I was sitting at the airport gate on my way back to Austin and I noticed a group of people who were obviously part of the same company and coming back from a convention. They were in their off work casual clothes and I found my mind unconsciously drawing conclusions about who they were:

“The tall, lanky one in the white sneakers, blue jeans, and button-up black shirt looks like he’s the douchebag boss who was promoted too early and thinks he knows what’s going on but is actually an idiot.”

“The guy in the over-sized khaki pants and over-sized North Face jacket is a space brained middle-manager whose brown suits never quite fit right. He thinks of himself as an outdoorsman, but never makes it much further than the grill in his back yard.”

“The apple-shaped, stressed out looking lady is the office manager who sadly over commits to her job yet goes largely unappreciated by the douchebag boss. I’d rather shoot myself than put that much energy into a job so unrewarding.”

As I listened to my inner monologue, I became aware of how acidly judgmental my thoughts were.

I like to think of myself as a pretty open-minded person who is all about letting people live the way they want to live without any interference (so long as they aren’t hurting anyone), so it was a bit of a shock to me to see a sharp disconnect between one of my cherished beliefs and the actual thoughts in my head.

However, rather than judge myself for being judgmental I decided to probe into these feelings and see what I could learn from them.

Judging Vs. Connecting

The problem with judging people is that it generally cuts you off from connecting with them.

If you want to make more friends, meet a new lover, or build powerful influence in business, then the only way to get there is through connecting with other people.

How do you think these people will feel about you if they realize that you are judging them for their faults?

How would you feel if you were meeting someone for the first time and they were judging you for your faults?

Is either of these situations likely to result in a mutually fulfilling relationship with another person?

You cannot be judging people at the same time that you are connecting with them, and you cannot be connecting with people at the same time that you are judging them. It is not possible to do them both simultaneously. You do one at the expense of the other.

Another less obvious symptom that you are judging people is that as you listen to them you find yourself merely agreeing or disagreeing with what they say rather than just being with them and really understanding what they are saying to you.

The Secondary Payoffs of Judging

Whenever we notice a behavior or aspect of ours that we don’t like, it’s important not to blame ourselves for it or make ourselves “wrong” for it.

On some level, a part of us is doing that behavior because it is trying to take care of us and it believes that doing those actions will make us safe. Often it isn’t a new behavior, but one that has been with us a long time that we developed as a young child making decisions about the world from a child’s perspective.

As I thought it through, I realized that as far back as I can remember I have indeed been passing borderline hateful judgment while idly people watching.

It acts as a sort of defense mechanism. As ruggedly independent as I have been all my life, there is still a part of me that worries about what other people think of me and is afraid of rejection.

By judging people before I even interact with them I am able to make them “wrong” in some way and put myself on higher ground. Then if and when I actually do interact with them I don’t have to care what they think of me. I mean, really, who cares what this “wrong” person thinks anyway?

My judgments are particularly harsh when I project onto someone a way of life that I perceive as a threat to the world I want to live in.

Looking at the band of office workers put images of the horrors of punching in at 9am on the dot to work in a small, grey cubicle in my mind and multiplied my loathing of them. Almost as if I loathed them enough I would be able to wipe “office” style working off the face of the planet.

These secondary payoffs I get from judging others are equally as childish as the behavior itself.

However, it’s important to remember that blaming yourself and making yourself “wrong” for an undesired behavior is like blaming the part of you that is still 5 years old. It just wants the best for you and it doesn’t really understand why it’s being punished.

Instead, comfort that part of you as you would a 5 year old child and let it know that you understand it was only trying to help you, but that there is a better way that will make you both happier.

People are Built to Fuck Up

I once spoke with a business coach who has worked with management and executives in Fortune 500 companies and he dropped the profound statement on me that “people are built to fuck up.”

We perfectionists and people who hold high standards for ourselves have a very difficult time dealing with people who have obvious flaws, but don’t seem to have any desire or inclination to fix them. It is particularly frustrating when these are people close to us like friends and family.

One area that I’m still struggling with is letting it be okay for other people to make mistakes and empathize with them rather than just being like, “what is wrong with you?”

However, we may not see that people are trying to improve. We may also have an over-inflated sense of how well we are doing ourselves.

Our own mistakes are often invisible to us, but mistakes others make stand out in high relief.

Comedian Eddie Peppitone described the phenomenon best when he said, “When I make mistakes it’s part of the process. But when other people make mistakes, it’s just wrong.”

Even if an “I told you so” might be thoroughly deserved, sometimes there is no more meaningful way to connect with someone than to let them know that you are still on their side even if they have messed up.

Escape From Judgment

Ending judgment doesn’t mean that you stop evaluating what is happening around you. The difference is what you do with the information.

Instead of looking for things to judge as “right” and “wrong,” it’s more helpful to think of yourself as a sort of anthropologist making objective observations about your environment and using that information if and when it’s useful.

“Oh, they must be in the same office. That guy is probably the boss.” Rather than, “Man, look at those sad ass office workers and their douchebag boss.”

It’s also not necessary that you like everyone and everything.

For example, I still loath the idea of working in a traditional cubicle office environment. However, just because other people do doesn’t mean that I need to feel threatened about my desired way of life as if I were about to be sucked into the cubicle vortex.

It also doesn’t mean that you have to put up with an endless stream of bad behavior from someone. If you have a boyfriend who beats you, leave him. You don’t have to judge the person as right or wrong, but you do have to employ a certain amount of discretion as to where your boundaries are.

As you wait in line at the store, interact with colleagues, or interact with your significant other, notice where it would help you to stop judging and start connecting.

Don’t worry, I haven’t found god and I haven’t become religious.

I was watching TV and a Rick Perry presidential campaign video came on with him talking about how something was wrong with America because gays could openly serve in the military but children couldn’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. Aside from instantly knowing that I would not vote for Rick Perry, I realized that America is on the right track when personal liberties are on the rise and religious dogma is on the decline.

