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

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Live from Syria

This month’s Site Update takes place from Damascus, Syria, where I’ve just arrived after traveling overland from Lebanon. Yes, I think that sentence is pretty cool. All is well over here, and I’ll write about the trip soon.

Each month I look back at what’s happened with ChrisGuillebeau.com in the previous month. If you’ve missed some articles, you can catch up in this update.

Writing

LIFE – I wrote about How To Respond to Critics, The Plan of Attack, Nothing Beside Remains, and How To Fall Down and Get Back Up Again.

WORK – I wrote about the question, Will Financial Success Follow You If Do What You Love? and then asked a few great writers to share their responses in a blogger roundup. I also wrote about The Flip Side to Entrepreneurship and Freedom and Social Networking with Twitter.

TRAVEL – I wrote about How and Why I Travel (Parts I and II), Observations from the World’s Ultimate Airport Lounge, and 35 Minutes of Homelessness in Central London.

PROFILES – The new “Profiles in Nonconformity” series debuted this month with an interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of the unconventional retailer Zappos.com. More profiles will be coming each month.

Gratefulness

I went to Easter Island a couple of weeks ago and now I’m in the Middle East. My OneWorld Round-the-World trip is halfway done, and I’ve really appreciated the chance to travel so much.

I did an interview with TravelBlogs and enjoyed the thoughtful questions they asked.

It was encouraging to see so many blogging friends and mentors participate in the first roundup response. Thanks again, guys.

Lastly, many readers wrote in to say that they are enjoying the site. Your comments mean the world to me—please keep reading and writing.

What’s Coming Next

I’ll be back in Seattle on May 7th, and I’m staying for a while this time. While I’m home I’ll be finishing the writing for my upcoming manifesto, “A Brief Guide to World Domination.” If all goes as planned, we should be ready to distribute this free PDF report to a broader audience by mid-June.

When I get closer to completing the manifesto, I’ll need your help. Stay tuned for details.

Essays

The thrice-weekly essays will continue to be posted each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. This month I’ll write about the following topics, among others:

• 28 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Traveling
• Questions to Ask when the World Isn’t Going Your Way
• How To Retire the Day after Tomorrow
• Trip Reports from Costa Rica and Benin

I hope you enjoy my writing, and I always welcome your feedback.

Audience Participation

You can participate in the development of this project in several ways:

Join my newsletter announcement list or add me to your RSS reader.

Follow my real-time updates on Twitter.

Leave a comment at the bottom of any essay. I haven’t actively promoted the “comments” section in the posts yet, but it will be upgraded in the near future and all previous comments will be retained. Feel free to share your comments and include a link back to your own site if you have one.

Send other feedback through my contact form.

Tell your friends, or tell the world by voting for my writing at Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social networking sites.

I appreciate the time you spend here. Don’t forget to change the world the way you think it needs to be changed.

-CG

Popularity: 10% [?]

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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.

I have a few important things to let you know about. The Art of Nonconformity site will be evolving in the next few weeks, and I thought that you should be the first to know what’s happening.

Profiles in Nonconformity

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll begin posting interviews with other individuals, charities, and companies who have chosen alternative life paths. I’ll do at least one of these each month, and my first profile is with the CEO of a billion dollar retailer that has focused on customer service to the exclusion of everything else. They have a unique story, and I look forward to bringing it to you soon.

Philosophy and Social Movement

I haven’t written extensively about my philosophy yet, but I’ll do so soon. The short version is:

1) You don’t have to live your life the way others expect you to.

2) The world is desperately waiting for you to figure out what only you can contribute to it.

I’ll be writing more on that soon, and in June I’ll be releasing a free PDF report called A Brief Guide to World Domination that outlines how you can rule the world and change the world at the same time.

The Last Very Important Thing

I believe in my own goals very much, and I’m glad that many of you are excited about my journey to every country in the world. But ultimately, even though I’ll be writing about that adventure (and other personal goals), this site will focus on personal development strategies that will help YOU achieve your own significant goals on your own terms.

I will need your help to make this happen.

The fact that we have 400-500 regular readers so far within five weeks and no advertising is pretty cool. But going forward, we’re going to scale it up.

My goal is quality readership that participates in the conversation, and I don’t want site traffic just for the sake of traffic itself. But I do know that there are many other people out there who will be interested in the message of nonconformity, and that’s why I need your help in getting the message out.

Here are a few options:

LINKS - If you have a blog or web site that deals with personal development, small business, travel, or the arts, please link to me and tell your readers. I would really appreciate that.

SOCIAL NETWORKS - If you are a member of StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, or another social network, please submit, share, or vote for any articles I write that you feel are worthy of attention.

COMMENTS - Lastly, I’d like to increase the participation of our community in each essay I write. At the bottom of each post, please feel free to share your own experience, provide a complimentary or opposing point, or anything else that is relevant.

I recently installed a comment plug-in that lets you subscribe to follow-up comments when you write your own, so you can see what others have to say in reply (if you want to).

***

OK, that’s all. Thanks again. Remember the words of Victor Hugo:

“One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

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Popularity: 7% [?]

