Tag: travel

A Conversation About Ecuador

I joined the wonderful World Wanderers Podcast (hosted by Amanda Kingsmith and Praxis participant Ryan Ferguson!) to talk about our family trip to Ecuador.

I haven’t listened to the episode yet, but we recorded it less than a week after we got back from the trip and I remember wondering if I’d even been able to process the experience enough to talk about it sensibly.  I did talk about it (a lot…I think I probably rambled at length…sorry!) and give a sort of quick take on the good, bad, and ugly and some lessons learned.  Still, I’m sure as time goes on we’ll form more ideas about our experience.

It was really awesome and also really hard.  It didn’t go to plan, but I wouldn’t trade it.  A great adventure I don’t think any of us will forget!

Anyway, take a listen to the episode if you’re interested in hearing one person’s take on international travel with kids.  Oh, and listen to other episodes of WWP.  It’s a great show!

Here’s the episode.

It’s Much Easier Than You Think to Live the Life You Want

Maybe not “easy”, but entirely possible.

I recently listened to an episode of The World Wanderers Podcast where the host discussed working at a Cafe in a great city that a lot of people would love to live in.  She mentioned how, had she not moved to this cool, exciting city, the job she had would have made her feel like a loser.  In your hometown working retail after getting an expensive degree seems pretty lame.  Up and moving to a destination city and working retail to support the lifestyle seems kind of adventurous.

Back home, she would have dreaded seeing an old friend come in.  “Oh, so you’re working here?”  In the new city when someone she knew came in the question was more like, “Wow, so you’re living here?”

Just a few days ago I talked to a guy who’s biking across the country and loving it.  He spent several months in beautiful Missoula, Montana waiting for the weather to improve so he could continue his journey.  He worked at a grocery store while there and it provided everything he needed to live the lifestyle he wanted and get back on the road in time.  What would his resume look like when, several years out of college, he had “Grocery bagger” listed?  Not great, except when put in the context of, “Spent two years biking across the U.S., paying my way through with odd jobs and blogging about the adventure.”

I thought about this phenomenon more in Mompiche, Ecuador a few weeks ago.  We found a little place with a sign for American-style pancakes.  A welcome breakfast after days of fruit and cereal.  The breakfast nook was run by a twentysomething woman from the Ukraine.  She fried up pancakes on a small griddle and served them with coffee for breakfast and lunch in the tiny Bohemian surfing village.  She lived in a neat little house right above the pancake joint and spent the rest of the day as she pleased.

Imagine this ambitious young woman back home responding to the common, “So, what do you do?” with, “I make pancakes for a living.”  Likely her friends and family would be a little worried and ashamed and think something wrong with her.

Contrast that with the same answer to the same question but with a change in geography.  “I moved across the world to a tropical surfing village in Ecuador where I opened my own business.”  Wow.  What an enviable life, right?

There’s something weird about staying in your hometown.  It severely limits the definitions you accept for what makes you successful.  Oddly, most of the hometown definitions of success have nothing to do with happiness.  They have to do with becoming what everyone in your past expects or desires given who you used to be.  It’s a sort of tether to a past self that no longer exists.

When the expectations of back home no longer apply you can ask better questions and make clearer connections.  What kind of person do you want to be (vs. what job title do you want)?  What kind of people and surroundings do you want to be immersed in (vs. where do you want to work or live)?

Many people would probably love to be the master of their own schedule, be in a beautiful outdoor setting with interesting people from around the world, seriously pursue a hobby with lots of their time, and be challenged in new ways daily.  Yet most of those same people would be horrified at the idea of playing guitar on the street for money, flipping pancakes, or doing freelance odd-jobs online, any of which might be the very means to achieve the life described.

Most people have this idea that you have to work a boring job in a boring house in a boring city for a few decades, and then if you play your cards right and all kinds of things totally out of your control (like the stock market or real estate prices) do the right thing, you can have some kind of two week vacation cruise or retire in a place where you enjoy good weather and leisure.  The weird thing is, all those “someday” goals are available right now with relatively little difficulty.  You can afford to live in a cool bamboo house in a beach town just by making pancakes for lunch and breakfast.  You can (as was one guy I met) travel the length of South America living entirely off the cash you make playing guitar outside of restaurants.