But as I began to think about it more it caused me to reflect on my own religious mores, or absence thereof.

First off, there are a few things I don’t like about the term atheist. According to Dictionary.com an atheist is:

a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

It isn’t just one who doesn’t have a religious belief, it connotes a lack or denial of belief. As if belief were the norm and an atheist is defined by his resistance to that belief.

This doesn’t describe me or the way I am at all. I don’t go around actively resisting religion or forcefully denying that a god has influenced the events of my life and defining myself by what I am not.

The Marked Case

In linguistics there is a concept called “markedness.” Essentially it means that there is a hierarchy of specificity in the meaning of words or grammatical structures, and that the more specific the meaning the more “marked” it is.

For example, in English we have a word “hot” that can mean that this thing I’m touching feels hot (the pan is hot), the air conditions I’m in are hot (it’s hot outside today or it’s hot in this room), or this food is hot (spicy). If we wanted to we could say a few extra words and clarify our meaning more specificly, but it’s normal and natural just to use the word “hot” to describe all of these situations.

In the Korean language this is not the case. A different word must be used in each of these situations to sound natural. A generic word like “hot” that can be used for all of these situations simply does not exist. In comparing Korean and English we would say that 3 Korean words for different kinds of hot are more “marked” than the the catch-all English word “hot.”

It’s completely alien for English speaking learners of Korean to have to use three different words for “hot.” In Korea you hear American’s telling confused Koreans that food is “hot to the touch” when they mean it is spicy. It’s also completely alien for Korean learners of English to have to lump their three seemingly unrelated words into a single concept. Koreans almost exclusively use the word “spicy” where in most cases we would simply say the food was “hot.”

Whenever I run into someone who talks about how religious they are or how they owe it to god for some event that has happened in their life it is so alien to my experience of the world that I feel like I am talking to a Martian. I don’t think of myself as the “atheist” different one, I think of them as the different “theist” one.

From my perspective the way I am is normal and natural, and adding extra beliefs and labeling oneself a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew is the marked case–not the other way around. Being associated with a particular religious sect and believing in a particular supreme being is a completely alien modality of being to me. Through my eyes I am not different from them by lacking or denying a belief they hold, they are different from me by holding an extra belief that I do not.

Transcending the Atheist Trap

I think many of us who don’t believe in a god or subscribe to a particular religion do ourselves a disservice when we start to think of ourselves as “atheists” and define ourselves in a way that sets us up as deniers or “non”-believers.

It creates a self-identity where being “different from the norm” occupies undue space. We lose focus on who we are and waste focus on who we are not. Many of us even carry anger at the “religious idiots” who try to convert us or damn us to hell for not going to church.

I am letting go of the “atheist” label. Others may wish to label themselves as Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc. but I am no longer an “atheist.”

I simply am.

It’s been slightly over three years now since the summer of 2008 when I first went Paleo / Primal and it’s been one of the most rewarding and difficult changes I’ve made in my life.

Health is the cornerstone of living a free life where you are bodily able to do the things that you want to do and have the energy and zeal for life to do them. Diet is the cornerstone of health, so it is possibly the single most important part of your life to optimize.

In the course of the past three years I’ve struggled with getting off of and staying off of grains, staying Paleo while eating out and on the road, being “that one” in the group, converting loved ones to Paleo eating, and even ethical concerns with killing animals for food (detailed series of posts about my research into vegeterianism / veganism and why I ultimately stayed Paleo for optimal nutrition starting here).

Going Paleo is not an easy road. Many people give up when they discover just to what extent that most modern “food” is some combination of bread and cheese (or processed corn).

However, it can be done and there are a few things I’ve learned along the way that help make going and staying Paleo easier to do.

One Meal at a Time

I’m generally the type of person that once I am convinced that something is right and true, I switch cold turkey. I just can’t do the wrong thing when I know what the right thing to do is. Not so with the Paleo diet.

Food habits run deep. It’s not just the food on your plate that’s changing. It’s your favorite dish since childhood, it’s the family recipe for rolls that has been passed down for generations, it’s your go to restaurant when you need food quick. We have enormous emotional attachments to our food and we are not prepared to give them all up at once.

The easiest way to get into Paleo is to just introduce one new meal at a time into your repertoire. It should be tasty, satisfying, and easy to cook. Maybe you even just start small by altering existing favorites–ex. eat steak and asparagus but leave out the potatoes.

Finding recipes is not difficult. There are cookbooks upon cookbooks on Amazon for Paleo recipes.

It’s likely that you only have 3-5 main dishes that you eat on a regular basis, so even if you just introduced one new core meal a week you’ll be eating mostly Paleo within a month.

It also helps if you create meals that re-use common items. I rely heavily on different cuts of meat and salad. Changing up the cuts of meat and throwing in some different vegetables gives me at least as much variety as the ubiquitous “bread and cheese” meals.

Lunch at the Office, Chicken Salad, and No-Bun Burgers

The biggest struggle for me, bar none, was tackling lunch. For most people–and consequently most restaurants–lunch equals sandwich (ie, gluten fest). Even when I worked in midtown Manhattan with arguably the greatest variety of food in the world at my fingertips, it could be difficult to find good Paleo options.

Eating out in general becomes much more difficult. Breaded chicken, breaded pork, steak sandwich in a gigantic hero roll, bread with bread sauce on it and a side of high-fructose corn syrup (okay, maybe not the last one).

To all this I have found a simple answer–the chicken salad.

Chicken salad is surprisingly easy to find in many different types of restaurants. American restaurants, Italian restaurants, Greek restaurants, nearly all of them have some variety of chicken salad on the menu. And amazingly, it’s often not breaded chicken.

The no-bun burger is also a great option for lunch. It’s simple, just ask for no bun (and no cheese if you object). Most places will also happily substitute vegetables for your fries.

