Source: notsogoodphotography at flickr

From Horace’s poem, Odes:

Don’t ask (it’s forbidden to know) what end
the gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don’t play with Babylonian
fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be.

Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one
which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the rocks placed opposite
— be wise, strain the wine, and scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have {already} fled
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

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Source: Marco Bellucci at flickr

There is a gentleman named Raam Dev who is currently managing to live 6 months, in 3 countries, for $3,000. Oh, and he’s counting the plane ticket to get there, so his all inclusive budget for seeing the world is $250 a month over a 6 month period, or $1500.

Of course, my gut instinct is to say, it can’t be done. To eat and sleep for a month requires more than $250 almost anywhere in the world. Well, anywhere I’d want to go I think.

Raam is oblivious, as he should be, to me calling this impossible, and is doing it successfully anyways.

That’s a mind blowing revelation to me. I am a guy who withdraws $200 from the cash machine once a week for lunches and dinners that week. And here’s Raam who will live an entire month on that including hotels. At the risk of sounding like an ass, $250 is such a small amount to me.

Here’s what $250 currently gets me:

- one week of lunches/dinners;

- one month of car insurance/home insurance;

- one month of cable/home phone/cell phone service;

- 5 nights rent in my apartment; or

- 1 month of gasoline for my car.

No, $250 doesn’t buy all that. Each of the above is costing me $250. So you can see how my mind is blown by what Raam Dev is doing. Hats off to him.

I am starting to form in my head a list of countries I would like to visit, that could comprise a six month trip. Surprisingly, I am now downgrading my total budget for such a trip from the tens of thousands, into the single digit thousands. Six months in a warm locale, on as little as $5,000. Can it be done?

It’s surprising how many good places to stay there are in India and Asia for the $7-$10 range per night. Budgeting $10 per night for accommodation averages $300 in lodging costs per month. You’ll notice right away that my $300 per month for hotels exceeds Raam’s entire monthly budget. (His secret, then, is to stay with people for free whenever possible.) $10 per night allows me to stay two weeks at $7 per night, and then splurge for a $13 place for two weeks at the next destination.

It’s also important to try to get deals whenever possible. If a place is nice enough to stay a couple of weeks, negotiate with the owner for a cheaper rate for that two week stay. Or for the month even. Always negotiate whenever possible. Only tourists don’t negotiate.

Once the sleeping arrangements have been taken care of, the second priority is food and drink. Food can be surprisingly cheap when you eat where the locals do. This might be where North Americans are ripped off more than any other place in the world. Even with wine or beer, a good meal can cost as little as $1. Especially if you are willing to buy food off a street vendor or in a food market. Even eating in a restaurant might only increase the price to $3. In my mind’s eye, 6 months in a warm locale will include a beer or two most nights. But this also includes buying food from markets, making my own food at home, and in general eating good cheap food whenever possible, I think I can get by on $4 a day average. That’s $120 a month budget for food and drink.

The third biggest expense might just be “getting around”. Taxis, buses, traveling between cities and countries. My feet might be my most used mode of transport, and most hotels have bikes that guests can borrow for free. But you just can’t avoid the occasional taxi or bus ride. These often cost just pennies – 25 cents or less to go from one end of town to the other. In order to see as much as possible in that time, I have to budget for travel. Let’s say $25 a month for all bus, taxi and other costs, plus $50 to travel any big distance between cities. That’s $75 a month for travel.

Lastly, I will need access to the Internet. I suppose I can travel 6 months without such access, but Internet access is so cheap it seems silly to exclude it. It is common now to be able to make international phone calls (over the internet), check emails, update facebook and twitter, and write blog entries. Setting aside $1 a day for this, that’s $30 a month for communications.

So what does that add up to?

Lodging – $300
Food – $120
Travel – $75
Internet/Phone – $30
TOTAL – $525 per month reasonable budget

SUBTOTAL FOR SIX MONTHS – $3,150

Plus plan ticket to get there – $1,250

TOTAL FOR SIX MONTHS – $4,400

If I budgeted $5,000 for the 6 months, that would give me $600 extra above the basic budget. That’s $100 a month that I can go over on lodging, food or travel. So if there’s a museum or culturally significant place that I want to see, that can come from there. Or even buying clothes to replace worn out ones (socks), or one night at a luxury hotel ($20) to take a hot shower and soak my bones in a jacuzzi. There’s flexibility there. It can be done.

