The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel

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I’m headed out on my next adventure early Monday morning. This is the continuation of the OneWorld Round-the-World trip that I began in Japan last month.

I use Round-the-World tickets to travel to far away places that are otherwise difficult to get to. On this trip, my first stop is…

Photo: Sonia Carolina

This is Rapa Nui, also known as Isle de Pascua, also known as Easter Island. After a lot of flying (it’s not the easiest place to get to), I’ll finally arrive there on Tuesday afternoon.

Easter Island is not really a country—it technically “belongs” to Chile on the South American mainland, and I’ll travel through Santiago to get there. But it’s such a distant, mythological place that I knew I had to find a way to go there ever since watching a documentary on a flight a couple years ago. I’m really looking forward to it!

After Easter Island, the trip continues. I’ll fly from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Amman, Jordan for a few days in the Mid-East, then over to Tunisia before coming back home.

As usual, my essays on Life, Work, and Travel will continue to be posted three times a week, and I hope to provide at least two detailed trip reports along the way. If you’re interested, you can follow more real-time updates over at Twitter.

Thanks for reading! See you on the island… let’s say next to the fourth statue on the left?

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Part I Is Here

People often ask me how I am able to travel so often and to so many places. For a long time I didn’t know how to answer the question, because for me travel is as natural as any other part of life. Over time I’ve gradually learned that someone asking me how I travel is usually asking a more specific question.

That question is usually one of these:

• How can you afford to travel?
• How can you take so much time to travel?
• How do you choose where to go and plan your trips?
• How do you get visas, meet people, arrange where to stay, or any other logistical question that deals with practical details.

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about the financial payoff of following your passion. If you deliberately take steps to do the work you love instead of the work you don’t enjoy, most of us would agree that you’ll feel a lot better about yourself.

But will you also make more money?

This is a controversial issue, so I asked some of the writers I read on a regular basis to chime in with their thoughts. The list of respondents includes:

• Leo Babuata, writer at ZenHabits.net
• Tim Clark, founder and writer at Soul Shelter
• Naomi Dunford, small business owner and writer at IttyBiz.com
• Mignon Fogarty, host of the very cool Grammar Girl podcast (#1 on iTunes for Educational Podcasts)
• J.D. Roth, finance guy at GetRichSlowly.org
• Darren Rowse, professional blogger
• Gretchen Rubin, author, attorney, and happiness blogger
• John Wesley, founder and writer at PicktheBrain.com

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Public Domain Image

After you make a decision to be remarkable and recruit a small army, you need a plan of attack. How will you accomplish your world takeover goals?

There are lots of ways to formulate a plan of attack. My own planning is usually constructed through mind-maps and process-oriented thinking. I work backwards from the goal, considering the step I need to take that directly precedes the desired result.

You Can Start Planning Right Away

I use Mindjet software (free trial here) to help with this, and you can see a real world example below of how I first began brainstorming the development of this web site.

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Hello everyone. This isn’t an essay—it’s a short note to each of you who have been faithfully reading so far.

Judging from the RSS feed, the newsletter list, and the daily site statistics, there are about 400-500 of you reading along every day so far. That’s great! I truly appreciate each one of you… please say hello in the comments for any post or on my contact form sometime if you haven’t done so already.

We’ve got a long road ahead of us, and I’m really glad that you’re on board.

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