of my friends stayed in either Austin or Houston, Texas. They hung out all the time. They loved each other. I still talked to them. And sometimes I went to visit them. But throughout my entire time in graduate school, my high school friends kept their lives together, my college friends kept their lives together, and I made a brand new base of friends. In graduate school, most of my friends were undergrads. (I was still in that mindset.) In grad school, I realized that I needed some life experience, so once again, I moved away, and once again, I was the only person I knew making the decision I was making. I moved to Ghana.
• In Ghana, I made new friends. Wonderful expat and local friends. My high school friends now had almost 10 years together, my uni friends had six, and my grad school friends had already been building more than two years. I had these three groups of friends to keep up with, and surprisingly, while some came and went, there was always a core group, my core 3-6 friends, that always were together. They’d vacation together, they’d movie together, they’d have mid-week cookouts together. They grew up together. They knew each other so well. Their lives were beautiful. And I kept having to etch a new social life out of my experience. I had wanderlust.
• This experience happened to me three more times. Once, after Ghana, I took a job in a new city. I knew so few people, and had to make new friends. Then, after working for one year, I moved to Thailand. I was the only person I knew in Thailand, so I again had to make new friends. Then, after one-and-a-half years in Thailand, I moved to Singapore, where I had to start the whole process again. As you can see, this is a cycle that gets exhausting, because while I have known my new friends here in Singapore for three months, my old core groups (what is it now, five core groups of friends?) have become so close that they are experts on each other. They have spent so many hours together that they can finish each others sentences.

But Is It Worth It?

You have to decide that for yourself. Personally, I am pleased with my decision.

But I didn’t know the full consequences, mainly because I didn’t take the time to rationalize the cause-and-effect of this sort of lifestyle. I know more people than some of my friends; I know a more diverse group of people, and I have a wider perspective and more things to talk about. I love it. I love it so much. I would never trade it.

But I recognize what I have lost, and what I will not have with those I care about. For many people, family and friends are everything. Not just having them or chatting with them, but being with them. Daily, weekly, or monthly.

To have a work/life/relationship balance, you need to think of more than just money and freedom. You need to think about others. A lot of the location-independent bloggers have a positive, no-holds-barred approach to living life by one’s own means. I support that 100%. But our decisions affect not only ourselves but also our family and friends. And it is essential that we recognize and are comfortable with that transition—with that life.

For me, it is worth it. For you, I do not know.

But know that there are pros and cons to everything; there is nothing wrong with having a traditional home base and taking many mini-retirements. There is nothing wrong with taking your winter trip to Vail and your summer trip to Cancun. There is something wrong, however, with wishing you could live a different life but doing nothing to get that life.

Conclusion

Living a perpetual travel lifestyle or a location independent lifestyle has consequences. For many, the consequences are too dire to live with. That is fine. For others, those consequences are small when compared to the exciting life we live. As Socrates said, a truly wise man knows what he does not know. Consequently, a truly wise nomad knows all that he gives up in order to live this life, and is validated by his decision.

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Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: The Nomadic, Permanent Travel Lifestyle and the “Friendship Void”