For eating out I don’t try and worry too much about what kind of oils might have been used on my food or other food preparation minutiae. As long as you avoid breaded foods, deep fried foods, foods drenched in soy sauce, and excessive starchy tubers you are staying Paleo enough to gain most of the benefits.

Preparation, Hunger Meltdown, and Intermittent Fasting

Food preparation is key for staying Paleo. It’s the times when you’re tired, the fridge is empty, or you don’t have anything on hand that you lapse back into bread and cheese meals.

Here are a few ways you can prepare in advance to prevent hunger meltdown:

• Cook large batches of meals in advance (stew, meatza, brisket) that you can easily re-heat.
• If you’re taking a road trip, pack a cooler with some hard boiled eggs, meats, fruits, and vegetables.
• Research restaurants beforehand. Know where you are going to eat before you get hungry.

Alternatively, if you find yourself headed somewhere that overlaps with meal time, you could take the opportunity to practice intermittent fasting by simply skipping or delaying a meal. However, also plan this in advance. Skipping a meal off the cuff because you’re working hard at something and expending lots of energy is a recipe for disaster.

That said, if you have any others you are attempting to bring along the Paleo path with you–significant other, kids–their resolve will melt much quicker than yours and they will have little to no sympathy for your cause. Plan food in advance, it keeps the peace.

Alcohol and Socializing (Hey, Where’d My Beer Go?)

It’s also a shock when people realize that going Paleo and ditching the gluten fest means giving up beer… Dun, dun, dun… !

The beer itself isn’t the kicker to most people though. It’s the fact that most people you know or will ever meet equate being social and having fun with going out and drinking themselves into a stupor.

Barring binge drinking and not even being a particularly big fan of drinking in general, I must admit there is a certain social appeal to going out and “having a beer” with someone.

There are a few different ways around this. First, there are gluten free beers. However, they are still not widely available in most establishments. I tried this route for a while, but ultimately found it dissatisfying because you just wind up with some other ground up grain that isn’t doing you any favors.

Wine is a suitable grain-free alternative, but it can be difficult to get people on board to go out for some wine. Especially your male friends, even the Paleo ones, might think it sounds too sissy.

Lately, I’ve just been giving up alcohol altogether. There are plenty of people out there who don’t want to have to drink to be social, and it’s actually a relief for them when they meet a kindred spirit such as yourself. Try bonding around shared hobbies or activities rather than alcohol. This is one area that I’m still working on. It can take some thought to come up with an alternative go to social plan.

Lifestyle Overhaul

It’s fair to say that going Paleo isn’t even just about the food, in many ways it’s a complete lifestyle overhaul. You don’t necessarily need to go full Paleo / Primal to get the benefits. When you first start out, you probably won’t be ready or willing to make all of those changes. Just take it one meal at a time.

The lifestyle changes you’d like to make but can’t imagine today, will be the foregone conclusions of the changes that you want to make tomorrow. It took me about 2 years before I was really able to give up grains completely.

What challenges have you encountered trying to go Paleo? Have you overcome them? If so how? If not, what could you do differently to overcome them?

As I wrote about yesterday, I recently moved out of New York City after living there for two years as somewhat of a resident tourist.

One of the main reasons I move as often as I do is that I like to leisurely explore new cities. Living someplace for a couple years lets you explore all the nooks and crannies of a city in a way that you just can’t do on vacation for a couple days.

Everyone knows about Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, and other major tourist destinations, so I thought I’d share the highlights of things to do in Manhattan that you might not know about.

The eligibility criteria for selection were 1) I didn’t know about it before I moved to New York, and 2) I had a lot of fun doing it.

1. New York City TV & Movie Sites Tour

New York City is the most filmed city in the world. Friends, Sex & The City, Ghostbusters, Seinfeld, the list goes on and on. This 3.5 hr tour takes you to filming locations all over Manhattan. My hands down favorite part of the tour was seeing the Ghostbusters firehouse that still has the Ghostbusters logo painted on the sidewalk outside.

You can find out more info and get tickets here.

2. Helicopter Tour

Need I say more? You haven’t seen New York City until you’ve seen it by helicopter.

Helicopters are a surprisingly smooth ride–smoother than an airplane. You glide over the city as your pilot and tour guide points out hot spots from the air. We also got some up close and personal photo opportunities with the Statue of Liberty.

I won’t lie, it’s not cheap, but helicopter tours aren’t as expensive as you might think. I went on a 30 minute private tour starting out of New Jersey that ran around $300 for two.

However, I would recommend using one of the tour companies based in Manhattan. It takes over an hour to get to the airports in New Jersey and you spend half of a 30 min tour just getting to Manhattan and back. At the time of this post, New York Helicopter has tours starting at $138 (personally I’d splurge for a 60 min tour, the 30 min tour flies by and leaves you wanting more).

3. Shakespeare in the Park

Everyone knows about Broadway, but did you know that every summer The Public Theater hosts productions of Shakespeare in Central Park? And it’s free.

When my New York friends first told me about this I had envisioned sitting on a blanket on a lawn half a mile away from the stage trying to make out what the actors were doing, but still enjoying the fact that it was free.

However, the way it actually works is that you can either line up early in the morning at 9am to wait for the box office to open at 1pm, or you can enter the online ticket lottery. I had all summer to try and win tickets, so I entered the online lottery. After two weeks of entering every day, I finally won tickets.

The Delacorte Theater where productions are held is a small open air theater in the park. Since attendance is limited and the theater is small, there isn’t a bad seat in the house. The sun sets as you watch the play, and by the time it’s over you are watching the play under the glow of the moon and the Chrysler building poking out over the trees in the background.

Bonus Tip: If you have time and don’t mind taking a chance you can also enter one of the Broadway ticket lotteries. I won the Wicked ticket lottery and got front row seats for $25!

4. Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The Botanic Garden is open year round, but you’ll enjoy it more if you go in the summer time. Normally the entrance fee is something like $10, but I went on the first Saturday of the month, which it turns out is free.

This is one of the largest botanic gardens in the country. It took a few hours of wandering around to cover the whole park. There are many outdoor as well as indoor plant habitats. If you are there in the spring time, there is also a massive cherry blossom garden that would be a great spot for a picnic.

5. Free Performance at Juilliard

You might be vaguely aware that there is a music school called Juilliard, but you may not know that it’s located in New York City and it frequently offers free performances by its up and coming star students.

I’ve been to Juilliard performances a couple times and enjoyed seeing a wonderfully talented, humorous young jazz musician and a chamber music performance. It’s free and fun to see the up and comers.

Keep in mind this isn’t Carnegie Hall though, you’ll be watching students perform. That said, indeed it is not Carnegie Hall and you will be in a small, intimate room watching the performance rather than far off in the distance in a large concert hall.

See the event calendar here.

Finding Things to Do

Even if you aren’t planning a trip to New York City any time soon, there are a few different ways you can find new and interesting things to do outside the normal tourist traps.

Daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial have been key for me. I discovered both the TV & Movie Tour and the helicopter tours that way. Even if you aren’t living in a new city like I was, you can start checking the deals before your trip and see if anything interesting pops up.

You can also search for top 5 and top 10 things to do type of lists like this one. When I first moved to Manhattan I compiled a list of something like 50 different attractions I wanted to see just from various online top things to do type of articles. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was one of the gems I found this way.

Of the 3 big changes you can make in your life, changing where you live is probably the easiest (the other 2 being who you love and what you do for a living).

Despite aspiring to always live somewhere warm, I recently indulged my desire to live in New York City for a couple years as a young professional having fun. After two years of sub-zero winters, iconic American tourist locations, and high fashion, I decided I’d had my fill and it was time to move on.

My next stop? Austin, Texas.

My friends thought I was crazy. Moving from Los Angeles to Manhattan made sense… but Austin? Texas?

To be honest, years of big city living was starting to be a bit of a grind. It’s exciting to have access to everything whenever you want it, but the prices, crowds, and density start to get to you after a while. This time around I was interested in a place that was still urban, but a little more laid back, reasonable cost of living, and with easier access to nature (and of course warm). Where else but Austin.

No matter where you go, there’s always a steep learning curve to an entirely new city. The move itself is always stressful. But there is a great sense of bliss in knowing that you can pack up and move if you want to. And even though I have moved around many times I learned quite a bit about how to make the process easier.

Moving Out of New York City

Of all the moves I have made in my life, moving out of New York City was the most difficult. Not from an emotional perspective of course, I was happy to leave, but from a logistical perspective.

Using any kind of moving service in New York City is expensive–very expensive. Many places will charge you an additional $800 specifically as an extra for New York City pickup fee. It’s also not practical to rent a truck for a self-move as there is really no place to park it while you load your stuff (you might also find that it magically unloads between trips up and down the elevator).

I knew from the outset this would be difficult and that when I moved out I’d only be able to bring with me what I could ship or bring with me on the plane. That suited me fine as I believe in trying to stay as close as I can to the “two suitcases and a carry-on” lifestyle.

There are a few item management strategies I use to keep me as mobile as possible.

• Only buy cheap or second-hand furniture (except mattress, always go for quality there)
• Only buy glasses, pots, pans that I can easily replace
• Avoid buying large, bulky items that cannot be easily shipped
• Regularly throw out clothes that don’t fit or that I don’t wear
• Don’t buy anything that is purely decorative
• No souvenirs (take pictures instead)

This way when you move out really all you have to take with you are clothes, computers, and a minimal amount of irreplaceables.

There are inevitably a few oversights that result in “stuff” which needs to be sold off or shipped. This time around I had a high powered Vita-Mix blender, a too-expensive to easily replace kneeling chair, a canvas painting, and a couple other items.

Here are a few strategies to make dealing with these items easier.

• Keep the original boxes and packing materials for expensive items to re-ship them in
• Use Fedex packing service (for $17.99 for my painting and $21.99 for my kneeling chair I was plenty happy to let them do the pack job for me, the additional shipping costs were reasonable, and they arrived safe and sound in Austin)
• If you can let it go, just sell it, and use it as a reminder not to acquire hard to replace items

One other thing I learned that I would be remiss to leave out is that if you are living with and moving with a significant other, they might not necessarily share your attitudes towards minimalism, replaceability of stuff, and restraint in shopping. At the very least, you double your own lapses in acquiring difficult to move items. It happens, plan for it.

And of course there was the one last bite of “leaving the Big Apple tax” (ie, landlord trying to take as much of security deposit as possible).

Landing in Austin

I arrived in Austin on a mid-August day for the first time ever on a scouting mission for an apartment. It was a scorching hot 105 degrees out. It hadn’t rained in months and all the moisture had been baked out of the air. My kind of town.

Fortunately I had a friend in Austin to stay with and deposit my stuff while I was looking for apartments.

I’d used a combination of Craigslist.org and an apartment locater service to research a few places beforehand. Every city I’ve lived in seems to have its own terminology and system around how the realtor system works and what types of unit construction is standard from building to building. It’s always a good idea to verify things like dishwasher, refrigerator, parking, elevator, etc. that you might take for granted where you live now. In New York City, for example, it’s not uncommon for apartments to have none of those and still cost just as much as ones that do.

Moving to Austin though, prices are generally cheaper and most things are an upgrade from living in New York. Thankfully most apartments in Austin only cost about half as much as their equivalents in Manhattan. It didn’t take too long to find a nice place just outside downtown.

Sticker Bliss

Everyone knows what “sticker shock” is, but we don’t really have a term for the opposite so I’ll call it “sticker bliss.”

