Traveling and experiencing.. Without losing career. How to?

[lux7]

Have your ever heard fathers saying "the kids are great, but... ".

If I have kids I wanna be a person that doesn't ever think that.

And I feel like you need to feel accomplished and feel like you've had enough fun and you are enough of a man to do that.
And You will hardly (or least I won't) be able to do it with a normal paying office job and limited holidays.

At the same you're scared of losing out on the money and career side by quitting everything.

That's how I feel. Feels like an early middle life crisis.

For you guys out of 9-5 jobs and/or traveling around, and/or who've already been through it.. How did you manage?

 

[Go10]

I have traveled a lot and been tons of places simply by working when I need money, saving some up so I can go on adventures, spending it on adventures, and then doing it all over again. It's not for everyone but I really fucking enjoy it!

By working do you mean jobs? How do you get such high-paying jobs so easily? Just curious.

 

[Chase]

Lux-

There's really no "easy" way - it takes doggedness and a willingness to absorb punishment and uncertainty for at least a year (or two, if your first couple of years in business for yourself are as punishing as mine were - I didn't pay myself a salary until I'd been running businesses for almost two years and was close to bankruptcy).

If you want to travel, you can get TEFL/TESOL certified to teach English; you can learn a skill and freelance online; you can even learn to bartend and do that at popular resort destinations. You can study entrepreneurship and learn how to start a business; just like with picking up girls, there are thousands of courses out there on running your own company, many of them scammy, some of them really, really good.

Whatever you do, you'll have to put the notion of "career" on hold, and that's the real catch, because "career" and "freedom" are not compatible. Had my job not laid me off in 2010, I'm not sure how long I'd have put off doing it - I told myself I was going to quit my job at the start of 2010 and pick up stakes and start to travel, but when 2010 rolled around inertia hit and I said, "Well, why don't I just wait until the end of this year, so I can save up more money and be in a better position..."

Chances are I'd still be sitting somewhere zoned out in a cubicle, thinking about how someday I was going to live my life of adventure. This site would still be getting one new post every month or two, like it was all through 2008 until autumn 2010, or more likely I'd have abandoned it long ago. Probably never would've started my book.

There are numerous paths available, but they all involve setting aside the promise, prestige, and security of a career and leaping out into the unknown.

Your career won't wait for you. Everyone tells you it will, but it won't.

You can always go back to school again later and start again, probably at a higher level than you were at the first time. Assuming you've got the financials to do so, of course.

And if you work on running your own company and are dogged about it, you'll probably pick up enough new skills that you'll be valuable to many more companies, and might actually find you have an easier time getting hired at a higher paying, more prestigious position, or taking on numerous profitable freelancing gigs to work at your own pace.

But... it's all uncertainty. No clear direction. It's not the beaten path.

When I find myself dealing with periods of heightened uncertainty, I like to calm myself down by reminding myself that in 2 years, no matter how tumultuous what I'm going through seems right now, I'll have sorted it out one way or another and life will have gone on. I won't have starved to death, I won't have died of dehydration or exposure, and I won't be locked up in debtor's prison, and I trust myself enough that I'm not going to be picking strawberries with a bunch of Mexicans for $3/hour or something silly. Somehow I will be okay.

Most people who want to do this never will. It's simply too hard.

That includes me. Had I not been laid off, who knows how long it would've taken me to take the plunge, or if I ever would have. Despite spending a year trying to "save up", I still hadn't been able to - when I think back, I'm not really sure where all the money I made in a corporate career went. I spent a couple of lean years with no income after that scraping by with very little, and looking back shaking my head at how much I should've saved and how little I actually did. 75% of the money I pay myself these days either goes into paying off debt or straight into the bank, and I live a life of far more adventure and novelty than I did back then. But my pay these days is hard-won, whereas the pay I used to get came from phoning it in during college and phoning it in at work. Easy come, easy go, as they say...

Chase

 

[lux7]

The notion of "learning to run a successful company" is so interesting, I always thought that coincidence and macro trends in your industry played too big of a role to being able to consistently launch new successful companies.

How did you move to China Chase and earned fron there , and now that you have your own businesses do you really feel freer if you (still) have to work, and a actually work that much harder and can't really stop or esle you lose the income ?