I’m not claiming this kind of life is for everyone.  Not at all.  There is nothing wrong with a 9-5 job and life in the suburbs if that’s what really resonates with you.  There’s nothing inherently noble about traveling or working some low wage odd job.  The point is that it’s too easy to choose things based on an artificially limited option set.  It’s too easy to define your life by stupid things like college majors or giant industry labels or titles that will make Aunt Bessie proud at the family reunion or salary levels.

The last one is especially dangerous.

It’s a weird habit to measure your success in life only by the revenue side of the equation.  Who cares if you bring in $100k a year if it only buys you a crappy apartment that you hate in a city that stresses you out with friends that don’t inspire you and a daily existence you mostly daydream about escaping from?  Your costs exceed your revenues and you’re actually going backward.  You very well could get twice the lifestyle you desire at half the annual income.  Like any business, the health of your personal life should be measured using both revenues and costs.  On the personal level, neither are not just monetary.

Only you can know what kind of life you want.  But getting off the conveyor belt of the education system, getting out of the home town expectations trap, and opening your mind to measures of progress beyond salary will give you a much better chance of crafting a life you love.

Here are a few articles to chew on:

Why You Should Move Away from Your Home Town

Why You Should Get Off the Conveyor Belt

Why “Escapism” Isn’t a Bad Thing

Why It’s So Hard to Exit a Bad Situation

Do You Need to Do Work You Love to Be Happy?

Stop Doing Stuff You Hate

Focus on What You Don’t Want

Do What You Love, or Have it Easy?

 

Ecuador Trip By the Numbers

  • 5 weeks (one more remaining)
  • 3 complete changes in plan
  • 2.3 times over budget
  • 3 languages (kind of) spoken
  • 8 exotic fruits we’ve never heard of ingested
  • 7 colds
  • 3 sinus infections
  • 3 foodborne illnesses
  • 1 sprained ankle
  • 1 (probably) broken nose
  • 1 ear infection
  • 1 visit to the doctor
  • 4 cities stayed in
  • 9 cities visited
  • 3 climate zones experienced
  • 9 power outages
  • 14 books read (between my wife and I)
  • 2 visitors from back home
  • 1,000,000 (rough estimate) hours swimming
  • 28 hours spent driving
  • 30 or more videos streamed on Amazon/Netflix
  • 2 houses lived in
  • 4 flights (by the time we’re done)
  • 3 dollars spent on the best lunch ever experienced
  • 2,374 miles from home
  • 1 hell of a good time!

How the Internet is Like Language

The power went out, and with it the WiFi, for four hours the other day while a pole was being replaced and again for an hour today while the A/C was being fixed.  It was almost overwhelming how lonely and isolating it felt.

Before you think me too dramatic let me say that we’re currently in a rental house in Ecuador, in a neighborhood that still consists primarily of empty lots or newly constructed but not yet occupied houses and we’re 45 minutes from the nearest city and without a car at the moment.  None of these things feel isolating when the internet is working.  (As an aside, the WiFi here is better than the best I can get back in South Carolina.)

It’s not that I spend all day on the web.  The bulk of my work requires internet and I do use it heavily, but there are many hours every day where I’m reading, exercising, playing with my kids, eating, preparing food, sleeping, or just relaxing when I do not use the internet.  One would think a few hours without WiFi would simply let me switch to one of these activities with no mental stress.  But it didn’t work that way.

The minute it went down I felt trapped in a desolate place, separated from the world.  Not because I wanted to do something specifically requiring the internet at that moment, but because I didn’t have the option.

WiFi provides a kind of invisible psychological ether that connects me to all of humanity.  Just knowing it’s there, at the tip of my fingers through my smartphone, gives me a profound spiritual sense of connection to all mankind and to great ideas and facts and images and more.  It is the subtle substrate that makes me always a part of a network or community, even when I’m quietly reading or sleeping.