I went to a great Tex-Mex place for brunch called Trudy’s. I had a sausage, egg, veggie scramble dish that only cost me about $7. An equivalent brunch in Manhattan probably would have run north of $20.

A pack of 100 trash bags that cost $35 in New York City only cost $13 for the same brand in Austin.

I can only describe it as a sense of euphoria as I kept discovering how much cheaper everything was.

Different Culture

Every city has its own hum, its own set of neighborhoods and definitions about what their reputations are, its own local hot topics, and its own culture.

This is probably the most difficult part to tap into as you can really only pick these things up by living in city for a while and making friends with locals.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how friendly Austinites are. I was loading a heavy dresser into my car and two unrelated people stopped by and offered their help.

Have you been thinking about moving to a new city for a while? It might be time to exercise your freedom and take the leap.

Let’s face it. Having to get up and go to the same office at the same time every day sucks.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve been working remotely 100% office free for the past 30 days and I have to say that removing your obligation to go to an office every day is the single highest impact thing you can do to maximize your freedom.

You don’t have to be self-employed either. I aspire to eventually support myself through a business I own and operate virtually, but currently I still make the majority of my income as a W2 employee.

In case you aren’t already convinced that working in an office is a relic of the past, I have a number of problems with being tied to an office that you might resonate with.

First of all, that office doesn’t move. I’m stuck in whatever city that office is stuck in. Want to take a week trip someplace? If you’re tied to an office you have to justify your absence and put in the required forms in advance to take time off. If you telecommute, you just bring your equipment with you, work during the necessary hours, and you can be anywhere you want.

Secondly, nap time. Yes, nap time. Studies abound that show a 20 minute power nap in the middle of the day works wonders to boost your energy and productivity. Most offices don’t have any problems with you taking 20 minutes for a smoke or a coffee, but goodness help you if you’re found sleeping on the job–not to mention it feels awkward to be seen lying down.

Perhaps more damning, there’s mounting evidence that working in an office actually makes you less productive. Many people say that they are the most productive early in the mornings before everyone gets to the office or in the evenings after the office has cleared out–that’s right, when no one is around and conspicuously not during the middle of the day when they are being “supervised” and interrupted with “urgent” requests for copies of e-mails.

But what is telecommuting actually like? Can you still get everything you need to do done without being in the office? Can you telecommute to any job?

If you work in manual labor you are probably out of luck for telecommuting, but it’s possible to telecommute to most white collar office jobs and still do as good a job or better as if you were in the office.

However, you will need to change your work style and learn to use a few new tools.

Telecommuting Tools of the Trade

With a laptop, internet connection, and three basic tools you should be able to accomplish 99% of everything you could do in an office.

Skype

This my new telephone. I have a regular 10 digit phone number registered through Skype that I can use anywhere in the world as long as I have an internet connection. Customers and coworkers can reach me seamlessly without having to juggle phone numbers. It’s also a nice all in one program since I use it to instant message or voice chat with coworkers

Cell Phone

Who doesn’t have one of these anymore? Most plans don’t have roaming charges anymore either, so you have another fixed phone number to provide stability to your coworkers and clients.

Scanner-Printer-Fax Combo

These days you can pick up one of these for your home office for less than $100 on Amazon. A small price to pay for freedom. Though one thing I failed to consider when setting up my current home office is that I don’t have a regular land line so I can’t actually use the fax. However, these days everyone has a similar all-in-one device and I haven’t had any problems scanning and e-mailing documents to clients or vice versa.

Unless you happen to spend a large portion of your day printing, scanning, and faxing, it’s also generally not that difficult to locate a Fedex Kinkos or similar place to take care of these tasks if you happen to be on a trip someplace.

How Telecommuting Changes the Way You Work

Most of what you do will be the same when working remotely. Reply to emails, look at spreadsheets, talk to coworkers and clients about projects you are working on.

However, meetings become a bit trickier. I have coworkers spread out across 3 states and 3 countries. And if we have a conference call with a client, that ads yet another locale.

We’ve conquered the technical aspect by using Skype for group calls, but here are a few more tips for working with people in multiple time zones.

• Have an agreed upon set of working hours and respect them
• Always specify the time zone (ie, the meeting starts at 1PM PST)
• No meetings just for the sake of meetings

How Telecommuting Affects Your Social Life

One change that you might not have thought about is that you no longer have the social component of meeting and conversing with your coworkers at the office. Depending on your personality this might not be big deal to you or it might leave you feeling a bit disconnected and lonely.

However, I think there is a big opportunity here. Having to commute to work, be at an office all day, and then commute back home often leaves you feeling too tired to go back out again. Once you remove the energy suck and back and forth travel time to the office, suddenly you have a lot more energy and you can go out on week nights. Working from home lets you take care of business during the day and still feel up to going out in the evening to be social.

Building a social life not tied to your office also means that if you quit, get fired, or change jobs you don’t lose your social circle along with the job.

So is being a telecommuter right for you? Only you can answer that, but I personally would have a very difficult time taking another regular office job.

Greetings if you came from the indiDenim blog. If not, you can see my feature here.

I was recently featured in Gainer–a Japanese men’s fashion magazine–and happened to be wearing my indiDenim jeans, so the good folks at indiDenim did a Customer Spotlight on me.

This post is the story of how I got in the magazine and my thoughts on whether or not some opportunities are as random as they seem.

The Story

Growing up, the word “model” was not one that was ever used in the same sentence as my name. Heck it still probably isn’t, but I recently had a chance to be one for a day.

I was on my way to work and it seemed an ordinary day like any other. I was a little bit dressed up because I was headed to a Cinco De Mayo party that evening, but otherwise I was just walking to the subway station in a bit of a sleepy fog.

Half way to the station I passed a couple of Japanese people that looked like they were lost. I’d gone no more than a few steps passed them when one of them called out, “excuse me.”

I looked at them out of the corner of my eye in my cautious New York way to determine if they were going to try and sell me something or hand me a flyer. As I remembered their lost look I slowly turned around as I upgraded them from pesky street flyerers to lost tourists.