 

[Raqimus]

I have traveled a lot and been tons of places simply by working when I need money, saving some up so I can go on adventures, spending it on adventures, and then doing it all over again. It's not for everyone but I really fucking enjoy it!

By working do you mean jobs? How do you get such high-paying jobs so easily? Just curious.

I don't get high-paying jobs, I just live cheap (usually) and like to go on adventures. There are work-trade programs all over the world, there's WOOFing, volunteer opportunities, etc.

I have done a ton of odd jobs, I've actually never had a job for more than 6 months.

Hey Drexel, have you ever tried woofing, or or those work-trade opportunities. I've always wanted to travel and those seem like very good options to travel and learn at the same time. I just wanna know what your experiences have been like if you've done so.

 

[Chase]

Lux-

The notion of "learning to run a successful company" is so interesting, I always thought that coincidence and macro trends in your industry played too big of a role to being able to consistently launch new successful companies.

There's certainly a large element of luck, yet also a large one of skill. It's much like seduction in that regard. If you write it off as "all luck", you'll never get remotely successful; if you count on it being "all skill", you'll find yourself confused and traumatized when things you were certain would win big get met with crickets. However, if you keep experimenting and diligently work to improve, you greatly increase your luck surface area.

How did you move to China Chase and earned fron there , and now that you have your own businesses do you really feel freer if you (still) have to work, and a actually work that much harder and can't really stop or esle you lose the income ?

Everywhere I've relocated to I just threw my belongings in a suitcase and went. Not so hard. Some countries you need visas for, but if you're working your network there are typically agencies with government ties, etc., who can help you get special visas, etc. that friends will put you in contact with.

I won't go anywhere for more than a week or two generally that I don't know at least one person who'd like to show me around and play host for a while to help me get my bearings. It cuts down on your learning curve / initial exploration time so dramatically that it's not really worth it for me to travel anywhere else long-term anymore without boots-on-the-ground information. Generally I try to crash with friends when new in town; you don't get the whirlwind tour when you're not living in the same abode.

As for freedom... man! It's all kinds of freedom.

I always felt like a prisoner when I had commutes for a 9-to-5, or even when I ran an office-based startup and had to be in the office wearing my suit and playing the "good manager" role. These things drove me nuts. I don't know what's worse: having to wake up early in the morning to make it to the office when you are NOT a morning person, and always being in a rush because you overslept again, since you didn't get to bed until 3:30 AM and your alarm was set for 7... or having to waste a ton of energy on trying to "look busy" and "seem important" so you don't get the ax, or encourage staffers to start trying to ladder climb you... or being stuck there all day long, even if you finish everything you need to do early, or there's nothing you can do until later.

An average day for me is waking up when I want to wake up, leisurely eating breakfast while reading the latest science news or a book on history or business (I've been chipping away at Plutarch for a while during meals, and it's wonderful), showering, then heading out somewhere for lunch, then a café to do some work. Sometimes I will walk the streets, or take the train to another part of town if I'm in a city with a train, right at evening rush hour, not because I actually have to be anywhere specific, but because it's kind of fun to walk or ride around with all the worn out, haggard masses heading back from their jobs to go flop down and pass out at home before starting it all over again the next day.

It makes me appreciate my freedom, and also gives me a ping of nostalgia for back when I was living that life, making my daily commute to and fro while cursing to no one in particular and saying "WHY am I trapped doing this mind-numbing BS day after day after day? Am I Bill Murray? Is this Groundhog Day?" The world felt like such a big, scary, unknowable, and limiting place back then, compared to the small, familiar, and limitless one it is for me today.

To get there, I had to endure the lean years of trial and tribulation though, where I faced constant failure and setback and oceans of doubt, and there was no one who could help me through it. The best anyone could offer was "Well, if it doesn't work out, what are you going to do? Take another job?"

I think MJ DeMarco's Millionaire Fastlane does the best job of anything I've read at highlighting the way your thinking changes once you've become at least moderately successful at business. Slowlane people trade time for money - they'll drive 40 minutes out of their way to get a free milkshake, say, or wait in line all night to save 40% on a flatscreen TV during Black Friday. This is because money is limited to them, and they have no easy way to make more. Spend all the money in your paycheck, and you're sunk. All you can do is wait another 2 weeks for more, or put it on your credit cards and hope you haven't hit your limit yet.