In Ecuador we’ve had experiences where we were nearly incapable of communication with the other humans around us due to my deficiency in Spanish and some Ecuadorians rapid speech.  In our current neighborhood there are many French Canadian expats who speak not a word of anything but French.  At times a feeling of fear and disconnection can sweep over you when you realize you cannot share ideas with any of the people around you.  What if you need something?  What if you just want to chat and aren’t up to the exhausting task of sign-language and hackneyed Spenchglish?  You’re stuck on a (metaphorical) island, surrounded by people but without any connective tissue.

The parallels between these experiences are striking.  Geographic proximity and physical presence do not connect us with our world.  Information and a means of exchanging it do.  That is the task language performs.  The internet performs it even better.  It can instantly translate between languages, among its other wonders.  The web is like a performance enhancing drug for language.  It exponentially increases the idea sharing power of words.

This silly idea that the internet and social media have somehow severed human connections or weakened community is an absurdity espoused by those blind to the world around them.  It’s no less ridiculous than claiming, “People used to really connect before language was invented.  Now all they do is constantly stream ideas back and forth with sound waves.”

It’s not even the speaking or web browsing.  It’s knowing you can.  What a powerful connective web for the human race.

Ecuador Update: Random Reflections from Abroad

  • The jungle is nice. Except for all the trees.
  • Hippies from every country are exactly the same.
  • Surfers do very little surfing.
  • Lines on the road are mere suggestions here and nobody takes them.
  • A “speed bump” in Ecuador is a large concrete protrusion on a major highway that, if taken at speeds exceeding roughly 3MPH, will dismantle your entire vehicle and several vertebrae.
  • Johnny Cash is a great English teacher on account of his slow singing.  Though phrases like, “The whirlwind is in the thorn tree” may have limited usefulness.
  • It is grossly mistaken to call underdeveloped living “the simple life”.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The lack of complex market institutions means the most basic of tasks become incredibly complex.  Getting food, water, medicine, or transportation necessitate various social networks, waiting and hoping on others, massive time and know-how, etc.  Survival amid simple institutions is very complex.  Conversely, highly developed and complex institutions make survival so simple as to require no thought whatsoever.  If you want a simple life, find the most advanced capital structure and complex web of market institutions and live there.  If you want complexity move to the jungle.
  • I vastly prefer Ecuador’s southern coast to the northern coast.
  • The jungle has a very weird and slightly dark vibe to it.  I understand The Heart of Darkness a lot better than I used to.
  • WiFi travels through bamboo a lot better than concrete.
  • Bamboo might be the most amazing plant on the planet.
  • WiFi and cell phones may end up being the greatest advances in human history.
  • Few things in the world are scarier than having a sick child in a remote place.  Also the jungle makes everything scarier.
  • For $40 you can get an excellent children’s doctor to take a quick break from the hospital and come meet you across the street in his private clinic for medical care.
  • For another $10 you can get three different medications from the pharmacy.
  • It cost $70 and four hours round trip to make it to the city to obtain these medical services.
  • I grew up in a town with a totally awesome name: Kalamazoo.  I just found one in Ecuador with an even better name: Jipijapa.
  • Country folk is country folk, no matter where you go.
  • How in God’s name are there so many kinds of fruit I’ve never heard of and several that apparently have no name besides, “Kind of like an orange”, or, “Kind of like a tomato” (translation: nothing like a tomato)?
  • Never have I felt the sheer stupidity of the “buy local” concept more than as a visitor to another country where signs everywhere urge, “CUANDO VAYAS A COMPRAR, PRIMERO ECUADOR!”  As an outsider, and one who is eager to exchange with people in this wonderful place it feels even more petty, inbred, and moronic than when I encounter “Buy American”, or, “Buy local” back home, which I’ve become more numb to.  Free trade is awesome.  Nativism is stupid. Always and everywhere.
  • In many poor towns and villages the houses and land are in great disrepair yet most of the people populating them have near immaculate personal appearance.  Clean, fresh, well-fitted and trendy clothes.  Neatly cut and styled hair.  It is a stark contrast to the dwellings and shops around them.  I don’t know enough to verify, but my hunch is that it’s an excellent example of the insights of people like Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto.  The houses and shops are in shaky legal standing with regards to ownership, therefore improvements are subject to attract more attention and cost more in taxes, regulations, etc., whereas one’s person and attire have much clearer ownership.  Whatever the reason for the disrepair, it seems clear it is not due to a lack of interest in cleanliness or improvement on the part of most of the residents.  They look better put together than people at an average Target in the Midwest.
  • Do taste buds change with latitude or is instant coffee always this good?
  • If a person who is 10% proficient in Spanish and a person 10% proficient in English can have 80% of a deep, meaningful, hours-long conversation, what are we doing with all those other words the rest of the time?
  • I’m even more intrigued by Ayahuasca than I was before.
  • My laptop has made it known in no uncertain terms that she requires A/C and she’ll throw a hissy fit if her demands are not met.
  • A word about dogs.  Yes, dogs.  The dogs here are ownerless.  Yet they are hardly “wild” in the sense you might imagine.  Never have I seen more docility and friendliness among canines.  In the nicer villages they are healthy, amiable, incredibly relaxed, and utterly harmless.  Yet I have not once seen anyone hit, yell at, or engage in any action remotely resembling training or cajoling any of these creatures.  They put the unwieldy, kid-attacking, frantic-barking, yard-pooping, crotch-sniffing, leash-straining horrendous beasts from my cozy US suburb to shame.  I do not like dogs as pets.  Yet I actually kind of like the presence of dogs wandering and sleeping in the streets here.  It seems the most natural thing in the world.  Perhaps dogs are meant as autonomous human companions, keeping away other vermin, eating the scraps at the fireplace, and lounging around the gates of our dwellings and streets of our neighborhoods, rather than enslaved to chain-linked lots with leashes and newspapers and electric fences and Kibbles and fake “walks” and alternating neglect and indulgence and dog pills and dog counseling and dog daycare?  The pet-loving people of the world act shocked and appalled at my distaste for their dogs.  But who knows, maybe I’m the humane one…

