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I’m about 5 weeks late in writing this article, postponed by a breakup, lack of motivation, work projects, political protests, getting distracted by tons of new friends, and by going on extended mental vacation! This Christmas I’m writing from my new temporary home in Bangkok, Thailand, and I wanted to finally share some of my goals for traveling abroad in 2009. I’ve let a lot of personal issues get in the way of my writing in the past year, but in the new year I will strive to offer you much more frequent updates about my attempts at living the dream, and tips on how you can too!
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I left the States only about a month ago, and already I feel like I have shed my “old” life and am living in a completely new reality! Before my departure, I’d been asked a number of times why I wanted to go to Thailand. My answer back then was simply that I was ready for change. I had lived in Sacramento for 24 years and I was ready for new scenery. But I don’t think I’ll fully understand my reasons until after my journey ends (if it ever does!—life is a journey with no destination).
I was literally two weeks away from moving down to San Diego a little over a year ago. I had left my job at Sac State and was interviewing with marketing & design firms there (which is how i came across a few awesome individuals, like Rodney Rumford and digitaltelepathy’s founder Chuck Longanecker), when suddenly I split up with my girlfriend at the time, so the bottom fell out on those plans.
After that, my desire to travel abroad started as a bit of an escape—to eliminate all ties to my old “self” and start fresh somewhere new—and my interest in crossing international boundaries was fueled by Timothy Ferriss’ inspiring New York Times Bestseller The 4 Hour Workweek.
Reading Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Workweek changed my outlook on the world, and it literally shaped the future course of my life more than any other book has. I learned that the rules have changed. Earning a living doesn’t require you to put your life on hold—working 40- to 60-hour weeks until retirement age is the “deferred life plan” as he calls it. And most importantly Ferriss introduced me to the concept of geo-arbitrage (something I’ll get more into in a future post, but put simply, geo-arbitrage means earning in stronger currencies like the US dollar, Euros, and British Pounds sterling, and then living/spending where the cost of living is considerably lower). Ferriss, like many other business backpacker/vagabond/digital nomad types, says that Thailand and Argentina are two of the world’s best remaining destinations where Americans can easily stretch their dollar.
I had been interested in Thailand since I was just 17, when my high school French professor—Alec Hodgins, who I still maintain a relationship with and whose teaching had an immeasurable impact on my life—took his wife and son for a three-week excursion to the small Southeast Asian nation and came back with wonderful stories of the friendly people and photos of the gorgeous landscape. Thailand in my mind became one of the last sought-after paradises. It was beautiful, you could live on the beach, and the price of living was inexpensive.
So rather than dream about some future vacation there or wait for retirement, I decided to mold my life into something where I could work and travel at the same time. I’ve spent the last year and a half building a business that I can run remotely from anywhere on the globe (as long as there is a decent internet connection). And then I went for it!
When I got serious about my goal to move to Thailand and start traveling through Southeast Asia for a year, dozens of people in my extended network began to come out of the woodwork. Every single person I talked to had good things to say about Thailand. I still haven’t met a single person who didn’t enjoy their time here, and many have stayed here indefinitely or moved their families here. I met several PhD students who did an exchange program with my university for a semester, and they were so friendly and selfless—I was looking forward to change of pace from Sacramento, where it felt to me like strangers are typically pretty impolite to each other.
I felt much more jaded with my hometown than the people around me, but perhaps I was just tired of being in the same place all of my life. I had been fortunate to do quite a bit of travel across North America and Europe, but I had always lived in the same city. I felt like I needed new inputs, and going somewhere as different as I could find from what I was used to was appealing to me. Fast Company magazine ran a fascinating article a few months back about creativity and how to come up with new ideas, in which Gregory Berns, author of Iconoclast, describes how in familiar contexts, your brain falls back on experience—old neural connections—to fill in the gaps and reduce its workload, thus processing the world, both perception and imagination, more efficiently. He talks about the importance of new environments and new experiences for creative thinking and innovation:
“Novel experiences are so effective at unleashing the imagination because they force the perceptual system out of categorization, the tendency of the brain to take shortcuts.”
Additionally I felt that if I didn’t take my opportunity to go for a “gap year” if you will, while I’m still just 24 and have no commitments—no relationship, no kids, no car payment, no mortgage—then I might get stuck in that game and never be able to go wander the world like I truly desired. Another quote that the jet set and the location-independent entrepreneur types often like to allude to is by Mark Twain:
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
So with that I think I’ve talked enough. Finally, here are some of the things I hope to learn as I travel throughout Southeast Asia in 2009:
Simplicity.
Extended travel is a great opportunity to separate oneself from dependence on material possessions. Before my departure, I sold most of my stuff on Craigslist. You’d be surprised how little you need to travel with (with exception of my laptop in my case!). Since I am essentially homeless, wandering from one city to the next, from one apartment or hotel to the next, I hope to learn to be content with only the possessions that are most necessary.
Pace of life.
In many Asian cultures, unlike American career-centric thinking, care for oneself and for others is much more important than business. With less need for material things and the ability to get by with less income, I thought this would be a good chance to scale back the amount of work I do, slow down, and concentrate more time on reading, personal growth, and improving my writing. I’ve got a long reading list of books on simplicity, psychology, positive attitude, the alleged law of attraction, success, and entrepreneurship to read in the year ahead.
Personal growth.
Life in paradise is not without its many challenges. I’ve already been stuck in travel purgatory because of unforeseen political protests, had to sort out un-sortable visa and immigration issues, and, well most recently I’ve woken up to a cockroach, two poisonous centipedes, and a dead lizard on my apartment floor in the past two days! But part of this adventure is to overcome challenges, and especially to learn to be more self-reliant. In Sacramento, not that I relied on it, but if I ever really needed it I had parents and family to fall back on and tons of friends to spend time with daily. Here, I am forced to make new friends, build a new network, and solve problems entirely on my own. To seek new solutions to new problems, almost daily. It can certainly be frustrating, but I think in the end it will be well worth it.
Openness to new ideas, new values, new people.
I think that, as a traveler, there is an ease in making new friends. Thais are intrigued with Western culture, and with other expats you have an immediate common bond simply by the fact that you are a stranger in a foreign land. You can easily form friends with people you might not normally engage with back home. Additionally, as a traveler, you must learn to be more trusting of those around you simply because you rely on them: your taxi driver, people who give you advice on the street, your fellow travelers, and so on. If you can learn to trust people and assume the best in others, most of the time you won’t get burned, and you will learn a lot about foreign cultures, religions, and ideas at an accelerated rate.
Calm down.
One saying the Thais have is “mai pen rai” or “it doesn’t matter.” It’s similar to when we say “no worries” in the US. My Thai friends are always telling me not to be so serious. In the last few days, I’d been stressing out about getting outside of the country before my visa expires, and how to get my paperwork with the immigration bureau in order. Well my good friend Tiam (who we call “The Protector”) told me that Thai law, unlike law in the US and many other parts of the world, is very flexible, and he took me to the immigration office where we were assured that overstaying one day would be no problem at the border. Customs, social norms, and rules are different all around the world, but in general as I face the challenges of travel and living abroad, I hope to cultivate Jai Yen, or “cool heart” in the face of adversity, and trust in the fact that one way or another things will work out okay.
In the end, I hope to prove to myself that life is only as hard as you make it. Although there are tons of language and cultural barriers/differences (some of which I will discuss in my next post), I believe that people around the globe are really all essentially the same. Some of my friends and family from back home were worried about my safety—the media is good at scaring people when there are robberies, kidnappings, acts of terrorism, etc.—but I really don’t think that life in other countries is any more dangerous or difficult than it is in the States. As seemingly “crazy” as people drive here, I haven’t seen a single vehicle collision since I’ve been here, whereas back home I could easily get in a car crash any day of the week (one of the leading causes of death in the US). I choose to accept that I could get hit by a bolt of lightning and die at any moment, so I should do as much as I can with every day I’m given. Why not live my dream in the meantime!?
You can too! Stay tuned.
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By the way, if you want to keep up with my (mis)adventures around the world, please follow me at codymckibben.com where you can see live updates of my photos and activites around the globe and across the web. Additionally, I’ve just started a second venture with my friend Brooke Ferguson from Sacramento, called BusinessBackpacker.com where we’ll soon start coaching other entrepreneurs to follow in our footsteps and live the nomad/vagabond/location-independent lifestyle!
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25 December 2008
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