More and more people are realising that any work you can do on a computer, you can do anywhere in the world. Plus it can be a lot cheaper to live somewhere sunny and warm than back “at home.”
I know because luckily I’ve been living this lifestyle for the past decade, deciding where I want to live from Italy to Japan, in the mountains or by the beach, and how I choose to work. I make my living online through websites, Youtube, writing magazine articles on various topics via email as well doing workshops and lectures all over the world. You don’t have to be a millionaire, far from it, it’s something anyone, or maybe even everyone, should do.
I figured in the spirit of give and take I’d write up this blog with some of the experiences and places I visit, along with some of the ideas and techniques you can use to fund your new Location Free Lifestyle. Hopefully it will give you a few ideas and hopefully will inspire a few more of you to share your knowledge and experience. This is still all very new. I know that I’m still making it all up as I go along. I’m always wanting to know the best places to go, the bargains that are out there and the ideas that will make funding it much easier.
We’re fortunate enough to live in a time where it’s possible to make even a modest living online, which can then allow you to travel and live in almost any country you could desire. It’s about breaking free from the 9-5, the long commutes and boring jobs. It’s about waking up in the morning in a beautiful location actually wanting to work on something that contributes and makes you happy.
I’ll try to update the site as often as I can, and judging by my schedule for the next year there should be quite a lot to come!
Travelling can be a real toil on your computer. Plus most computers generally tend to slow down with age. But here’s a really good 1 minute tip I use to speed up my laptopn. It also keeps the computer quieter and increases your battery life! It’s not quite as good as a new computer, but it can make a huge difference:
With Windows 7 out I figure it’s about to time to get a new laptop. For the last 3 years I’ve been very happy with my amazing Panasonic Y5. It’s a “toughbook”, has a great screen and battery and it’s the only laptop that’s lasted more than a year for me!
But with insane dust in Cambodia and India it’s getting really slow now, probably just all bunged up with muck inside, and although I’ve upgraded the hard drive to 320 Gig that’s about as far as it will go. I really want something faster, and that means an SSD hard drive.
Now I would love to upgrade this to the latest version, but the new version is the Panasonic F series, which is horrible! It’s got this handle thing on the front, which doesn’t look cool, but the main problem is the screen resolution has gone down, which is a dealbreaker.
So I’ve spent far too much time reading reviews and trying to find the best new laptop to buy. I need something super powerful that’s also easy to carry around. The two that I’m thinking of..
Sony Vaio Z
This is super fast! With a 3 gig core 2 duo and best of all it’s available with a 500 GB SSD! It is so fast. The screen has huge resolution but only 13.3 inch size which is a bit small. But it blows all the other machines out of the water with the specs. The only problem? It’s sold out till November - and then I’m on my European tour!
So….
MacBook Pro 15 inch
I’ve been looking at macs for ages, all that hype does get to you, but don’t believe a word of it. Macs do not simple “just work”. They crash like crazy! Twice this year I’ve walked into a Mac store cash in hand and played around on Logic and it’s crashed. I guess I was building the Macs up to be as good as the iphone, which is amazing. But they’re just normal PCs with all the same hassles and problems.
The thing is that they might be the best PC out there. Having Logic and Final Cut at such bargain prices also takes any competition away from Windows machines. It is much cheaper to buy a mac at the moment. But there are still hassles, especially with moving old emails across and some older fonts. The main thing is the hard disks, no 512Gig SSD means I’ll be stuck with a slow hard drive again!
Anyway, I’m still deciding, if you find an amazing notebook out there for me, let me know…
Whenever I tell people about the Location Free Lifestyle, invariably if they are working they’ll say “I have no time to travel.”
I have no time
My answers to that is…. ”Really? I have 24 hours in a day, do you have less than me? ”
Wellm we all have the same amount of time each day, it’s how we choose to use it. What do you choose, the 2 hour commute and 8 hours behind a city desk each day? Or spend the 8 hours working by the beach with zero communute time - that you can then use to go swimming in the sea?
As we’ve seen in the other posts it does take time to set these things up. But your time is your own, and you’ve only got a century or so left so make the most of it!
So why work?
And at the same time when I talkt to people who spend all their time travelling they always say “why work at all?”
