I’ve received your email address and will keep you posted as future episodes are published.
Not that you asked but I would like to tell you why I run this podcast. Understanding one’s “why” is powerful and I want to share with you mine.
Deciding to do Remote Year was the single most transformative decision I’ve ever made. It completely reshaped my life and led to improved work performance, restored my social life with countless friendships, revitalized my attitude, health and overall outlook on life. Not everyone needs a “gateway drug” like Remote Year to make the transition but in my case I wouldn’t have done it otherwise – it was the essential catalyst that made it possible. But I was 50/50 on going. The idea of selling all my stuff and uprooting was crazy daunting and I almost didn’t take the leap. Three years later though I’ve established residency in Lisbon, Portugal and have the self confidence to continue solo traveling the world while performing my job remotely. Every door that has subsequently opened for me can be traced back to that one decision to go nomadic.
I read a NY Times piece recently that proposed an idea called the “Lost Einsteins.” The hypothesis was that there are a chunk of young people in society who could have been the next Einsteins delivering world-changing inventions had they only been “unlocked” or “ignited” in school. The premise was that the limiting factor for these youth was the socioeconomic status of the parents and the consequent denial of access to the best role models and teachers. Summarized succinctly, “Creativity is broadly distributed. Opportunity is not.”
I believe this same phenomenon is quietly at work later in life robbing the world of the next late-bloomer Einsteins. We get slow-cooked and locked into stagnant jobs and sedentary lifestyles through the gradual process of settling down and seeking safety and comfort as we grow older. We don’t do it knowingly but we get settled into a safe groove and it takes a radical move of uprooting and traveling to wake us from this slumber. Going nomadic served as a defibrillator that shocked me back to life from this coma of mediocrity. If I can help two or three “sleeping Einsteins” just go for it and experience the awakening I did, that would be massively rewarding. At scale I believe moving more people to this decision creates much needed cultural intermixing, promotes creativity and heightened awareness and will have the ultimate effect of waking up some percentage of the world’s sleeping Einsteins. And we will all be better for their contributions.
I don’t know how many people I can truly move off the fence but as one of my role model’s Tim O’Reilly once said:
Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.
This effort I believe is one of the most important things I can undertake.
For this reason I built the NomadPrep.com eCourse to help those folks aspiring to try this lifestyle change to do it in confidence and improve their odds of success with it. For the same reason I also created the NomadBloggers.com blog aggregator property as a way to bubble up primary source accounts from nomads currently on the road to make it easier to find and read their stories. NomadPodcast.com is the third prong of the effort designed to expose valuable conversations with nomads, domain experts, program and product founders and anyone else who I believe has wisdom and experience to share that will help aspiring digital nomads be successful.
It’s my intent to not just have syndicate killer conversations with memorable, impactful stories and actionable advice but to turn this vlog platform into a 2-way street in which the audience can participate actively having conversations with guests and getting answers straight from the sources.
That’s why I spend my weekends and nights building out these properties, finding amazing guests, learning how to be a better interviewer and hiring programmers to deliver the exact experience I envision. If you’re an aspiring digital nomad reading this, I encourage you to check out some of the latest posts from NomadBloggers.com and to enroll in the free sample trainings on NomadPrep.com if you haven’t already.
If you’ve been nomadic for a year or more, have at least a small following of people who look to you for inspiration and guidance on how to do what you do and would like to rep my course and podcast & share in compensation from students you originate, consider joining my Nomad Advocate program.
Safe travels and I’ll see you on the road.
– Sean
