Early this morning, I got back to Barcelona following a 2-week trip that spanned 5 countries.
Diligent readers of this newsletter know that last weekend, as part of this trip, I missed a layover flight, which led to an almost 12-hour, cross-country, cross-corn-field bus ride.
Yesterday, I missed a second layover flight, which led to a 17-hour total trip to get back to Barcelona.
As I sat at Frankfurt airport, uncertain that I would make it back at all before the “airport curfew” struck, and faced with the prospect of spending the night at an awful airport hotel and then another day at the airport, I swore to myself I would never ever travel again, or in fact ever leave the house.
I bring this up because I got a question recently from a long-time reader and customer by the name of Jordan:
===
This one might be a bit meta, but how did you start traveling and how do you travel so much? Did you start before having the income from this newsletter or after?
I’m also looking to travel more and I’ve found it intriguing how others do it. your insights are always very unique though.
===
I don’t feel I travel very much these days, certainly not compared to how I did a few years ago, when I was living in Airbnbs for almost 2 years straight. I got burned out after that, and it took me a couple years to develop any interest in taking a trip further than the local grocery store.
I also don’t really have all that much to say about “how to travel.”
I personally had zero obligations or restrictions when I decided to uproot and start living like a high-class hobo. I also had good money to support this lifestyle, which was pouring in via freelance copywriting work, a year or so before I made a first dollar from this first newsletter.
Since Jordan flatters me by saying my insights are always very unique, let me share the one possibly unique thing I can say about traveling a lot.
It’s something I experienced personally, and something that I also heard confirmed when I had a quick call once upon a time with now-dead pickup coach Tom Torero, whose worldwide travels dwarfed anything I ever did or would ever want to do.
Possible insight alert:
If you travel intensely for extended periods of time, particularly to places where you don’t know anybody or have no right being, you have to have a routine, and ideally you have to have something productive to do most days, like a job.
… which is ironic, because I imagine most people want to travel so they can get away from their routine, and because they don’t want to work.
But such is the human mind.
We have a few basic needs. The rub is that among those basic needs, we have ones that are diametrically opposed to each other, such as the need for novelty and the need for stability. If you swing too far to either pole, it leads to craziness and eventual breakdown.
The thing is, you don’t need a tremendous amount of daily productive work to keep you grounded and sane.
For me, writing this daily email does it. Plus, like Jordan says, writing this daily email has had the nice knock-on effect of generating an income, and even introducing me to people online that I ended up meeting in real life on my travels.
I got a course that shows you how to write daily emails like this one to your own list. If you’d like to find out about it: