Making It Anywhere

Shiny objects: captivating, but can end up burning you (and not just if you admire them too soon after taking them off the stove)

It’s nearly summer. Offices will be emptying out as employees go off to enjoy their two weeks’ annual vacation (if they’re lucky). Graduates will be emerging and half-heartedly looking for jobs that don’t exist anymore.

And you? You’ll be working hard on starting something brilliant that will open up a whole world of freedom and opportunities.

Or at least, you will if you embrace Just Freakin’ Do It June.

The Eurovision Song Contest 2013 is nearly here! Yes, the competition for excruciating singing, eyelid-batting presenting and so-political-it’s-unreal voting will take place in Malmo, Sweden, on 18 May at 8pm UK time.

And if we haven’t sold it to you enough, we want you to join in with our own version of Eurovision voting!

Spot the Mafia dude (we excitedly assume) ducking behind the spring onions

1: The alphabet is Cyrillic

And while that’s apparently no secret, we had no idea until the day before we travelled there (we were a bit behind on implementing our SOPs). And here’s the problem with Cyrillic: you can’t type it into Google Translate and see what the words mean.

When you combine that with the fact that no one speaks a word of English, you’ve got two options for the duration of your visit: stay in your apartment, or wing it. We chose to wing it. Which resulted in unintentional tram rides to areas we didn’t really care for, eating things that definitely weren’t chicken, pork, beef, lamb or fish, and still not being entirely sure we walked up part of Vitosha Mountain or just a cocking steep hill.

2: People come alive on the tram 

The default demeanour of a Bulgarian person would never be described as “jovial”. And when you get served in a restaurant or cafe, you’ll be inclined to assume that their demeanour is an accurate reflection of their personality (we’ve never seen so many grunts or had so many menus slammed in front of us).

We’re having bouts of confusion where we spend too much time wondering where we are. Which is understandable when you’re on country #7 for the year, but we’re experiencing other mental problems too.

Rob keeps zoning out when Mish is talking, and not just when she’s going on about newspaper style guides again. Mish is so irritable that she unleashes military-grade swearing if a YouTube video is buffering too much for her liking. We’re having long, circuitous conversations about the simplest of things because we can’t seem to hold more than two facts in our head at one time.

This is all because we haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since 8 March, when we left Chiang Mai, and it’s an occupational hazard of being on the move all the time.

In your face taxpayer-funded, TV-promoted podcast losers!

Last month, I started co-presenting a podcast. Within a couple of weeks it was the #1 business podcast in the UK, and had put me directly into the ears of 6,000 potential customers.

As a result, I’m being totally insufferable about haranguing every business owner I know to start a podcast. To save me losing all my friends, I’m going to make the argument in full here then shut up about it once and for all. Maybe.

Alone, out of place, and with a mortgage back home. We’ve been there.

Nearly every day we get emails from people who say they’d love to become a digital nomad, but there are so many things standing in their way and they’re just too scared to make a go of it in case it all goes tits up.

And we totally get what they mean - if we hadn’t fallen into this digital nomad thing by accident, we’d have also thought there were just too many logistical and financial challenges to make it work.

But we’ve actually done it, so we know that it’s so much easier than you’d think for anyone to become a digital nomad.

And because we’re on a bit of a mission to get everyone doing work they love on their own terms while travelling around and experiencing the world as much as possible, we’ve decided we’ve just GOT to tackle these fears. Maybe not once and for all, but for a few weeks at least.

So… here are your fears, in the order in which they most frequently get mentioned in emails to us:

If you saw how much time and effort Mish puts into English grammar, you’d wonder how she has any brain space left for other thoughts or creativity. This is a girl who knows the newspaper style guides of every British newspaper off by heart, and who has an inner scream every time she receives an email containing a comma splice.

As for Rob… he devotes so much mental energy to property yield spreadsheets and imagining what life would be like with a puppy, you’d imagine he’d have no time left for thinking about anything else.

And yet we get called “creative” the whole time. In last week’s newsletter for instance, we asked you to send us any questions you liked. And heaps of you asked things along these lines:

Our “pull”: the freedom to work from a New York rooftop while wearing totally inappropriate clothes for 38-degree heat (laundry day)

We’ve done a couple of interviews recently where we were asked the same question: can anyone become a digital nomad?

Our typically upbeat, feel good, puppies-and-rainbows answer?

Hell no.

Or rather, of course anyone can, but only if they have a damn good reason for doing it.

This photo relates to the most un-Lifehacker-esque tip you’ll ever read… prepare to be disappointed

Two years ago, our travel tips would have looked like this: 

But after one year, one month and a couple of weeks living the digital nomad lifestyle, our repertoire of advice could easily last the duration of a flight to Bangkok – with perhaps only a couple of boredom-related deaths from fellow passengers.

There are plenty of people who’ve been working while travelling for far longer than us, of course. Two of our favourites are Dan and Ian from the Lifestyle Business Podcast, and they recently recorded a podcast all about their ten commandments of travel.

Their tips are so brilliant that they need to be shared with the non-podcast-listening world. So here they are – with some of our own extra information, advice and ideas:

“The great thing about us digital nomads is that we’re all such totally unique individuals.”

Last weekend we were in Berlin, at a conference for online business owners – many of whom travel like we do.

We thought we hated conferences, but this one was different: instead of starting conversations with “So, what do you do?”, people would ask “So, what’s your why?” Rather than swapping pleasantries about the weather, we’d compare travel itineraries and airline hacks.

As well as reassuring us (that there are other people who freak out as much as we do when the wifi goes down) and reminding us of things we already knew (that Germans are hilarious and speak better English than wot we do), the weekend was incredible because we met so many people who we really admired. And the best part about that was realising that they’re just nice, ordinary people – people who’d take an interest in us even though we couldn’t offer them anything in return.