Making It Anywhere

We have a copywriting and web design business, which sucks for the purpose of this post. Because that’s what almost every bloomin’ digital nomad does (unless they’re into SEO or affiliate schemes).

Thankfully, there are plenty of other people who prove that you can be a teacher, or accountant, or shop owner, or psychologist, or a lot of other things, and make a decent income while travelling the world.

Below are four business models that work for non-techies who want to be location independent – with real-life examples of people who’re already doing it.

“Bean counting”, you see.

One of the questions we get asked most often by people struggling to understand our lifestyle is, “What about paying tax?” The suspicion seems to be that we’re slipping through the cracks – keeping our money hidden in PayPal accounts and buying our groceries with Bitcoins.

To be fair, it’s also one of the questions we get asked most by aspiring digital nomads. We’ve been resisting answering publicly because we’ve got very limited knowledge – and, let’s face it, it’s more fun to talk about new business ideas – but as we’re doing our end-of-year accounts today, I thought I’d finally tackle it.

Hanging out with entrepreneurial German/Austrian beekeepers: one of the best types of input.

When we were in Chiang Mai, we were happier than we are when we’re back in London. 35-degree weather and an abundance of mango smoothies probably has something to do with it, but it was also because we were hanging out with ambitious, positive people, and were totally disconnected from the mainstream media.

Even in Chiang Mai though, we made ourselves unhappy quite a lot of the time by worrying about things beyond our control, or focusing on the downside of things that happened to us.

We talk a lot about the importance of changing your inputs if you want to achieve a life of doing the work you love on your own terms. Being on the move naturally changed our inputs for the better, but we’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to the inputs we give ourselves.

So I decided to round up some of my favourite suggestions from people around the web about quick’n'easy ways to start changing your inputs – both external and self-generated.

Some of our daily “6pm photos”. Yep: flexible as hell we are.

Before we became digital nomads, we loved living in London, and we were huge fans of the structure and consistency we had in our lives. We loved going for runs around Primrose Hill every morning, then reading our books with a cup of tea before getting the train to work. We loved coming home every day and seeing friends or snuggling up in front of our laptop watching Question Time. And we loved (if we stayed up late enough) listening to the Shipping Forecast at 1am, and joining in (baaaadly) with the National Anthem and Radio 4 beeps at the end.

Our Chiang Mai test: cars and bikes really will slow down (and people will smile) if you walk out right in front of them

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We’re noticing strange things since being back in London. The fact that it’s fricking freezing, everyone’s miserable and Rob’s already got a cold are givens, of course. But here’s what else…

• The tap water’s drinkable.
• You really shouldn’t try crossing a main road under the assumption cars will slow down. They’ll just honk and make finger signs.
• You flick the switch downwards to turn on a light.
• There aren’t any fanny-washing implements in public toilets.
• If you go to a food market and smile and point at the food you want, it’s considered rude.
• They really aren’t that imaginative or resourceful with their food packaging around here.
• It’s nice to go into Boots and know that the products aren’t trying to whiten your skin.

You might argue that these sorts of mundane, useless thoughts are using up too much valuable headspace – especially for Mish, as about 50% of her brain capacity is already filled with fretting over whether Sean’s really “following his heart” on The Bachelor. (We’ve just watched the one where he doesn’t give Des a rose. Can anyone believe it??)

But back to the main point… we’d disagree if you were to argue that. Because we hung out with Buddhist monks in Thailand, and they focus on the “now” (rather than concerns about the future or regrets about the past), and they’ve totally and utterly nailed life.

We’re not sure who’s stolen from whom here, but c’mon – point of difference people, point of difference…

Let’s blow our own trumpet one more time – we don’t have a problem coming up with business ideas. We’ve given lots away and shared one method we use to generate new ones.

For many people though, coming up with an idea for a business is a real barrier to quitting and doing their own thing – and recently, I’ve been wondering if the problem is that people are getting the wrong idea about what a business usually is.

Here’s a problem with being a married couple that does everything together: you start to think the same way about everything too.

If Rob had said to me last year, “We really need to come up with standard operating procedures for our day-to-day life, like getting the groceries and doing the laundry,” I’d have had enough of my own – romantically inclined – mind to say, “Like f**k we need SOPs for daily life. What sort of marriage is this?”

But this year, things are different. Due to constant travel, it’s hard to keep track of things. And due to constant encouragement from Dan Andrews at the Lifestyle Business Podcast, it’s hard to imagine a life without SOPs.

So I was the one to suggest some “everyday life” SOPs, and Rob wholeheartedly agreed.

Biggest regret: missing out on awesome experiences because we were working the whole fricking time (even before we’d got dressed)

Last Thursday, we celebrated it being one year since we quit our old lives to live the Anywhereist dream. And we celebrated in the only way one can mark such an occasion: by working in the food court of a Bangkok shopping mall, then going back to our room to watch back-to-back episodes of The Bachelor.

Obviously it’s been the best year of our lives. But you don’t want to hear about that, do you? You want to hear about what we’ve screwed up along the way.

And holy crap have we screwed things up. So, Making It Anywhere is proud to present…A Not Even Vaguely Complete List Of Our Business And Travel Failures, March 2012 – March 2013:

19 homes, one year

Our mental calendar is chock-a-block with lovey-dovey anniversaries: the first time we kissed, the day we moved in together, the day Rob proposed, our wedding, the first time I popped his blister… I say “our” mental calendar, but obviously I mean “my”: gender stereotypes are alive and well in the Mish ‘n’ Rob household.

Now though, we have a brand new type of anniversary to celebrate – and this is one that Rob’s been looking forward to as much as me: one full year as digital nomads. On this day (14 March) last year, we flew off to NYC, having left behind our jobs, our home, our favourite Indian takeaway and our Oyster cards.

Since then, we’ve lived in 19 different “homes” – sometimes for just a week, sometimes for whole months. We’ve set up a web design and copywriting business, written five books, started two blogs, invested in a buy-to-let property, and had the best year of our lives.

Yet almost every day we come across misconceptions about digital nomads that might put people off from doing it themselves – so I thought I’d use our one-year anniversary to set the record straight from our point of view…