Going mobile can be either the most liberating experience of your life, or a masochistic, cash-sucking international nightmare that will have leave you trembling in the fetal position, smiling only as you think about returning to your safe, comfortable desk back home. Let’s make sure you it’s not like that for you.
As a traveler, you want to be spontaneous. You want to just throw planning and time constraints to the wind while you frolic carelessly through random countries, ducking into a Starbucks every few days to check your Paypal balance and laugh while you count up the orders for that brilliant product you created. Let that dream marinate for a second then wake up.
The raw truth about going mobile with your lifestyle and business: it’s a logistical, technical and psychological hazing that separates the men from the boys (or something more gender neutral, albeit less punchy). It’s never the big things that burn you. It’s the tiny, trivial ones. Your plane won’t crash – your hard drive will. You won’t lose your backpack – you’ll lose your wifi signal. You won’t look around your office and see everyone else that resents their job – you’ll look around the fantastic cafe you’re in and resent all the people having conversations that aren’t about work.
With some simple preparation, management and contingency planning, you can skip all that. You can live your lifestyle design fantasy and never wake up. Define your experience ahead of time, or the surprises you didn’t consider will define it for you.
If you haven’t already, check out my related post on all of this: The Lifestyle Design Intervention (which admittedly skews more towards passionate rant than actionable advice).