When you're a business owner, and you're making money, your thinking shifts to "How can I spend my money to save myself more time?" because the more time you have, the more you can leverage your burgeoning skill sets to make even more money, which allows you to save even more time.

If there's a course I want to take or a trip I need to go on and it's going to cost me a few thousand bucks, yet I know it makes good business sense, I don't even think about it, I just do it. And then I work on making sure that whatever it was pays for itself several times over within a few months of signing up for it in terms of a better business creating more value for customers, the team, and me.

Or, if I can pay someone to handle XYZ time-consuming thing I do, now I can pursue ABC other opportunity that will increase revenues 40%, 50%, 100%, or more. Then I can hire still more people to automate that piece of the process, and build something else even greater. All of this is super fun when you are someone who enjoys building cool things.

If you like playing strategy games like Risk or Chess or Age of Empires or StarCraft, or you like RPGs like Elder Scrolls, etc., business once you're past the initial freaking out "HolycrapI'mlosingsomuchmoneywhathappensifthisallgoesbellyup???" point becomes a really enjoyable game much of the time, so long as you're good about getting the stuff you hate doing off your plate by hiring people to handle it or cutting that aspect out of the business so you aren't spending time every day doing things you dislike doing. All you're doing is building your empire and leveling up your skills. For me, those things are way more interesting than most anything else I can do. Getting paid to do them beyond what I need to survive is just a neat bonus.

Chase

 

[lux7]

Lux-

There's certainly a large element of luck, yet also a large one of skill. It's much like seduction in that regard. If you write it off as "all luck", you'll never get remotely successful; if you count on it being "all skill", you'll find yourself confused and traumatized when things you were certain would win big get met with crickets. However, if you keep experimenting and diligently work to improve, you greatly increase your luck surface area.

Makes sense.
May I ask what businesses arw you running and how did you happen to choose it (ie happenstance, you liked it, you brainstormed ane seemed a great idea..) ?

Everywhere I've relocated to I just threw my belongings in a suitcase and went. Not so hard. Some countries you need visas for, but if you're working your network there are typically agencies with government ties, etc., who can help you get special visas, etc. that friends will put you in contact with.

I won't go anywhere for more than a week or two generally that I don't know at least one person who'd like to show me around and play host for a while to help me get my bearings. It cuts down on your learning curve / initial exploration time so dramatically that it's not really worth it for me to travel anywhere else long-term anymore without boots-on-the-ground information. Generally I try to crash with friends when new in town; you don't get the whirlwind tour when you're not living in the same abode.

As for freedom... man! It's all kinds of freedom.

I always felt like a prisoner when I had commutes for a 9-to-5, or even when I ran an office-based startup and had to be in the office wearing my suit and playing the "good manager" role. These things drove me nuts. I don't know what's worse: having to wake up early in the morning to make it to the office when you are NOT a morning person, and always being in a rush because you overslept again, since you didn't get to bed until 3:30 AM and your alarm was set for 7... or having to waste a ton of energy on trying to "look busy" and "seem important" so you don't get the ax, or encourage staffers to start trying to ladder climb you... or being stuck there all day long, even if you finish everything you need to do early, or there's nothing you can do until later.

An average day for me is waking up when I want to wake up, leisurely eating breakfast while reading the latest science news or a book on history or business (I've been chipping away at Plutarch for a while during meals, and it's wonderful), showering, then heading out somewhere for lunch, then a café to do some work. Sometimes I will walk the streets, or take the train to another part of town if I'm in a city with a train, right at evening rush hour, not because I actually have to be anywhere specific, but because it's kind of fun to walk or ride around with all the worn out, haggard masses heading back from their jobs to go flop down and pass out at home before starting it all over again the next day.

It makes me appreciate my freedom, and also gives me a ping of nostalgia for back when I was living that life, making my daily commute to and fro while cursing to no one in particular and saying "WHY am I trapped doing this mind-numbing BS day after day after day? Am I Bill Murray? Is this Groundhog Day?" The world felt like such a big, scary, unknowable, and limiting place back then, compared to the small, familiar, and limitless one it is for me today.