Many, many people spend almost their entire time travelling around the world. They work a bit, save some money then head off. They’re not just beach bum hippies, but all sorts of people including ex accountants bankers and lawyers. They often say, why not just travel instead of working in different places?
The anwers to this is “purpose”. Yes I love being by the beach, seeing amazing things and meeting amazing people. But at the same time you have to a have a purpose in life. What do you leave behind and how can you help other people? Without that it can become tedious and meaningless to just travel around, especially when that’s all you can talk about with people!
Yesterday was great for me to just spend the whole day slobbing around the pool. But at 3 this morning I woke up wanting to do more, so started work. If you love your work, and you spend the time finding something that really makes a difference in the world then you really want to do it!
And if you’re going to do that you might as well do it online, with wonderful friends in beautiful and more often than not cheaper, places all around the world!
This month I’m lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks in Sydney and up north in the tropical paradise of Queensland. Mind you it’s July down here which equals winter, which means Sydney is cold but the north is very comfortable.
Travelling to Australia does feel a little different, it’s certainly different to the UK or the US, it has its own laid back character. As it’s a developed country you don’t have to worry about shopping, great coffee or buying anything, everything is available.
The flip side of this is that it is expensive, it’s probably better value than Europe, but accommodation can be very expensive even in backpacker hostels.
Where’s the net access?
The biggest downside to Australia, and this is probably going to be the breaking point for anyone who is Location Free is the horrendous internet access! You’d think it would be up there with the rest of the world, but it is incredibly slow - slower than many developing countries - and incredibly expensive. At the moment I’m in an internet cafe, with gorgeous $4 coffees, but the net is $5 an hour and keeps cutting out. Uploading to Youtube is virtually impossible. Last week I was in a 5 star hotel in Sydney, and they not only charged $20 per night for net access, they capped the limit at 300 MB! Unfortunately Windows decided to update that night and used up all my allowance.
So although Australia is beautiful and laid back, the lack of net access is a very big hindrance to anyone wanting to seriously work online here. Plus having everyone speak English just makes it far too easy, I think I’d rather go somewhere with more of a challenge - that’s also a little cheaper!
There are some really cool things to do on your day off though!
Reason to have a location free lifestyle no. 4: You can also choose when, not just where you work.
For example last night was the Michael Jackson memorial. I happened to be in Japan, which meant it would start at 2AM. All my friends with regular jobs were having to rush around trying to beg their bosses for the next morning off. For everyone that was location free, we just worked till midnight (I finished up recording my latest CD - yeah!) then headed off to the bars at 2 o’clock till dawn. We still do the same amount of work, well maybe a lot more, but if something unmissable crops up, you have the flexibility to be there.
So where do we start making money online?
This is the question I get asked more than anything! Have a look through the previous posts on this site, especially the ones marked “Make money online”
And one really, really excellent free course I can recommend is the one by Shoemoney. It’s heavy going, not for the feint hearted, but it has real ideas that do work. Why is he giving it away for free if it’s so good? I think it’s so you’ll think about signing up for his website tools when you do start, which is a pretty good deal, you get all the info for free and then get a choice if you want to pay for it later! Sign up here.
Many people have no idea how to sell their products, their ideas or themselves. So today I got each person in turn to try and sell me the easiest possible item: chocolate cake!They nearly all failed in the first sentence. They let me say “no”.
As we are bombarded with sales people all the time we’re naturally conditioned to say “no” whenever we are given the chance. So the first person asked “Do you like chocolate cake?” “No, thank you, goodbye”. It took several people before they got why this wasn’t working. Any closed question i.e. one that can be answered with yes or no will always receive a “no”. Try it and see!
Although one girl did try hard by asking “With this chocolate cake you can get any hot girl. Do you want a hot girlfriend?” sadly we’ve all been conditioned to say “no” even though many of us would probably realise later we should have said yes!
So if you do ask any questions.they have to be open questions, i.e. where it’s impossible to say “no” because the language part of our brain won’t let us! What sort of chocolate do you like the best? Which of our gorgeous cakes would you like? How many lessons shall we book today?
