Have you ever heard of the 4 Hour Work Week? It was written by Tim Ferris. It’s a game changer if you’ve never read it. In it, he talks about how he quit his “9 – 5” rate race lifestyle and started working 4 hours a week and traveled the world doing EVERYTHING he’d always wanted to do from Tango lessons in Argentina to full immersion language learning. It was mind blowing how he did it. But like the movie Inception – he’d planted a virus in my mind. The virus of thought which said “someday, I’m gonna travel the world and do the same.” So what actually happened?
Life Before Trying to Travel the World and Working 4 Hours a Week…
In the fall of 2014 going in to the rest of that Winter which ended in 2015, I’d had enough. I wanted a life of no more winters. Quick story: So, I grew up in New York City and had enough of the cold winters. Then I went to school freshman year in Pittsburgh – Carnegie Mellon, cold. And I then transferred to the State University of New York at Buffalo, 4 – 5 years of cold. Then I came back to New York after finishing school to work as a bridge inspector for a couple years and one of them I was doing inspections into mid December. Gaaaawd that was THE WORST winter of my life. I was literally inspecting a bridge in the early hours of the morning in upstate New York fffffreeezzzzing as an Assistant Team Leader inspector. c-Cr-razy.
A couple years later, I ended up moving to the Midwest – Chicagoland area! You see the craziness? Another cold a** part of the world. A few years of that and I still kept saying… Someday, I’m gonna … I’m gonna… When I make it, I’m gonna call my pilot when it drops under 65 degrees and fly to an island of my choice. Guess what? Someday NEVER came. Well, I never got a pilot. But the bottom line was that I got tired of hearing myself say stupid stuff like that. Not that having a dream of getting a pilot that I could call and fly me out was stupid; but the lipservice I was paying to an imaginary future that I had no actions to back up was just silliness.
The Reality of Traveling and Planning to Live a 4 Hour Work Week Lifestyle
When Tim Ferris talked about traveling the world and living a 4 hour work week lifestyle, he made it clear upfront that it wasn’t about living lavish life. As a matter of fact, he clearly stated that traveling the world and living in places that your dollar could go further was one of the biggest reasons to travel! Crazy right? I never really thought about that part. And it made so much sense to me. So, I knew that if I was going to do it, I’d have to factor that into my plans. So, by January 2015 I was starting to plan for the next winter escape and say Adios! to Northeast and Midwest winters. Puerto Rico came up in a vision. Don’t ask me why, but it did. And nope, it wasn’t that much cheaper that living in the US but it was a start.
The way this whole things ends is super funny. And I’ll share more in another blog post…In the mean time, here’s a pick of a moment of awesomeness with my feet before putting my toes in the Pacific Ocean! Ahhhh….
Stay tuned for the rest of this…and comeback. Leave a Comment too.
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