$5,000 for six months. It can be done.

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I am currently listening to an audio book (from audible.com) called “Talent is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin. I started off disagreeing with the author on some of his key points, but giving the book a chance and listening to it all the way through has changed my mind somewhat. How does it relate to sabbaticals? It does, and I’ll address that at the end. (Without purchasing the book, you can get a good understanding of the topic by reading this Fortune Magazine article “Secrets of Greatness” by the same author.)

First the premise: there is no such thing as natural born talent. You are not born to be a great golfer, artist, singer, actor, or computer programmer. All 1-day old babies have equal abilities in this regard.

But somewhere along the way, Picasso picked up a brush, Tiger Woods picked up a golf club (or more specifically was given one), and Mozart started composing music.

This might sound outrageous at first. Tiger Woods is naturally talented right? If I had a baby tomorrow, I could not hope to turn him into as good a golfer as Tiger Woods, no matter what I did, except if I got extremely lucky right? It turns out, anyone can craft their child to be the next Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods was born with nothing special that you and I were not born with.

I happened to believe, before I started listening to this book, that there is a combination of factors that make any athlete or artist (or anyone else) great. You have some natural ability, you have opportunity to develop it, you are dedicated to developing it, throw in some luck, and then you become great.

But it turns out, there may be no such thing as natural ability. Tiger was watching his dad swing the golf club in his high chair, his dad had him swinging his first club at 18 months, from before he could walk he could hit a ball, and magically 17 years later (which is a LONG time to practice), he becomes the youngest winner of the Junior Championship. But Tiger Woods probably played more golf before he was 4 years old than I have in my entire life. What if my father made me practice golf many hours a day? Would I be pretty good by now? Geoff Colvin thinks I would, and I now agree.

Its more than working hard though. After all the PGA tour is made up of many golfers, but most of them will never win The Masters, yet Tiger does it year after year. It is not just the number of hours or number of years spent practicing apparently. Colvin suggests that what the high performers in any profession have in common is deliberate practice. It’s not 1 million swings of the golf club that make you great. You have to work on specific things, with a specific purpose.

You have to work the 3-iron specifically for hours, in real tall grass, aiming at a target, correcting your swing if you miss, adjusting it slightly, trying to get it perfect. Video tape yourself, have a teacher examine your swing. After every bad shot, go over it in your mind and deconstruct what happened. When the ball leaves the tee, you should instinctively know how the shot is going to go, since you know if you executed your swing perfectly. Did your hips rotate? Hitting balls blindly is not helpful in and of itself. Deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice should not be fun. Think about the violinist that spends days practicing moving their hand (transitioning) from low on the violin neck to high. Working on the smoothness. Trying to do it quickly and smoothly without any interruption in play. They do this over and over and over. It’s no fun. They’re not playing any specific piece of music. Not part of an orchestra at that moment. They’re practicing alone. And they’re working on their transitions today. Or this week. Or this month.

How does that apply to me and my goal?

Well, what this means is that any level of performance in anything is attainable by anyone. So let’s say I want to travel, and need some income coming in to do that. There are people out there who do quite well with their online web sites. Is that out of reach for me? No. Given time, and practicing in the right way, I can achieve that too.

The people currently doing what I want to be doing have no God-given talents that I cannot acquire. I simply need to identify the skills, and work on them deliberately. Things need to be measured. When I publish an article, does it get commented on? What articles do and do not? Are my tweets being retweeted? What if I change the headline slightly, does that change my success? What if I tweaked this? I need to be able to predict in advance the outcome before I hit the publish key.

I think in one month I should be able to get some type of online income coming in. Even $3 a month. In 3 months, that should be high enough so that checks reach my mail box every month. In six, it should be a reasonable amount. And in 12 months of intentional, deliberate practice, there’s no reason why I can’t reach my goal. Anything is possible.

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If you are thinking about taking significant time away from work (or at least away from your usual work), it may be interesting to step back a little and see if you’re also thinking about making other changes to your life. Perhaps they’re related. Perhaps a trip is not just a trip, but a change in attitude.