Why My Wife and I (and Our Three Kids) are Spending Six Weeks in Ecuador

Sticking with an important theme in my life the better question might be, “Why not?”

Still, given our stage in life, our kids ages, and our work and financial situation, it does raise some eyebrows when we tell people of our Ecuadorian excursion planned for early 2016.  There are several reasons we chose to do this, not least of which is the fact that there are far, far more reasons we can come up with not to do this.

That’s the thing.  The reasons not to will only ever pile up.  Screw that.  Perfect timing is a myth.  If we waited for the right time we never would have gotten married, had kids, adopted, taken new jobs, moved, moved again, started a business, unschooled, and all the other things we cherish most about our life.

The Idea

It began a little less than a year ago.  I was flying home from a business trip and listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast.  It was an excerpt from a book called Vagabonding by Rolf Potts.  I knew in my gut I wanted to get out into the broader world with my family.  Not out of nowhere.  The podcast was just a nudge.  My own experience had me jonesing for international adventure for me and my kids already.

Between ages 12-20 I spent at least a few weeks, sometimes a few months, every summer in another country.  Mexico, Peru, Kenya, Honduras.  These were the most important and formative experiences of my youth.  I loved it.  It was really hard sometimes.  I learned so much and gained so much perspective.  Perhaps I’ll write more another time about what these trips did for me, but one of the things was to teach me forward orientation.  The first few times it was crushing to make deep connections to dear friends across the world then leave, never to see them again (and pre-Facebook, never to talk to them in most cases).  It made me learn to live in the moment and not hold on too tightly to past experiences.

My wife and I have always wanted to travel with our kids and let them experience the world outside the suburbs.  Not because we think it’s somehow morally superior or because we want to be international do-gooders.  Just because it’s really fun, and the best kind of challenge.  We both know how hard it was for us to move from the small-town Midwest just a few states away, and how good it was.  It’s too easy to assume your current geography is the best fit for you simply because you’ve never ventured out.  We want our kids to feel like the world is small and not be afraid of exploring all of their options.  We don’t want the exit option to feel so daunting to them.