Then one girl started down the “it’s very cheap, we have a promotion” track. This never works. The instant reaction is “oh, this mustn’t be good if it’s discounted. I don’t want chocolate cake that no one else wants”. Social proof, if it’s cheap other people mustn’t like it. Therefore I don’t like it.
Cost nor product matter at all!
The first thing is to realise that it doesn’t really matter what the cake is about nor how much it costs. All selling is is the transfer of emotion. Your job as a seller, especially online, is to get the image of the feeling that the product will bring firmly into the buyer’s mind. They have to see it, experience it, feel what it’s like to have this gorgeous, delicious, moist chocolate cake gently crumbling as you move the fork, passing the soft, fresh cream and the exotic wild strawberry jam layers. They have to imagine the luxurious taste as the first delicate chips of dark, fragrant chocolate caress your tongue. If your mouth is watering now, you want it. You don’t care what the cake is made of or what it costs, you want that feeling now!
It’s the same with anything you buy. You don’t buy a car because you want a car. What you buy is the feeling of freedom. Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee, they sell the energy and the feeling the ambience creates.
As a salesperson, and that’s what you are, you have to figure out what you are actually selling. What feeling you are selling. Then using words, images, videos you put the clear emotional image of this feeling in the customer’s head and you’ve made the sale. Every time.
Whilst I spend most of my time on professional development workshops for teachers, I also do them for business people as well as personal development workshops for, well, everyone really!
Today was my first time to be invited to give a workshop like this in Beijing China, so it was very exciting.
Usually it’s usually businessmen who attend these types of workshops. Today it was all girls, which was great!
Warm Up
I usually start off with my “Genki Relax” programme. It’s just a special piece of music and video I have that gets everyone nicely unwound after a hard day’s work and mentally relaxed, willing to listen to new ideas. It’s exactly the same as a sports “warm up”, but we’re just chilling down instead of warming up.
Intros
Then my self intro. Normally my self intro has to be quite “humble” talking about how other people use my materials. But here I have to build credibility, so it’s my business experience, travel and the people I’ve met that count. Which then leads into the students introducing themselves.
The questions I wanted them to answer today were:
1. Your name(s) (Chinese people often have English and Chinese names)
2. What’s the best thing about their job (much better than asking directly what they do, here you find out what they’d like to do!)
3. What’s their biggest challenge with English (not a business question, but I just wanted to check their English confidence level was good enough for what was to come!)
4. One word to describe yourself (you can tell a lot about people from this one)
Then I started the workshop proper.
The Rules of Life
Whenever you talk about professional or personal development it all starts off with the way of thinking. You have to think like a winner in order to become one, whatever you do. My grade school programmes don’t work because they are great programmes, but because they teach kids how to succeed, then they naturally do succeed with the learning tools inside.
But in development courses it’s fine to explicitly teach this way of thinking. My favourite tool is to put famous quotations on the screen. Then one person comes to the front, reads it out, simplifies it into easy language, and asks the group if they agree. You keep going until you find something where some people disagree. With great groups, like today, that’s quite far in. With many groups it’s much earlier!
Here’s an example of the first four for personal development (numbers 5 and up are for business development). How far do you get before you disagree?
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right. “ - Henry Ford
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“Those who say it can’t be done are being passed by those doing it.” — Unknown = Rule No.1: I can do it!
‘The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.’ — W.C. Magee
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“A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” — William Shedd = Rule No. 2: If you lose, just try again
‘If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.’ — E. Joseph Cossman
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“I have no time to worry” - Winston Churchill = Rule No. 3: If you can do it, do it. If you can’t, use your energies elsewhere. Never worry.
“Building a better you is the first step to building a better America.” - Zig Ziglar
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‘It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not.’ — Unknown
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“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” - Mahatma Gandhi = Rule No. 4 - It’s up to you.
Everyone was very much on board with all this, which made life easy for me. It’s the “It’s up to you” that causes many problems with people blaming their spouse, or lack of money or lack of time or where they live. But today they all got it.
One round is to ask them what they want to do, and then ask who it’s up to. Do I decide? Does your boss decide? No, of course not, it’s up to you. Because the group was all girls, except for the staff guys, it did throw up some interesting things!