To get there, I had to endure the lean years of trial and tribulation though, where I faced constant failure and setback and oceans of doubt, and there was no one who could help me through it. The best anyone could offer was "Well, if it doesn't work out, what are you going to do? Take another job?"

I think MJ DeMarco's Millionaire Fastlane does the best job of anything I've read at highlighting the way your thinking changes once you've become at least moderately successful at business. Slowlane people trade time for money - they'll drive 40 minutes out of their way to get a free milkshake, say, or wait in line all night to save 40% on a flatscreen TV during Black Friday. This is because money is limited to them, and they have no easy way to make more. Spend all the money in your paycheck, and you're sunk. All you can do is wait another 2 weeks for more, or put it on your credit cards and hope you haven't hit your limit yet.

When you're a business owner, and you're making money, your thinking shifts to "How can I spend my money to save myself more time?" because the more time you have, the more you can leverage your burgeoning skill sets to make even more money, which allows you to save even more time.

If there's a course I want to take or a trip I need to go on and it's going to cost me a few thousand bucks, yet I know it makes good business sense, I don't even think about it, I just do it. And then I work on making sure that whatever it was pays for itself several times over within a few months of signing up for it in terms of a better business creating more value for customers, the team, and me.

Or, if I can pay someone to handle XYZ time-consuming thing I do, now I can pursue ABC other opportunity that will increase revenues 40%, 50%, 100%, or more. Then I can hire still more people to automate that piece of the process, and build something else even greater. All of this is super fun when you are someone who enjoys building cool things.

If you like playing strategy games like Risk or Chess or Age of Empires or StarCraft, or you like RPGs like Elder Scrolls, etc., business once you're past the initial freaking out "HolycrapI'mlosingsomuchmoneywhathappensifthisallgoesbellyup???" point becomes a really enjoyable game much of the time, so long as you're good about getting the stuff you hate doing off your plate by hiring people to handle it or cutting that aspect out of the business so you aren't spending time every day doing things you dislike doing. All you're doing is building your empire and leveling up your skills. For me, those things are way more interesting than most anything else I can do. Getting paid to do them beyond what I need to survive is just a neat bonus.

Chase

I see, so you knew someone in China and you were already an entrepreneur?
I thought you'd have enjoyed the freedom of exploring without chaperone and have your own place, but a friend there can help in so many ways indeed and also cut costs.

Age of Empires is amazing
sounds great, so now you're working less hours , you get to pick the time and what you're doing is more stimulating for you?

 

[lux7]

P.S.: loved the walk during rush hour and enjoying the slight melancholyc feeling

 

[Rage]

If you like playing strategy games like Risk or Chess or Age of Empires or StarCraft, or you like RPGs like Elder Scrolls, etc., business once you're past the initial freaking out "HolycrapI'mlosingsomuchmoneywhathappensifthisallgoesbellyup???" point becomes a really enjoyable game much of the time, so long as you're good about getting the stuff you hate doing off your plate by hiring people to handle it or cutting that aspect out of the business so you aren't spending time every day doing things you dislike doing. All you're doing is building your empire and leveling up your skills. For me, those things are way more interesting than most anything else I can do. Getting paid to do them beyond what I need to survive is just a neat bonus.

This analogy of role-playing/strategy games to business is great!

I used to play these types of games though most of my friends growing up didn’t like playing them. They would play Super Smash Bros and Mario and other single player/multiplayer, competitive popular titles out. But they wouldn’t like these strategy games that much, my sister too…

From what I heard from them it was because those games were too complicated, too difficult, too time-consuming etc.

I loved playing video games, but the RPG games (for me it was fire emblem path of radiance, radiant dawn) I played late elementary school, and middle school on were perhaps my ultimate favorite games. I think what it is is that these games come close to running a business or world domination. Something the ordinary person may find arduous and frustratingly, maddeningly difficult and not as quickly rewarding/enjoyable as most games.