The traditional way to live your life – as taught to us as children by our parents and by 1960′s TV shows – is that you go to school, meet a nice girl or boy, graduate, marry, have three kids, live in a nice white picket fence home, and work for 40 years until the age of 65, after which you promptly take up golf or knitting. Then you die, and people will remember you as… well, they will call you charming and sweet.

Anything that deviates from that plan, including taking one or more significant breaks from work to go backpack through Europe or live in the Australian outback, is considered a radical departure from the way you are supposed to do it. You get 3 weeks of vacation a year, and that’s the end of that. If you will stay 20 years, we will up it to 5 weeks. All subject to approval by your boss as long as no one else in your department has booked that time off already.

So the people that tend to take sabbaticals away from that traditional model, for instance by taking 2 years to travel from Alaska to Argentina by bicycle as a family, also tend to have other areas of their life they prefer to do differently that the norm too. Those people tend to be self-employed – sometimes through necessity, but mostly through the dislike of being told what to do and when. Six months in the south of Spain fades quickly away (to the point of disappearing from view) when you head back to work, and are working under intense deadlines, stress, working til midnight every night, working weekends, and generally counting the seconds to the next time you can go away.

Now there are people who like their regular jobs, who don’t feel it is such a burden or overly stressful, and that’s fine too. But consider this appropriate warning. My view is that there are three type of rats in the world: rats in a cage who don’t know they are in a cage, rats in a cage who know they are, and free rats. The worst off of the three is the second rat: being in a cage and knowing it. Once you spent a year being a free rat, you don’t want to go back in the cage. Another way to look at it, with less rat metaphors, is the movie The Matrix. Once you take the red pill, you are forever altered.

My view is that people who conciously choose to live life differently in this way – outside the traditional 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, 50 weeks a year, 40 years model – also are conscious about other things they do. They eat better, are a bit healthier than the general population. I’d love to see some research to back this up, and I am sure there are a fair number of people who do nothing but sit on a couch all day eating ice cream while they are off work. But to make this a conscious choice implies doing something other than nothing. Most workers don’t do anything during the week. They work, they go home and watch TV, they sleep. On the weekends, they go to the mall to buy stuff their kids don’t need.

Time away from work also implies free time to improve the other areas of your life. I have heard people say they have more time for family (parents, siblings, other relatives) when they are away then when they are at home. Certainly I called my own mother every week when we were in Spain last year, and sad to say only speak to her monthly when I am in the same city as her. I sent more catching up emails to friends too. Was more interactive online. Hopefully I was more interesting to them too!

It goes without saying having more time for your spouse and children strengthens that bond (for most, haha). And if you have room in your life for more friends, travelling can definitely broaden your friendship circle from your “school and work friends”, to “worldwide”. Which is a pretty big circle to draw from.

So once you start down this path, expect some unintended benefits. You may improve your work and career with a way to make as much as you did before with less work. You may improve your own budgeting and handling of money instead of wasting it. You may lose weight and get in better shape by eating better and being more active. You may strengthen your family ties and friendships since you are able to devote a bit more time to that.

So you may think all you are doing is planning your next long trip, but what you may be doing is changing your life.

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OK, everyone’s heard of Twitter, and some people are sick of hearing about it. This isn’t a raving fanboy post about how great Twitter is, so bear with me.

I had a conversation today with a friend about the site, and I expressed the opinion that there are not a lot of business uses for Twitter. Companies are basically using it in one of two ways: 

1. Customer Service - monitoring what people are saying about them and in some cases joining in the conversation
2. Advertising – pushing out a marketing message in a one-way direction

Big multi-billion dollar brands have established strategies for advertising and customer service, and they don’t include Twitter just yet. So you don’t see a lot of billion-dollar companies jumping on Twitter like it’s the next hot thing. It’s not.

Twitter is however a great place for personal brand management. Celebrities know this. Ashton Kutcher, and Sean P Diddy Combs, and even Larry King are on there interacting with fans in a safe, controlled fashion. (There are some recent stories of celebrities leaving Twitter, so we will see how long this lasts.) In fact, there’s an expectation that anyone who cares about marketing their personal brand will be on Twitter.