The Decision

I got back from that trip and told my wife to listen to the podcast episode.  She did.  She knew right away what I was going to suggest and she wholeheartedly agreed.  Let’s spend some time abroad with the kids.  Not a vacation.  Not as visitors touring the sites.  Just normal, day to day life in a different place.  We knew this required more than a few weeks and a location that wasn’t just for popular attractions.  Don’t get me wrong, I love popular touristy stuff and we aren’t the type to go searching for the “too cool for the travel guide” spots when we travel.  But this wasn’t about travel.  It was about living.

I wanted two months, she wanted one, we settled on six weeks.  It seemed long enough to make us both uncomfortable and wonder if we’d get bored and restless and homesick.  We couldn’t just distract ourselves with novelty for six weeks.  We’d have to establish a daily routine.  Perfect.

The Timing

It seems weird to try to spend time abroad at this point in our lives.  Our kids are 4, 6, and 10.  That’s still pretty young.  We are not in a place to put money into anything besides day-to-day expenses.  I launched my company, Praxis, just two years ago and every ounce of material and mental resources go into building it.  We moved here to the Charleston, SC area just four years ago and we love it.  It’s beautiful, we’re not bored, and we’re beginning to make very deep and rewarding social bonds.  My wife and I are young, so it’s not like the clock is running out on us.

But we don’t want perfection.  We don’t want some experience that’s been planned and built up for years or decades.  We don’t want to overthink it.  We don’t want it to be that big of a deal.  We just want to try living somewhere else for a bit.  That’s it.  When will we be in a better situation?  Realistically, never.  There will always be something more pressing to spend our energy on.

Besides, there are several ways in which we’re in a perfect position to do this.  I own my own business and all of my colleagues work remotely.  Besides travel season, all I need is WiFi.  I live and breathe Praxis, but where I live and breathe it from is of little relevance most of the time.  We unschool our kids.  We have no schedule or obligations.  One of the reasons we chose to unschool was so that we could do stuff just like this.  How many kids get to do that?  Our kid aren’t wasting away in cinder block cells all day, so why should we follow the same routine as those that are?

We know it will be really, really hard.  Especially for me in the most intense phase of growing a business and trying to revolutionize the world.  But everything we do at Praxis is about living life on your terms.  If we preach it, we can live it too.

The Details

We had several constraints and preferences, but a lot of play room.  I travel a lot to conferences and events to speak and promote my company and the ideas behind it.  We couldn’t go in late spring/early summer, or in the fall.  Speaking season.  We also needed this to be really, really affordable.  As in, all-in, this six weeks in Ecuador needs to cost the same or less as if we had stayed home for the same six weeks.  We also needed reliable, solid WiFi.  (One of the first things we did was have our AirBnB host run a test and verify the speed, which is the same as what Comcast gives me in SC.)

We weren’t ready to fly more than 4-5 hours with kids as young as four, so South  and Central America were the target.  We searched around on AirBnB for a few days and found a place that looked crazy cool.  A bamboo beach house like something out of Swiss Family Robinson.  It was gorgeous, large enough, and well-rated.  No A/C and open, so mosquito nets, but otherwise not primitive.  Good price, good WiFi.  Why not?

The Act

Never the type to dwell too long on a matter, we booked it.  Was there something better?  Probably.  Would it be worth the agonizing and the time and energy to find it?  Probably not.

Once our non-refundable house was booked, the rest had to happen as a matter of course.  We’ve been alternating between excitement and terror since then, but that’s exactly what we want.  Just a little fear to overcome, mixed with the thrill of overcoming it.

We’ll set out just after the Super Bowl (what, you think I’m going to miss the NFL season?) and return around the Ides of March.  If all goes to plan it won’t be noticeable from the outside.  I’ll be working most of the day most days of the week as usual.  The kids will be doing what unschoolers do, which is precisely what drives their curiosity and interest, and we’ll be grocery shopping, going for walks, cooking, cleaning, reading, meeting with people, and enjoying the beach.

We’ll also be sweating, struggling to communicate in a village of Spanish speakers, adapting to new foods and smells and sights, and probably in many moments fighting homesickness.

This may be the first of many experiences living abroad.  It may be the last we ever do.  That’s why we’re doing it.  We need to know.  Will we love or hate it?  No amount of analysis can answer the question.  We’ll go find out for ourselves.