Probably correlation and not causation, but those games seemed to garner an interest in me similar to interest in business that I came to have. I loved building up my units and having everything be so challenging, which characters to have support each other, which way to attack each map, which stats to increase, skills to add, weapons to buy.

Oh also interesting too, when like your units are new and you wouldn’t have much skill or much money in your convoy and you’d be scraping the coins you had together to make ends meet and have just enough weapons and items for the group to use.

And it’d be tough to get by. But slowly you’d progress, get better, get more money, win more battles. Your units would get more stronger and new ones would join. And then you’d grow and get bigger and the scale of your problems would too. Not about surviving then so much and you have way more resources and strong units and ability to do things but then it would be fighting a much larger battle more complicated map objectives and complicated procedures and methods needed to be taken to have a chance at achieving them. More room for failure and larger scale problems that the group would have to face.

And just the game altogether was so frustratingly difficult; especially if you tried to keep all your units alive, I remember you’d spend 2 or 3 days on one map and then be just about to beat it and then one of your guys would die and you would tearfully reset and begin so everyone could be kept alive. Haha.

Really hard, but more than anything, it was so much fun. More so than I would get just in competitive matches of easy vid games with friends.

With those strategy games, would be creating something bigger and get to see your “company” grow from scratch, mature, develop and grow to become the empire it one day became later on. Felt much more purposeful and fulfilling… and when you are big especially, there would always be more territory to traverse, new heights to go and new realms to journey to and dip your feet in.

A big world … maybe I find business to be the same way for me one day

 

[lux7]

This analogy of role-playing/strategy games to business is great!

I used to play these types of games though most of my friends growing up didn’t like playing them. They would play Super Smash Bros and Mario and other single player/multiplayer, competitive popular titles out. But they wouldn’t like these strategy games that much, my sister too…

From what I heard from them it was because those games were too complicated, too difficult, too time-consuming etc.

I loved playing video games, but the RPG games (for me it was fire emblem path of radiance, radiant dawn) I played late elementary school, and middle school on were perhaps my ultimate favorite games. I think what it is is that these games come close to running a business or world domination. Something the ordinary person may find arduous and frustratingly, maddeningly difficult and not as quickly rewarding/enjoyable as most games.

Probably correlation and not causation, but those games seemed to garner an interest in me similar to interest in business that I came to have. I loved building up my units and having everything be so challenging, which characters to have support each other, which way to attack each map, which stats to increase, skills to add, weapons to buy.

Oh also interesting too, when like your units are new and you wouldn’t have much skill or much money in your convoy and you’d be scraping the coins you had together to make ends meet and have just enough weapons and items for the group to use.

And it’d be tough to get by. But slowly you’d progress, get better, get more money, win more battles. Your units would get more stronger and new ones would join. And then you’d grow and get bigger and the scale of your problems would too. Not about surviving then so much and you have way more resources and strong units and ability to do things but then it would be fighting a much larger battle more complicated map objectives and complicated procedures and methods needed to be taken to have a chance at achieving them. More room for failure and larger scale problems that the group would have to face.

And just the game altogether was so frustratingly difficult; especially if you tried to keep all your units alive, I remember you’d spend 2 or 3 days on one map and then be just about to beat it and then one of your guys would die and you would tearfully reset and begin so everyone could be kept alive. Haha.

Really hard, but more than anything, it was so much fun. More so than I would get just in competitive matches of easy vid games with friends.

With those strategy games, would be creating something bigger and get to see your “company” grow from scratch, mature, develop and grow to become the empire it one day became later on. Felt much more purposeful and fulfilling… and when you are big especially, there would always be more territory to traverse, new heights to go and new realms to journey to and dip your feet in.

A big world … maybe I find business to be the same way for me one day

.
Yes it's an interesting correlation indeed. I remember when play Age of Empires I used to hold the pee so long it was a challenge reaching the bathroom cause I didn't wanna leave the troops for a single second .

One a second thought though "luck" might have a bigger impact on entrepreneurship success than seduction -or video games for that matter -, in seduction you have millions of women to re-try and in video games you can restart as much as you want.
But in business you might not get that many second chances (investors will be wary of investing on a failed entrepreneur, colleagues and new hires will prefer already successful ones, you own money will run out, debt might get too high to restart etc. etc... ).