For me, I enjoy following a lot of diverse people. But there are a handful of people who’s tweets I don’t want to miss. I’m starting to have tiers of people I follow – the large unwashed masses and a small handful of must reads. (No offense to the unwashed masses.)

Here are some of my must reads – who I consider in some ways thought leaders in the personal brand management space.

@Jason – Jason Calacanis – Web Business Thought Leader

Now Jason is a bit of a controversial fellow sometimes, and some people see him as a bit egotistical. But if you can get past all that, he’s actually got some pretty sharp business acumen. His podcast, This Week in Startups, should be required listening for anyone who is in the early stages of starting a business. If I ever got to a stage where I had a business and received an offer to buy it, I would fly down to California and seek out Jason’s advice. He’s knows a good deal from a bad one, and is one of the few people publicly helping entrepreneurs get themselves to a place of independence.

@timferriss – Tim Ferriss – Nothing Is Impossible Thought Leader

Most people know Tim from his New York Times bestselling book, The Four Hour Workweek. And beyond the ideas in the book, Tim’s message is one of ongoing personal improvement through experiments. He’s the guy who no goal is impossible. Tim has never set a loftly goal without then going and getting it done. If he woke up tomorrow and decided he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he would then research the hell out of the topic, talk with a dozen people who have done it, hire a trainer, and book the plane tickets for the trip. Tim follows his dreams with intensity, and is a good model to follow to get your dreams done.

@keithferrazzi – Keith Ferrazzi – Network Building Thought Leader

Keith recently had a fascinating book called Who’s Got Your Back. The premise of which is every successful person has at least 2 or 3 people who they can be completely open and honest with, and who will be open and honest with you. These are your consigliere who you can trust completely and want to see you succeed. These are not your #1 fans, and these are not people you only know over the Internet. These are real true-blue friends who you will presumably be friends with for the next 50 years.

@leawoodward – Lea Woodward – Location Independent Thought Leader

Lea has lived and worked in various parts of this big place we call the Earth, and she blogs and podcasts about it to teach others how to do the same. Location independence is definitely something I am striving to achieve, so I watch her tweets and often find some very interesting things in there. In addition, she’s actively building a business and I am watching with great interest to how that goes. Other thought leaders in this area already have a thriving online-only business and so there is less to learn in real-time from them.

@chrisguillebeau - Chris Guillebeau – World Traveller Thought Leader

I’ve written about Chris before on this blog. He’s actually supporting himself through blogging, and living his dream of travelling the world to boot. Chris doesn’t travel to far off locations to work (like Lea does), he travels there as a tourist. He takes photographs and writes about his trip.

Not all thought leaders are on Twitter. And not everyone on Twitter is a thought leader. Have any more to add? Put them in the comments. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m http://twitter.com/scottjduffy. If you only want to follow this blog on Twitter, and I sometimes tweet things having to do with sabbaticals, travel and location independence, please follow http://twitter.com/mysabbatical.

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Some people have antiquated views of what a sabbatical is. Take for example this question, to which someone defined a sabbatical as:

“A sabbatical is a period of paid leave granted to a college teacher/professor for study or travel. Traditionally, this is done once every 7 years. This only applies to college teachers/professors, and not anyone else besides.”

Oh, sorry about that. Only teachers can take a sabbatical and the term doesn’t apply to anyone else. Nothing to see here folks, most of you should head over to the My Vacation website instead.

Even the Wiktionary entry is not very supportive of the concept of sabbatical being for everyone:

“An extended period of leave, often one year long, taken by an employee in order to carry out projects not otherwise associated with the employee’s job. During the sabbatical, the employer may pay some or all of the wages that would have been otherwise earned or some or all of the expenses incurred. University lecturers, for example, may be granted a one-year paid sabbatical once every seven years.”

OK, so a sabbatical used to be associated with paid time off work to do project not directly related to your job. Maybe I really should just shut this site down and apply my time elsewhere.

Of course, that’s silly. A vacation is something people do for a week or two. They run off to Florida or up to the cottage or even to Hawaii. And 7 days later they are back at their desks telling everyone how great their trip was. Most people in their life that they don’t talk to on a daily basis (family, parents, co-workers, dog) hardly noticed they were away.

