Benny Lewis is one of those guys you’ll eventually meet – in some absolutely random spot on the globe – and immediately take a liking to. For me, that particular meeting spot was near Khao San Road here in Thailand – appropriately enough, in an Irish pub named Shamrock. Here’s what’s remarkable about this chap: at any given moment, you can hear him shift between any of 7 languages in casual conversation. Benny Lewis has the type of linguistic skills that make me feel like a low-functioning autistic by comparison. Fortunately he has that disarming Irish charm to spare the fragile, unilingual ego of the average American.

After hearing him speaking Esperanto (seriously), I was fascinated. After hearing more than a wee’ bit o’Gaelic, I felt an Irish camaraderie with him. Having heard no mention of Elvish or Klingon, I knew he wasn’t just some lonely language nerd (though he did deconstruct Na’vi). After listening to him charm a Parisian model to the point of melting – in fluent French – I was straight-up jealous of him. I recall Sean Ogle and myself were about ready to bow at his feet after we witnessed that moment.

So, how is this relevant? Aside from being fascinating, what does this have to do with turning passion into passive income, product creation, and mobility? Everything.

Mobility

First off, Benny is entirely location independent. He’s lived all over this fine globe, supporting his travels as a language consultant and translator. He has the workflow and toolkit to a science, and this work also develops and maintains his core language skills. He is not crunching spreadsheets in a cube, hating his life, dreaming of a someday that will never come. He’s found a way to fuel his lifestyle doing what he loves.

Check out this post on Fluent In 3 Months for more on going freelance: How To Become A Location-Independent Freelance Translator

Product Creation: Content is king. You are nothing without content.

I don’t speak 7 languages, and I never will. That’s not my passion. However, I could make Benny relatively rich by helping him beautifully package everything he knows into something marketable. Nothing is possible without the content.

At present, you can’t buy anything from Benny. When you go to his sites, you aren’t hammered with promotions for an e-book or a course he’s selling. Everything he’s doing is 100% pure content emerging from his own learning process. This is the foundation for what will become a seriously profitable product/course. Content is all you need. If you are cranking out content around the thing you know best, you can create income. Packaging knowledge is formulaic – possessing the knowledge and sharing it liberally is what counts. Go buy yourself a $500 package from Rosetta Stone or Berlitz. By the time you’re thoroughly frustrated and regretting your decision, Benny will have something out there worth buying. He’s setup a mailing list to keep everyone updated on the status of his Language Hacking course, so I highly recommend you jump on that here.

Proving it

Benny doesn’t flaunt his language chops. He won’t bust into a language for the “Oohs!” and “Ahhs!” it surely gets. Instead, Benny blogs, tweets & films in all 7 languages – every time. Want proof?

• Twitter: English, Irish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto
• IrishPolyglot (Blog): English, Irish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto
• Video: He re-dubs every video in each language too. Below is a compilation. Check out his YouTube Channel for more.

Wrapping it up

There’s a lot to digest here, but the simple point is this: share as much as you can about the thing you absolutely love, and do so with the realization that you can monetize it. You cannot monetize an intention. You need substance, you need remarkable content. It costs nothing and there are no excuses. Start consolidating, structuring and focusing what you know best, and leave it to guys like me to show you how to turn it into income – fuel for your lifestyle.

Want more on the actual language hacking process?

• Cody McKibben also sat down to talk with Benny, where he goes much further into his specific language hacking techniques and concepts – highly recommend that you check it out over at Thrilling Heroics.
• Check out FluentIn3Months.com

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).

Lifestyle design needs an intervention, and you just walked into a room full of familiar faces. Interventions don’t make friends, but they do save lives. I’m about to tap your ego, but I might just save your life.

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Fresh off the heels of my last post on negotiating remote work agreements, what I’m about to share could not have come at a better time – both for you, and the entire community.

Amidst the hustle, focus and ingenuity behind creating your muse – your passive income stream – it’s all too easy to lose sight of the driving motive that set you down that path in the first place: independence. Muselife, above all else, exists to transform passion into the income which fuels your lifestyle and experiences. It’s one thing to know why location independence and financial self-sufficiency matters – it’s another thing entirely to actually make it happen. As is always the case when taking the road less traveled, it’s also easy to feel you’re alone in your ambitions, particularly when everyone around you are simply living towards retirement and content with someone else owning their freedom.

Now is the perfect time to say it: you are anything but alone in your pursuit. Not only is there a rapidly growing movement towards ultramobility and living for your passions – but there’s also a thriving set of entrepreneurs that have achieved the new rich lifestyle, and freely share what they’ve learned along the way.

For the first time ever, we’re taking the pulse of this movement and community, and intend to share it all with you. Corbett Barr of Free Pursuits and Jonathan & Lea Woodward of Location Independent have tightly orchestrated a simple survey and it’s time to add your voice. You don’t have to already be location independent to participate. It’s enough to simply know you need to escape your job, travel unencumbered, and turn passion into income. Muselife is in good company on this one, spreading the buzz alongside 18 other exceptional lifestyle design blogs.

Take me to the survey on FreePursuits.com ›

You’ll see the results of this once the response reaches a healthy tipping point, so this is not something you want to miss.

Photo: Embracing my location independence over Budapest, 2008

What follows is the first in a multi-part series on achieving liberation from location-dependence and a rigid 9-5 grind. If you are traditionally employed, this will serve as a critical catalyst and rite of passage towards fully passive income and designing the lifestyle to which you’re entitled. Creating your muse and automating your income requires an up-front investment of time and energy, both of which you gain by removing yourself from the bind of a traditional work structure.

The words that follow will make you uncomfortable. Liberation and absolute autonomy lies in your reaction to that discomfort. Let’s get this started… (more…)

To start things off, below is a quick video to let you know what Muselife is all about. Take a minute to watch and then check out the post below it for more…

Muselife is born of equal parts inspiration and frustration: inspiration to share experiences with outsourcing and niche product creation, and frustration with the torrent of conflicting advice and common questions I see absolutely everywhere. It’s time to centralize the conversation and share both the experiences and resources needed to make a killing turning your ideas into income and aggressively reclaming your time.

It’s important we start by defining our end-game: ultramobility & total personal autonomy enabled by highly automated sources of passive income. Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week succinctly and powerfully codified a lifestyle and methodology many of us were already pursuing, and a thriving community has emerged to further the effort. Within these circles, we call one such source a muse to distinguish it from a traditional business – as the focus is an essentially hands-off, automated way of generating revenue that lets us focus on far more important facets of your life: time with family, friends, exploring passions, travel, philanthropy, and so on.

Consider Muselife your no-bullshit resource for all facets of achieving such a lifestyle, focused on rapid product development, niche market testing, fanatical outsourcing and complete process automation to give you more of what you can never get back once it’s gone – your time.

Click below to keep reading…

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