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

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Happy 4th of July, everyone, live from the Russian Federation, en route to the new Republic of Moldova. I’ll tell you more about this part of the world soon, but for now I thought I’d say a few things about my homeland, the much-loved and much-hated United States of America.

International readers, the 4th of July is America’s independence day. We usually celebrate it at home by drinking beer and eating large cupcakes with frosted flags on them. In the evening we watch fireworks and drink more beer—it’s not a bad day, all in all.

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Dear Fellow Worldchangers,

Greetings from Seattle, Washington. I present to you your own copy of my promised manifesto, modestly entitled A Brief Guide to World Domination.

Tech Notes: The report should work in all computers with Adobe Reader installed. If for some reason it doesn’t work, please send me a quick note with details of what went wrong.

Copyright: I am the copyright owner of the report, so that means you can’t sell it or steal it. But otherwise, you are welcome to quote from it or share it with others. You can also upload a copy of the document to your own site, as long as you include a link back here and don’t change the content.

Please link to the manifesto here at this page:
http://chrisguillebeau.com/3×5/a-brief-guide-to-world-domination

A Few Things You’ll Learn in the Report

• The Two Most Important Questions in the Universe
• Why Ruling and Changing the World are Interrelated
• The Clear Alternative to Being Unremarkably Average
• True Stories from Zen Habits, Kiva, Randy Pausch, and more
• The Most Important Work We Can Do
• Life Lessons from My Singapore Airlines flight to Tokyo

Resource Page

I will be creating a resource page for the manifesto with more information and a video update on Thursday. But for now, please leave your comments in this post.

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Image by Swanks

My nice university-sponsored health insurance is ending soon, so I thought it would be good to go in for a check-up. On Friday morning I headed down to the university clinic right next to where I used to go to school.

The good news is that I’m fit and healthy, as I expected to be. The bad news is that I’m not sure what they think of me over at the clinic anymore, because the medical history review got off to a rocky start.

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26.2 Miles on the Alaskan Sea

Hi everyone… I had a bit of an adventure last week. My parents and little sister came to visit in Seattle, and we took a 7-night cruise to Alaska.

A few years ago the ship we were on caught on fire during a Caribbean cruise, but nothing exciting like that happened on our trip. There wasn’t a whole lot to do at sea other than watch the glaciers go by (which was indeed pretty cool), so we had to create our own excitement.

I decided to run a full marathon (26.2 miles, or 42.2 kilometers) on the jogging track during our day of scenic cruising through Tracey Arm, Alaska.

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If you’re reading this essay, I have some good news for you today: the odds are that you are very well-off in the financial sense. In fact, in case you’ve never realized it before, you are incredibly rich. Surprise!

You may not have realized how rich you are, so I thought I’d show you how it breaks down in real, measurable terms. And don’t worry—there are no guilt trips or anything messy like that. It’s all good news, at least for you.

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