To my complete surprise they complimented my style and said they’d like to take a few pictures of me for the magazine they work for. I was already running late and debating whether to blow them off and keep going, but a voice at the back of my mind told me I should stop and see what this is was all about.

As I’ve written about before, you should always keep yourself primed to investigate and take advantage of opportunities.

They showed me a copy of their magazine–a Japanese men’s fashion magazine similar to GQ called Gainer–and so I said okay and they took a few pictures of me right there on the street.

After they were done taking photos I gave them my contact info, thanked them, and headed back off to work. Knowing that they were probably taking hundreds of pictures while they were in New York and much of what they took probably wouldn’t make the final cut of the magazine, I wondered if my pictures would actually go to print.

During the next month I anxiously waited for the next issue to come out. When the July 2011 issue of Gainer Magazine finally hit the stand I rushed down to the Japanese book store and there I was bold and in full color on page 32!

Chance or Intention

At first glance this just seems like a random chance encounter. Like I had nothing to do with it other than being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. After all, I certainly hadn’t been out banging on doors of magazines trying to get a modeling gig, this opportunity just kind of showed up.

But as one of my friends pointed out to me, for every person they put a picture of in the magazine they probably walked by thousands that they didn’t. I’m a bit of a fashionista by hobby and it stood out when the right people happened to be around.

During the year prior to this chance encounter I’d spent a lot of time reading about fashion, having custom clothes made at my local tailor (shout out to Michael Andrews Bespoke), and experimenting with online tailors and places like indiDenim. In fact, the Cinco De Mayo party I was headed to that night was being hosted by MAB.

When you get deeply involved in something, related opportunities have a way of showing up whether you are seeking them out or not. Affinity to your interest makes you more likely to be in the right places and near the right people.

In this case I move to a fashion capital, then I become very interested in fashion, then I start dressing more and more fashionably, then suddenly I get approached by a fashion magazine.

Where would you like to create more opportunities in your life? What place can you go to where there are other people with similar interests? What place can you go to where there are decision makers for the field you are interested in?

And most profoundly, where in your life are you already doing this without even realizing it?

One summer during college I was doing an internship at a corporate law office in Tokyo and I met a lawyer there from Los Angeles who was on a “working vacation.” This was a new term to me at the time, but it seemed like a shear genius idea.

Many of us would like to travel the world, live in exotic places, and meet new and interesting people. But we have no notion of what that might actually look like in real life.

We might have a few vague images in our heads of airplanes, hotels, and pictures of us in front of well known landmarks, but actually describing it in concrete detail is another matter.

Would you be in New York, Tokyo, Paris, Mumbai, Melbourne? What would you be doing? Learning French, visiting ancient temples, watching a play on Broadway?

Even say you had an idea of where you might go and what you might do, isn’t long term travel expensive? And how would you ever get that much time off from work? And what about the kids (if you have any)?

The easiest way to keep your finances afloat during extended travel is to make income from an online business, but as I hinted at the beginning it’s not the only way.

It might be time to redefine the way you look at “traveling the world” and consider a working vacation.

Redefining Travel

Even if your aim and interest is long term travel, you probably have an unhelpful notion of a “vacation” in your head.

At some point in your life you’ve probably been on at least one three day, four night type of trip where you crammed as much sight seeing into the few days you could as possible then came home exhausted and wishing you’d had more time. Perhaps you even shed a small tear when your credit card bill came that month because the trip cost so much.

Long-term travel–the kind that lasts months or years–is not the same thing as just taking a long vacation. It requires different strategies and a different plan of action.

Instead of just taking a short trip someplace, you’re going to actually be living there as a resident.

Instead of a hotel, you’re going to want to find an apartment or a house to rent.

Instead of a pile of cash that you’ve saved up to pay for the trip, you’re going to need a way to keep earning money while you are there.

Instead of seeing 3 museums and 6 national monuments a day to “get it all in,” you’re going to have a lot more time to space out your sight seeing and get to know your new locale and its people on a much deeper level.

In fact, this goes much deeper than taking a trip. Really what we are talking about here is moving to a new city, or a bunch of new cities. You’ll be gone for a long time, possibly forever, so you’ll either want to give up your apartment / sell your home before you leave or make arrangements to sublet it.

Finding Work For Your Working Vacation

Of course if you are going to go on an extended working vacation, you need some work to do to keep paying the bills.

If you’re lucky, you might work for a large company that has a branch in your new location that you can transfer to. Or if you work for a more flexible company, you might be able to continue doing your current job remotely. If neither of those options work for you, you can simply get a new job in the city you are moving to.

New employers will often want at least a 1-2 year commitment, and I find this is well suited for long term travel. If you live in a place for at least a full calendar year then you get a chance to experience it during all the different seasons, all the different holidays, and all the different local eccentricities.

That said, like any other job, don’t spell out in your interview that you are only looking for a 1-2 year job. When I’m interviewing for jobs in a new city I usually just say that I’m moving there and plan to live there for the indefinite future–because it’s true. I don’t know how long I will be there. For all I know I will really fall in love with the place and want to stay for 5 years, 10 years, or longer.

I’m not going to pretend this is the easy part though. You have to look hard at your priorities here as there will most likely be a trade-off between career and your desire for long-term travel. Achieving very high levels of career success often means being involved at the same company or at least in the same network of contacts for a long period of time, which is usually not compatible with frequent moving.

However, if you’re making a livable income now, no matter where you go you should be able to find work that meets your basic needs and leaves some left over for play. If you move to a city where English is not the native language, you can usually find decent paying work teaching English if nothing else.

Living in New York: A Personal Example

For the past decade of my life I haven’t lived in any city for longer than 2 years at a stretch. I don’t really think of myself as “traveling” so much as just moving to a new city. Though in all that time I’ve never stopped feeling like a tourist.