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Live from L.A

This month’s Site Update takes place from Los Angeles, where I’ve been hanging out at a conference for entrepreneurs that I’ll write about soon.

Each month I look back at what’s happened with ChrisGuillebeau.com in the previous month. If you’ve missed some articles, you can catch up here.

March was my first full month of writing and posting essays for the site. I published the three essays a week that I’ve committed too, along with a few real-time updates from my travels in India and Hong Kong.

Writing

LIFE – I wrote about The Decision To Be Remarkable, The 14,600 Hours to Virtuosity, Creating and Live by Your Own List of Values, Focus on What You Need To Know, and How To Recruit a Small Army.

WORK – I wrote about How I Really Got Started in Business, Are 70% of American Men Lying?, On Returning to Wal-Mart after a Four-Year Absence, and a critique on franchise businesses called Do You Want a Business or a Job?

TRAVEL – I wrote about Why You Should Quit Your Job and Travel Around the World, my choice between 100 Countries or an S.U.V., Airport Adventures from Bucharest to JFK, three essays on my trip to India, and a short update from Hong Kong.

Gratefulness

In March I was especially grateful for the chance to travel after being in the U.S. for several months. The high point was spending two weeks in India, and I was also able to visit Japan and Hong Kong.

(I had also planned on traveling overland to Dhaka, Bangladesh, but unfortunately I had to put those plans on hold due to visa concerns. I’ll have to save Bangladesh for later.)

It was very cool to go back on Singapore Airlines, my favorite airline in the world, after a long absence. I didn’t mind any of the 11 hours I spent flying to Tokyo. The second day, when I had to turn around and fly 10 more hours to Mumbai, wore me down a little, but in the end I made it safe and sound. Then on the way back to the States, I came through Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific, which was also nice.

After five quarters at the University of Washington, I completed all the requirements to receive my M.A. degree in International Studies and a graduate certificate in International Development. I had a good time at the UW, but I’m also grateful to be finished.

Lastly, many of my friends and readers wrote in to say that they are enjoying the site. Your comments mean the world to me—please keep reading and writing.

What’s Coming Next

I’ll get back to Seattle on April 6th, but I won’t stay too long. Three weeks later, I’ll head out on another extended trip, this time to South America and North Africa. I plan to visit Easter Island (not technically a country, but a cool place nonetheless), Argentina, and Uruguay first. Then I’ll cross over to Amman, Jordan as part of my OneWorld Round-the-World trip, and begin a week of overland travel in North Africa from Tunisia.

Essays

The thrice-weekly essays will continue to be posted each Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. This month I’ll write about the following topics, among others:

• 35 Minutes of Homelessness in Central London
• The Flip Side to Self-Employment and Freedom
• How and Why I Travel
• Five Trips to Cotonou, Benin
• How To Respond to Critics

I hope you enjoy my writing, and I always welcome your feedback.

Audience Participation

You can participate in the development of this project in several ways:

Leave a comment at the bottom of any essay. I haven’t actively promoted the “comments” section in the posts yet, but it will be upgraded in the near future and all previous comments will be retained. Feel free to share your comments and include a link back to your own site if you have one.

Send other feedback. Use my contact form here to tell me what you think so far. In the future, I probably won’t be able to respond to every inquiry, but right now I can.

Join my newsletter announcement list or add me to your RSS reader.

Tell your friends, or tell the world by voting for my writing at Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social networking sites.

I appreciate the time you spend here. Don’t forget to change the world the way you think it needs to be changed.

-CG

Popularity: 7% [?]

Related entries:

Every month I look back at what’s happened with ChrisGuillebeau.com in the previous month. If you’ve missed some articles, you can catch up here.

This month, I’ve been busy getting the site online for my small group of beta readers before I branch out in April. I’ve pre-written the first two months’ worth of content, although when I travel I hope to provide some real-time updates as well.

Writing

LIFE – I wrote about How To Be Remarkably Average, and what I hope will be the outcome of this site over the first year.

WORK – I wrote about What Entrepreneurship Is and Isn’t, and How To Stand Out in Any Job.

TRAVEL – I wrote A Short Narration of My Travels So Far. (There are a lot of travels still to come, so stay tuned.)

Gratefulness

I’m grateful to Robert & Kelly Gash for their help with great photos, especially the one for the header which comes from the Seattle Public Library. We were almost thrown out of the building for taking photos without a permit, but thankfully we got what we needed before getting busted by the library police.

I’m grateful to my new friends in Malaysia, Jason & Reese Spykerman, who translated my ideas into the great design for this site. I talked with several designers before finding the Spykerman team, and something was missing in those conversations. When I talked with Jason & Reese, they “got” the idea right away and then did a very nice job with the design.

I’m grateful to Matt Shedden, the very first person I talked to about the site in detail, who told me what resonated with him and what didn’t. Thank you for your advice.

What’s Coming Next

On March 13, I’ll finish my year and a half at the University of Washington, receive my $32,000 diploma, and fly off to India. I’ll be there, and hopefully in Bangladesh if I can get a visa in Calcutta, until the end of March.