Wikipedia might say it best:

“In recent times, “sabbatical” has come to mean any extended absence in the career of an individual in order to achieve something. In the modern sense, one takes sabbatical typically to fulfill some goal, e.g., writing a book or traveling extensively for research.”

I like the idea that a sabbatical is a break from work with a higher purpose or goal. Yes, perhaps you want to go study Spanish in Spain, or live amongst the people of Macchu Pichu for a couple of months. It’s not just staying at home eating bon-bons and watching Oprah (as the saying goes). Perhaps you have a story to tell and want to write a book.

Any extended period of time away from your normal work to do something special. I like that.

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From time-to-time I read about some of my business heroes: people such as Donald Trump, Brad Lamb, Richard Li, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Martha Stewart, Dave Ramsey and Kevin Rose. Donald Trump has a series of best-selling business books, Brad Lamb has a popular show on HGTV called Big City Broker, Dave Ramsey has a daily radio show, and Kevin Rose through his blog posts and video podcasts.

These people cover different industries from real estate, to technology, to investing, to information products.  Most of them have developed and actively cultivate their own personal brand. None of them have traditionally had any problem sharing their knowledge about what they do as well. It seems when you’re a leader in a particular category, you tend to focus more on what you do and less on what the competition is doing.

The other quality they all seem to have is how hard they work. Donald Trump and Martha Stewart in particular are known for how little sleep they need. Trump has claimed he gets around 4 hours of sleep a night. He wakes up at some ungodly hour (4am I think) and does some reading before he starts to get ready for the day. I’m sure he arrives in his office at 6am.

Bill Gates was famously quoted as once saying, “12 hours is only half a day”  when speaking about someone who left the office after only 12 hours. When Microsoft was founded, he was known to sleep at the office sometimes, wearing the same clothes two days in a row, coidng from 9am til 2-3am the next morning fueled only on Coke and potato chips.

Brad Lamb is also known for always thinking about work. On his show, he incorporates work into his vacations, takes calls at night and on weekends. And in fact would likely be miserable if his girlfriend took him somewhere without cell phone access for a whole week. Well, he might still be going to see properties and talk to local developers even then. But he himself says he lives to work, not works to live.

Do you have to be a workaholic to truly succeed financially? Has there ever been an entrepreneur who was known for taking summer’s off, going for long stretches away from the computer and cell phone, and just living a relaxed lifestyle?

Well certainly Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have a relaxed lifestyle these days – known more for their philanthropy and card-playing skill than business lately. But what about when they were first starting out? Did Buffett work only 37.5 hours a week before he made his first billion? I doubt it. I bet he was studying stocks from before breakfast til well after dinner.

So it seems that hard work, at least when you’re first starting out, is a must. Sacrafice is required to win. I’m sure it helps immensely if you love what you do. If real estate deals are what makes you happy, you will want to be thinking about them all day. But a successful runner ultimately has to run faster than the competition. A successful race car driver needs to drive faster too. Becoming better at anything requires a sacrafice of “time”. Malcolm Gladwell once said it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. That’s approximately 5 years at 40 hours a week including vacations. Or 2 years at 90 hours a week without vacations.

After that, you become better than the average bloke, and you can’t help but win.

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Chris Guillebeau, who I hope to meet one day in some exotic foreign locale, runs a very successful blog called The Art of Nonconfomity. He has a very ambitious personal goal – to visit every country in the world in the next four years. He’s well on his way, having already visited 117 countries out of a total of 197. Of course some places are going to be very difficult to visit – such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran. So my personal opinion is that he’ll easily come very close to his goal – say 190 countries – but be stopped from attaining the whole thing by political and military unrest in some places. He’ll do the whole list eventually. It’s fascinating to watch.

Chris makes me want to dream big though. Bigger than I have been dreaming. My goal is to be able to spend 6 months a year in a warm country such as Spain, and still live a comfortable life back in Canada for the other 6 months. That’s not exactly reaching for the stars when compared to “visit every country in the world in 4 years”.