Most recently I’m finishing up a 2 year stretch in New York. Prior to that I spent time in Los Angeles, Seoul, Tokyo, Yokohama, and Silicon Valley.

When I first moved to New York I was actually unemployed and in the process of shutting down a failed online store. Everyone wanted to know how I was going to get an apartment and pay my bills without a job–so did I.

With about 6 months rent in the bank and a co-signer, I was able to negotiate my way into a studio apartment just outside Times Square. It was about 4 nerve wracking months before I actually landed a job in the city–in retrospect not too bad considering that we were supposedly in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Now that I had regular income and the bills were taken care of, I was free to explore the city. And explore I did. I’ve been on bus tours, walking tours, boat tours, and helicopters tours of New York. I’ve been to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Governor’s Island, Coney Island, the Empire State Building, Central Park, Battery Park, and more.

I saw the New Year’s ball drop 20 feet from Carson Daly in Times Square, then watched the exodus from Times Square from my roof top. I saw the Macy’s 4th of July fireworks from my rooftop as well. In the winter I saw Christmas displays at the shops at 5th Avenue, and in the summer I saw a performance of Shakespeare in the Park.

All in all, I’ve seen and done far more in New York City than I could have done on a short vacation trip. By actually living here I still have essentially a “normal life” except that the tourist destinations are located right in town instead of a plane ride away. Instead of cramming them all into one day, every weekend or two I go explore a new corner of the city.

The experience is actually much deeper than just seeing the sights in a new city. It’s experiencing an entirely different way of being and viewing the world as a “New Yorker.” I’ve also been able to work in online advertising on Madison Avenue, which gives me somewhat of an affinity to the show Mad Men. Sometimes I even light-heartedly tease my friends for living in New Jersey.

Conclusion

So often we get our heads stuck in the sand and think something can’t be done or will be way too expensive for us to ever afford it. Long-term travel needn’t be that complicated.

The “working vacation” I have described here is in many ways simply “moving to a new city” by another name. Something that many people and families do all the time–and so can you.

Moving to a new city gives you a new launching pad to explore not just the touristy items in the city and near the city, but the experience of a different way of living. Once you’ve had your fill the option is yours to stay, move back where you used to live, or go someplace entirely new.

Are you a problem fixer?

Most of us approach the challenges of life with a mentality that I call “problem-fix.” In short, your method for tackling challenges is to become really good at diagnosing problems and then fixing them.

You might show up to work in the morning and there are already a pile of problems on your desk or in your inbox. So you immediately launch into identifying all the problems and how to fix them. Throughout the day more problems are brought to you, so you set about fixing them as well.

Problems pop up in your personal life as well. Your husband didn’t take out the trash again, your wife spent too much on the credit cards, your kids got in trouble at school. Someone’s behavior is out of line with your expectations, so you set about trying to “fix” them.

I’m going to suggest that you try on a new mentality that instead asks “What is good? What needs to be done?”

What’s Wrong with Fixing Problems?

It depends. If your car breaks down, getting it fixed is an entirely appropriate response. However, using “problem-fix” as your default mode of operation for everything only takes you so far and can get you into trouble.

If you are running a business and all you try to do is fix problems, then you are probably missing growth opportunities.

If every time you meet someone your first inclination is to quickly figure out what is wrong with them and tell them that they should fix it, you won’t have very many friends.

But more fundamentally, “problem-fix” implies a world view that everything is broken in someway and all your efforts are targeted at merely bringing it back up to baseline. You are thrust into a permanent reactive mode and unable to take on challenges proactively. You become a “negative Nelly” in other people’s eyes.

Furthermore, defaulting to “problem-fix” strategies means that not only is growth essentially impossible, but you are actually playing a game of trying to lose as little of what you started with as possible.

Building On What Works

As a simple experiment, ask yourself right now, “What is good with my life? What needs done?”

If you’re like me, it might take a few seconds to come up with an answer as it has never even occurred to you to explicitly ask yourself what is good with your life.

Now, what world view does this mode of thinking imply?

I contrast to a broken “problem-fix” world, asking “What is good? What needs done?” starts from a basic assumption that something good or right already exists and that there are actions you can take to make further improvements.

Instead of constantly trying to bring deficiencies back up to baseline, you are starting from an already acceptably good baseline and adding more to it.

When you look at your business or job, you realize that in addition to the problems that need fixing there are also things that are going really well. You’ll generally get more bang for your buck by doing more of what works than trying to fix what isn’t working.

As a mentor once told me, if you really want your business to explode make a list of the top 10 things that are working well for you and a list of the top 10 things that aren’t working. Figure out how you can do more of the things on the first list, and simply stop doing the things on the second list.

In your personal life, consider how things might be different if every time you met someone your default mode of thinking was to immediately notice what is good about them and how you can see that their life will only be getting better. You will have many more friends than if you bring the “problem-fix” mentality.

Growth will be almost inevitable. People will like you because they see that you have vision and are going places. You will like yourself more because you feel like you are winning more often than you are losing.

In a way, every time you ask “What problem needs fixed?” you are subconsciously calling yourself a loser. Every time you ask “What is good?” you are calling yourself a winner.

How would you feel about yourself and how much would you achieve if you called yourself a loser 365 times in the next year? How would you feel about yourself and how much would you achieve if you called yourself a winner 365 times in the next year?

How to Start

Try starting by simply asking yourself “What’s good about my life?” and “What needs done?” every morning.

It will be much more pleasant than rolling over, punching the alarm clock, and letting out a groan while you think “oh god, what am I going to have to deal with today.”

The more you ask yourself these questions the more natural it will seem to see life in terms of what is working and building on that base.

“But, but, but… problems do happen. I can’t just ignore them.”

You have built a comfort zone around problems, and this new thought pattern might make you feel anxious.