15 Minutes a Day is Better than Two Hours a Week

I took several Spanish classes in my teens.  I hated them all and didn’t do that well with anything besides the pronunciation.

I also took half a dozen trips to Spanish speaking countries in my teens.  I did incredibly well making basic conversation in Spanish.

I got to thinking about this while listening to an episode of Praxis participant Ryan Ferguson’s The World Wanderers Podcast.  Language is one of those things that is really dumb to try to learn in a classroom.  The incentives are all wrong.  When you really want something – to get to know a person, or to find a bathroom – you’ll engage your cognitive capacity at a high level.  Learning to navigate another country is a great way to grapple with the language and gain some proficiency.  When your only incentive is a test, how will you rewire your brain to say “The apple is green” in another language?  More important than how is why?  Why would you want to say that anyway?

Here’s the thing.  It’s not always easy to get to another country and learn a language by necessity.  You can try other hacks, like pick a day of the week where everyone in your house is only allowed to speak Spanish, but this can be pretty tough too.  So if classroom learning is subpar and you can’t immerse yourself, what can you do?

I downloaded the free Duolingo app on my iPhone.  I love it!  Yes, it’s basically glorified flash cards, but it’s very fun, quick, has cute animations, easy progress tracking, and lets you practice pronunciation (my favorite part) using the phone’s mic.  I also love it because it works well with a breakthrough discovery I’ve made about other aspects of my personal growth in the last few years: tiny daily challenges work better than big goals.

I blog every day because there’s no excuse to not push out at least something.  I do one form of exercise every day because there’s no excuse to not do at least a few push ups.

Since my family is embarking on an Ecuadorian adventure early in 2016, I decided I wanted to brush up on my Spanish.  I added an activity to my daily tasks spreadsheet that just says, “Spanish”.  I do 10-15 minutes a day on Duolingo.  Some days I do a lot more, some days I barely hit it.  I’ve done it every day but two in the last 60 days.

For me, this pattern is vastly superior to taking a one hour class twice a week.  By getting Spanish bouncing around in my brain every day I find weird things happening.  I’m beginning to have a few random thoughts in Spanish.  Just a word or phrase, sometimes apropos of nothing, but it means my brain is being primed.  It’s like listening to a song every day.  Pretty soon it just comes out all the time.  My ears are being trained to hear things and my tongue to form new words associated with old concepts.

Of course, upon arrival in Ecuador I will realize how little Duolingo prepared me for fast-paced real world conversation, but I can’t realistically do anything about that.  The daily Spanish is fun, totally doable in my schedule, and it’s making some kind of progress.  The power of the compounding effect comes in to play.  If I improve my Spanish by only a fraction of a percent every day, it begins to get serious before long.

In case you’re wondering, Duolingo tells me I’m currently 10% fluent.  On the one hand, that’s probably a huge exaggeration.  I’d fail any Spanish test.  On the other hand, that’s probably a huge understatement.  I know from experience that once I get into a place where I need it, I’ll get where and what I want more like 2/3 of the time.

What other things might you learn better by doing a little every day instead of setting some big huge goal or taking some formal class?

When Chasing Your Dream Ends Up Sucking

Join the other supporters of the KickStarter campaign to launch and publish the book!

One of the most interesting chapters in “Why Haven’t You Read This Book?” is by Courtney Derr about her adventure with her husband traveling the globe, primarily by motorcycle.

Courtney and H.J. had an itch they’d wanted to scratch for many years, but both were stuck in the 9-5 grind with jobs too good to give up.  The timing was never right.  Instead of waiting and hoping and delaying, or demanding a perfect list of justifications to go chase their traveling dream, they said, “Why not just do it now?”

So they did.

They saved up their money, quit their jobs, and set out to explore parts unknown.  Courtney’s a great writer and there’s no way to do justice to the narrative she shares in the chapter.  The ups, downs, twists, and turns are entertaining and inspiring.  But the thing that most sticks out about the chapter is this:  They didn’t enjoy probably the majority of their trip.