No doubt when Chris reaches his goal, he will set an even bigger one for the next few years of his life. He’s lived his life so far dreaming big, and there’s no reason for that to stop once he’s reached his goal.

So how can I dream any bigger? What can I do that I would become known for? When they speak at my funeral (hopefully at least 80 years from now), what will my friends and family say about me? “He went to Spain 6 months a year.” Um, I don’t think so.

I guess I’m not ready to think big enough. I’ll be perfectly happy just to be sitting with my toes in the pool in Spain, working on my tan and drinking a cerveza,  not having a care in the world for a few months. Maybe what I need to do (bigger) is learn to be fluent in both Spanish and Castillian, and move my way slowly around the Mediterranean edge of Europe until I speak fluent French and Italian too. Fluent in four new languages in two years, now that would be “big”.

(Take a look at Chris’ eBooks at The Unconventional Guides.)

Note: Purchasing Chris’ book through that link earns sabbatical.me a bit of revenue, to help fund my next sabbatical. Thank you in advance.

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I don’t know if this has happened to you, but it’s happening to me.

In order to achieve my goal of 6 months a year in a warm locale, I’ve decided the biggest hurdle to me doing that is financial. To many others, it may be family relationships, or career, or health, or a multitude of other hurdles. But for me, the biggest hurdle is financial and so that’s what I’m focusing on fixing.

I’ve downsized my life, significantly reduced my monthly expenses, and as discussed in the last post am finally conscious about what I spend my money on. It is a lot harder (I hope!) for me to needlessly waste money than it once was. I feel like I am awake after not paying much attention to it before.

But it’s amazing to me that I’m suddenly paying more attention to much more. I feel like I am doing better at work. I have started working out every day. I actually MISS it when I don’t get a chance to work out one day.

I’m doing things that have long been on my to do list. I am reading books I once purchased but haven’t gotten around to read yet. I am blogging more. I am more easily resisting the temptations of old bad habits. I am spending time every day thinking – with no outside visual or audio stimulation to clutter my head.

In short I feel like a whole new me. No guarantee all this will stick. But I’ll let you know in a month how it’s going!

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It is sometimes said that the difference between someone who has a goal but doesn’t achieve it, and someone who has a goal and achieves it, is focus. Being consciously aware of everything you do, everything you spend your time and money on, and not just letting it slip through your fingers like sand.

Even a goal like mine – spending 6 months a year in a warm locale – requires daily focus to make sure what I am doing is allowing me to stay on track to the goal.

When I find myself with the opportunity to buy a new sexy gadget, before I pull my wallet out I ask myself how is buying this going to help me achieve my goal? If not, will not buying this help me achieve my goal? More often than not, not buying something is more likely to help me achieve my goal in the form of saving money.

Does this mean I don’t buy anything? No. Today I bought a soft drink and potato chips from the variety store that cost me $4. But I did that consciously. Is it going to help me achieve my goal? No. Is it going to hurt me in achieving my goal? No. It’s not about removing all personal pleasures from your life, although some people do that.

When I spend a night on the computer, and find myself surfing mindless web sites, I have to ask myself how this is helping me as well. Again, more often than not it isn’t. And so I stop my mindless surfing and write a blog post, or work on my book, or read a book instead.

Financially, you need to make some sacrafices. Downsizing your lifestyle is a big step. Selling the house you can’t afford, staying away from new cars, doing your best to reduce your regular monthly expenses like cell phone bills, credit card interest, subscriptions, gym memberships, and such. Those are the big brush strokes – saving you hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars a month. Having your life burdened with payments such that every penny you make goes out the door as soon as you make it is a surefire way to failure in achieving your goals. So you make sacrafices to win.

But its not just important to stop digging holes for yourself – you need to start building ladders. Being conscious about what you are doing on a daily basis is about making a plan to get from A to B, and implementing that plan daily.

If you come home from work and decide to spend the night watching television, you are not making progress to your goal. I’m not saying you need to spend every waking moment thinking about this and working on it, but you need to do ONE THING once per day. As you make your plan to achieve a big goal, identify what it is you always need to be doing to get you there faster. Do you need to be building your business? Do you need to be researching locations?

Whatever it is, do at least one thing per day to achieve it.

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