Yes–the car might break down, a client might get upset, your dog might chew up your good shoes. These things happen, and you will want to take care of them. They might be part of your “what needs done.” But these issues will soon start to be part of the background of a life that is working well, instead of the primary focus of a life where things constantly go wrong.

From time to time in our lives we have chance encounters with acquaintances or are somehow drawn into conversation with strangers.

Even if you have positive feelings towards the other person, these chance encounters can be awkward and uncomfortable. You might find that you don’t really know what to say.

Oddly, everyone except you seems to know exactly what to say and exactly what to do in these situations. It’s as if you were in a play where everyone had been given the script except you.

However, with a few simple mindset shifts you can not only survive these situations, but they might even become the highlight of your day. The quality of your seemingly simple everyday interactions with people has a dramatic impact on your happiness.

If you reflect on your own behavior, you’ll realize that people inevitably tell someone about whoever they ran into. You know how it goes, “I ran into so and so the other day.”

Consequently, I find that it helps to think about these experiences in terms of “what would this person say to someone else about seeing me?” Then it becomes a fun game of crafting a great experience.

Dress Well and Be Clean

Even before you say anything, your physical appearance sends a message to other people.

As long as you look generally healthy, are in a good state of personal hygiene, and are wearing clean clothes that fit well, you could say as little as “hello” to someone and they will report back to others that you “looked good.” Socially we know this doesn’t mean that you looked good in the sense that you were attractive, but that you looked healthy and as if life was going well for you.

If “dressing well” sounds like a hassle, it doesn’t have to be complicated. I have a fairly simple closet of button up shirts, nice jeans, and a couple suits. I could get dressed in the dark and still look presentable for most occasions.

Own Your Life

When we haven’t seen someone for many years or find ourselves engaged in small talk with a strangers, we start to project all kinds of fantasies about how good their lives are, what amazing jobs they have, and the movie star social life that they have.

Next to the fantasy you are creating in your mind about what their life must be like and the stark contrast of it to yours, your job and life might seem ordinary or even embarrassing.

Maybe in your own mind you thought you’d be further along career-wise by now. Or maybe you’re working in an industry or company that you don’t think they would perceive as prestigious. You dread the inevitable moment when you get asked where you are working these days, and when you do talk about your job it almost sounds like a resigned admission of how lame you are.

However, the fact is, most people don’t even really care where you work. They are just asking this question out of reflex because it is part of the social script of small talk and/or “catching up.”

When you talk about what you do, own it. Say it with conviction. People take their cues about how to feel about your life from your own behavior towards it, so your energy is more important than your content.

This is revealed again in the conversations people have about you later. If you act like your life is lame, the report back to others will be that it was kind of awkward and “weird” seeing you.

Even if you have an amazing job and a very high position, people will still mainly report back on the energy you said it with. They will say things like, “It seemed like things were going well for him, he was doing some kind of marketing job or other.”

They Are Just As Nervous As You Are

The truth is that the other person actually is holding onto a secret that you don’t know about.

They are feeling just as awkward and nervous as you are–even if you both generally have positive feelings towards each other. When you realize this, you may find that it actually causes you to relax.

Odds are that their life is probably even more screwed up than you think yours is (especially if you actually think your life is pretty awesome).

If you realized that you were talking with someone who was nervous about trying to impress you, how would you react to them? How could you respond to them in a way that would help them to relax and share positive energy with you? If so, how do you think they would feel about you afterwards?

End the Conversation First

If you run out of things to say, just tell them how great it was seeing/meeting them and leave.

For those of us who don’t spend a lot of time in social mode, we almost feel compelled to prolong an interaction that is going well. You could be out shopping and have an appointment that you need to be at in 10 minutes, but after 30 seconds of conversation you feel a pressure like you have to go to a coffee shop or something to keep spending time with this person.

Just let it go. Not only do they already have plans, but so do you. All you really need to do in these situations is share a few words about what’s going on in life, enjoy that you got to run into this person, and move on.

Leave them wanting more.

If you leave people wanting more, the reports about meeting you will get upgraded from “it was good seeing you” to “it was great seeing you.”

Putting It All Together: An Actual Chance Encounter

I was out shoe shopping today and I heard a voice I thought I recognized. I turned around and two people who had lived in the same senior dorm as me, but that I wasn’t that close to, were standing behind me.

We all looked at each other a bit bewildered for a moment because not only had it been years since we’d seen each other, but we also went to college together on the other side of the country and had somehow managed to run into each other at the same time and place in New York City.

We exchanged the normal pleasantries about where we were living and how we all wound up in NYC. Then came the question, “where do you work?”

As I explained earlier, this can feel like a loaded question. And truth be told I did hesitate for a moment, but only a moment, before I boldly stated what I do.

I work for a company that does marketing for mortgage companies. Mortgage never enjoyed a particularly high reputation, and especially in the post-sub-prime recession fallout of New York City, it’s considered a dirty word by many of the Wall Street folks I run into.

Whatever.

I used to be very sheep-ish about telling people what I did for a living, but now I just boldly declare it and move on. The fact is the company provides a valuable service and I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside some of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

After the normal “status update” questions and a few stories about other mutual acquaintances we’d run into lately, the conversation started to peter off into the “it’s so good seeing you” phase.

I used to think that this was just an indirect way of saying “okay, I’m tired of talking to you, now go away.” But cultivating greater awareness in the moment, that didn’t quite seem right. We were all sharing a high degree of mutual positive feeling.

I realized that the one saying it was actually nervous and had run out of things to say. I had also run out of things to say, so I told them I’d be off with my shopping and to have a good time in New York.

In effect, I ended the conversation first and left them (and myself) wanting more.

Conversely, if I had tried to press on and keep the conversation going or even invite them out to someplace on the spot it probably would have turned awkward leaving a very different taste to their experience of having run into me.

I can’t know exactly what they’ll say about me later, but I feel that the conversation will be a generally positive one.