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

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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 iirraa

Ever play the lottery? If you have, did you spend a few seconds thinking about what it would be like to win when you scratched off that ticket or selected your magic numbers?

Don’t lie—no one is listening except yourself. Here’s my guess:

If you ever bought a lottery ticket, OF COURSE you thought about winning. You had a secret lottery fantasy like everyone else who has ever paid their $5 to join the pool of potential winners. However briefly, you thought about what life would be like with that oversized check and all those Powerball millions.

Well, I’ve thought about that before too, but no longer. See, I’ve decided to let go of that fantasy. I haven’t ever really been a big gambler, but I’m taking it a step further—I’m officially giving up the option to win the lottery for the rest of my life.

Read the rest of this entry »

Image by Mercurian

I recently came back to Seattle after traveling for two weeks, and began eating simple, organic food again. I’m a vegetarian wherever I go, but I don’t always eat very well when I’m out around the world. After getting back on track after all the travel and different countries, I started feeling better within 24 hours.

The next morning I walked down the street to Espresso Splendido on Stone Way for a short 2% latte, and I suddenly remembered what good coffee tastes like. I hadn’t stopped drinking coffee on my trip—coffee is one thing you can find pretty much everywhere, in one form or another—but because of factors outside my control, I had stopped drinking good coffee, and I came to accept that mediocre coffee was just the way it had to be.

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Image: VirginAtlantic.com

Why are most airport departure lounges so terrible? In short, it’s because the airlines want to ensure that premium flyers receive better treatment than the regular people. If everyone were allowed “amenities” like friendly staff and clean restrooms, then no one would want to pay more money to upgrade to a higher class of service.

Tim Harford has a nice essay about this in his Underground Economist book, and persuasively argues that airlines even go out of their way to provide bad service to Economy travelers so that their Premium travelers receive “better” service. In other words, says Harford, a lot of Premium flyers travel in First Class not because it’s wonderful (especially on domestic flights; it’s usually not), but out of fear of being mistreated so badly in Coach. This process naturally extends to the way that travelers are treated in airports, including access to the lounges.

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Traveling between Budapest and Prague in the summer of 2004, I suddenly realized how comfortable I felt with the process of moving from place to place. I was 26 years old and beginning to travel independently. It no longer felt strange to fly between continents or change currencies three times in a week.

Adding up my adventures up to that point, I found that I had been to about 35 countries. Nearly a third of them were in Africa, and I knew I’d be going to at least 5 more over the next year.

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