One girl said “I want to have plastic surgery. And it’s up to me!” So fair enough, although I wished I had prepared more self image quotes! And one girl said “I want to find a boyfriend” to which I asked “And who’s it up to?” and she looked at me, forgot to change the sentence and said “It’s up to you!”
OK, that’s one way of throwing me off balance in the middle of a workshop!
How to get your dream job
Then we had a quick break.
Breaks are always good because you get asked questions, and it’s here where you really see what people want. One girl was wanting to be a lawyer, it’s her major, and was asking how she could get a job. Teaching people how to get a dream job is quite an easy one, you just listen to what they say, follow the rules, then follow it up with practical advice.
Here it meant phoning law firms, getting their prospectus, talking to their HR department to ask what they are looking for and trying to make contact with other lawyers in the firm to see if they will give you any advice.
The first rule is you have to believe you can do it. The second is that many people will turn you away, so you just try again. You will lose faith, but never worry about the outcome, do what you can, leave what you can’t. And finally realise it’s all up to you, nobody is going to get the job for you.
Role plays
Business in the21st century is very different to the old ways. In the 21st century one Google search can make or break a company’s reputation. Communication skills, people skills and use of positive language are vital. So I practice these with role plays.
Students learn new techniques from seeing each other’s role plays in action and offer criticism for future improvements.
I have a funky “role play” generator that just scrolls through different scenarios until you hit the space key. I had expected lots of hard nosed business people so the role plays I had prepared were more business orientated e.g.
Richard is a lazy worker. Motivate him. (for management issues) Make a sales presentation. Make us want to buy your new …. (sales language) “Your …. broke!” Make the customer a fan again. (customer relations) The plane is cancelled. Get compensation from the airline (Negotiation skills)
All have to be done in a positive way with win-win outcome.
Today the girls were much more into the personal development side of things, but the organisers wanted me to do business activities, so I just did one, how to sell!
And for that you’ll have to tune in next week. How to get an infinite amount of new customers, whatever you sell!
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My schedule is very full, but if you’d like me for your own highly energetic, personal development or motivation workshop or speech, then please contact me at:
Being location free doesn’t just mean that you can live in whichever exotic location you want to live. It means you make your money online so you can live wherever you want to live, or sometimes wherever you have to live.
For example a few years ago I was going out with a very nice girl who happened to live very near to where I was living. Then she decided she wanted to do her Masters degree at a university on another island. Now for most people that would mean a long-distance relationship (those never work!) or a big upheaval or lots of arguments! For me it was quite simple, as I could work anywhere, in between gigs I simply flew back to her island instead of the one I was living on before. Really easy and happy happy!
Another example is when my Mum had to go into hospital. Normal lifestyles would mean you’d have to take time off work. But I simply booked the next flight and did my work at my Mum’s house for the next few weeks. (Side note: don’t ever just buy “the next flight” I ended up travelling via Kuala Lumpur which added 10 hours to the flight! Make sure you ask for the “one that will get me there the quickest!”)
Sometimes you’ll have (ex) friends who can be bitter about a location free lifestyle choice, they’ll say you are selfish or not caring about others. Really they’re just jealous and what they are saying is a lot of nonsense as being location free means just that, you work online so you are free to go wherever, whether that means being on a beach, on a yacht, in a new country, with people important to you or just being by people’s sides when they need you.
Whilst all the needless media hype and government over reactions on “Swine Flu” are based entirely on a lack of education amongst the general public, it does have real world effects.
If you were quarantined would you still be able to work? If travel was banned could you still talk to clients and make a living? Would you still be able to feed yourself or your family?
With a traditional job the answer would probably be “no.” So it’s yet another reason to start at least part of your lifestyle as being location free right now. Just in case an over reaction by an under educated government official takes away your freedom and makes you stay at home all day!
The SARS virus hit people in Asia pretty bad when companies were closed and people stayed at home. Mexico has a similar thing this weekend. But people still need to buy things, learn things and entertain themselves. They’re more likely to do this online at a time like this. So that’s where you need at least part of your income to be.
It’s not the “Swine Flu” disease that’s causing the problems, it’s the media fuelled over reaction. But let’s make sure it doesn’t effect our lives back on planet Earth too much!
= Rule No.1: I can do it!