At the end of March I’ll head to Japan, my stopover point, and pick up my first OneWorld Round-the-World ticket. This will take me to L.A., where I’ll be for a weekend business conference at the end of the month. I’ll be back in Seattle on April 6th.

During the trip, the thrice-weekly essays will continue to be posted, and depending on internet access, I hope to write some real-time updates as well.

Audience Participation

You can participate in the development of this project in several ways:

Leave a comment at the bottom of any essay. I haven’t actively promoted the “comments” section in the posts yet, but you’re free to share your comments and include a link back to your own site if you have one.

Send other feedback. Use my contact form to tell me what you think so far. In the future, I probably won’t be able to respond to every inquiry, but right now I can.

Join my newsletter announcement list or add me to your RSS reader.

Tell your friends, or tell the world by voting for my writing at Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social networking sites.

I appreciate the time you spend here. Don’t forget to change the world the way you think it needs to be done.

-CG

Popularity: 3% [?]

Related entries:

At the time I’m writing this, only about 10 people will be reading. The ChrisGuillebeau.com site has been live for a couple of days, but I haven’t announced it anywhere or done any kind of promotion.

It’s good to test things out before you take over the world.

A couple of months from now, I’ll go live with a more public launch, but until then I’ll be adding content, tweaking the design, and getting the site together.

Right from the beginning, I thought it would be good to state for the record what I hope to accomplish here. A goal is good, a measurable goal is better, and a publicly measurable goal is best of all.

This project is about unconventional ideas and how to put them into practice. I’ll be writing mainly about the subjects of international travel, personal development, and entrepreneurship. The theme that links these different topics together is nonconformity, or ways of thinking about life, work, and travel that are vastly different—and usually vastly superior—to what is offered by the status quo of conventional thinking.

I have some degree of experience in each of these areas:

LIFE

• Finished college at age 19 with two degrees
• Lived in the poorest region in the world (West Africa) for four years from 2002-2006
• Admitted into a competitive graduate school program without taking any standardized tests
• Finished graduate school three months early with a 3.9 GPA and 20 more credits than needed (Note: this will technically only be true as of March 2008—but I’m not expecting any problems)

WORK

• Supported myself entirely through self-employment for 10 years
• Have lived completely debt-free for my entire life
• Gave keynote speeches and facilitated negotiations with numerous government leaders in Africa
• Served in various leadership positions, including two years where I had primary responsibility for 120 staff members

TRAVEL

• Visited more than 70 countries so far (but there are still a lot left!)
• Traveled in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class cabin from London to Tokyo (the ticket cost $8,000, but I paid only $212)
• Took a 36-hour bus ride through East Africa, a 10-day series of bus rides through Eastern Europe, and a 10-day independent walking trip through the Middle East (all of these just in 2007)
• Earned 680,000 Frequent Flyer Miles from 2005-2007 with only 84,000 actual miles traveled

Anyway, those are a few credentials, but I put them here only for people who are interested in those kinds of things. Going forward, I’ll be focusing on helping others achieve their own significant goals.

Looking ahead from the beginning of the project, here’s what I’d like to see one year from now:

1. 78,000 words of high-quality content in at least 150 posts. I’ll be writing primarily in the short essay format, but naturally some essays will be longer.
2. An additional email newsletter series of 15-20 messages. You can sign up for that here and follow along as it develops.
3. 25 completed profiles where I feature other non-conformists who are out changing the world as they see fit.
4. An average of at least 1,000 committed, regular readers who follow the project through RSS, email updates, or by checking in at the site.
5. A signed contract for my first book that will explore these ideas in greater detail. Later in the year I’ll submit a proposal to a few book agents with good reputations, and based on their feedback I hope to move forward with a publisher’s contract before January 1, 2009.

There are also a few other metrics that I’ll be tracking, but I haven’t set measurable goals for them yet. The main one of these is revenue, or how I will monetize the site. Since the beginning of the planning process, I’ve gone back and forth about this for various reasons.

The most important consideration is that I’m not creating this site to make money. In fact, I’m effectively giving up a lot of money to work on it instead of working on business projects. However, I certainly don’t see anything wrong with making money either, so if I can do so in a non-obtrusive way that adds value to readers, we’ll work on that later.

For now, I’ll err on the side of less promotion and more great content. At some point after the April launch, I may need to think more about monetization, but for now it’s off the radar.

While I’m writing, I’ll be pursuing other important goals.

I hope to visit at least 15 new countries this year as part of my five-year journey to every country in the world. I’ll write about each of those visits here in weekly trip reports. I don’t travel constantly—I usually go on 3-5 overseas trips a year for about 2 weeks at a time. Eventually the site will be at a point where all my trip reports are live updates, but since I have a lot of catching up to do, the first year will mostly contain trip reports from previous countries I’ve visited.

I also work with several non-profit organizations, speak to groups about leadership and international development, run marathons, and other fun stuff. From time to time, I’ll write about these activities whenever it seems they are relevant to the site. But mostly, the project will be less about me and more about the power of choosing an independent path.

I hope you enjoy it.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

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