They ended it sooner than planned and had plenty of bad weather, motorcycle and emotional breakdowns, and all the other downsides experienced by anyone on a long road trip multiplied many times.  Rudeness, safety concerns, language barriers, food sickness, and many more travails.

This chapter was a really important one to include in the book because this is not a book about rose colored glasses and berainbowed cat poster motivation.  It’s about taking charge of your life.  One of the things that happens when you choose to “do you” instead of succumb to status quo pressure is that you reap the rewards.  One of the other things that happens is that you own the downsides too.

Despite the less than glamorous aspects of the story, Courtney and her husband do not regret their decision.  Part of self-exploration is realizing that you’re different than you assumed.  Your tastes, preferences, pain and risk tolerance may not be fully found out.  The thing is, you can’t really know yourself by reflection alone.  You’ve got to act on your desires, dreams, and hunches.

Had they not journeyed out into the wild they would have enjoyed life less back home.  They would always have a fallback to play the blame game and claim their struggles or unhappiness were because they were never able to travel like they wanted.  They would always wonder if they were missing something big.

Now they have a bunch of memories, some great, and some tough (though the tough ones begin to turn great over time too), and the clear knowledge of what the traveling experience is like and to what extent it can and cannot give them the life they desire.

You can’t trade that.

Check out the chapter, “Why Haven’t You Traveled the World” by supporting the campaign and claiming your copy of the book.

You won’t know until you try!

You can also learn more at their great website, www.wanderrlust.com

Why You Should Move Away From Your Home Town

“A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his relatives and his own family.” – Mark 6:4

You want to grow, progress, live an interesting and meaningful life.  You want to do and be something big, by your own definition.  You want the freedom to explore and dive deep into what interests you and maybe even master a few things.  You want to know yourself and most of all esteem yourself.

If that’s true – and I hope it is – you need to move away from your home town.

You can always go back later if you want, but if you never leave you’ll always be contained within strictures not of your own making.  At home you’re always only an outgrowth of your perceived past.

In another place you’re that wild outsider with intriguing ideas and a fiery passion for life.  In your home town you’re little Jimmy, Bev and Stan’s kid.

In a new town you’re the girl who’s full of promise.  You can define yourself, write your story, let your first impression speak for itself.  Anything you do is potentially interesting and you can potentially be successful in any endeavor.  Back home you’re the kid who wanted to be a vet when she was twelve and to many people anything you do other than that will be seen as a compromise.

In a new city your value must come from what you can produce.  You are judged on your merits, by your fruit.  In your home town you’re loved and cute and special no matter what you do, but never fully respected as an independent being.

It’s hard to discover yourself when you’re defined so much by your heritage, perceptions others have formed about your family and their place, your past self, etc.

People from where I grew up still ask me if I’m going to be President some day.  Nothing could be more repulsive to me than the idea of running for political office.  I wouldn’t wish office on my worst enemy and I think politics is the most backward form of human activity and energy.  But once upon a time I thought politics was a viable method for expanding human freedom.  I told people around me about it.  That’s the me they knew.  To them, I will never be successful or interesting unless and until I achieve a goal that is totally meaningless to me now. (I wrote here about why I’m glad I failed in this regard.)

Even if you care about your home town and want to improve it the best way is to leave.

Outsiders are more likely to innovate.  This is true in all fields.  The most likely to have a breakthrough in one industry is not the industry expert or insider but the expert from a different sector who’s looking in with fresh eyes.

I once heard that the definition of an expert is someone who traveled more than 150 miles to deliver a message.  Introduce a speaker from next door and no matter how much they know about the topic at hand few will be moved and impressed.  Fly someone in from the next city and they’ll get attention no matter what they say.

Leave.  Go out into the world and discover who you are.  Not who you were when your imagination was limited.  Not what you grew up thinking and wanting.  Not what your family or friends thought about you.  You needn’t reject or be angry with any of them.  You simply need to do what they don’t know how to help you do; grow into something beyond the confines of your point of origin.

Go out and become what you want to be and you’ll discover something interesting if you go back home.  You’ll have a level of respect and influence and freedom you could never have  won had you stayed.

You’re not just somebody’s kid.  You’re somebody.