I can now clearly see the path I followed.

September 2009 – Dakhla, Marocco

Between the Sahara desert and the blue lagoon of Dakhla, I’m reading the classic book 4 Hours Work Week from Tim Ferriss (forever thankful to Emilio for giving me that book!). This book challenges the normal assumptions about work and lifestyle and shows new possibilities.
“The Book” is great but I’m skeptical. I think it has good ideas but everyone has to elaborate, evaluate and explore to see if they can work for themselves.
Reading this book wasn’t enough, but was the first of a series of actions towards freedom.

November 2009 – Amsterdam, Netherlands

I resume my old passion for websites and following a set of very well done online videos about Internet Marketing I launch the blog Percussion Conga, my first marketing experiment talking about conga drums.

March 2010 – online

Someone buys Mel Bay Art of Bongo Drumming DVD and I make my first (of few) dollar with my experiment.
I’m 100 times more happy with this dollar than with the salary from my day job. It’s the proof that the system WORKS… it’s just a matter of order of magnitude

May 2010 – Amsterdam, Netherlands

I change role and move to the Consultant department of the company. In the months after both personal and professional life deeply change.

I have to quit eStilo, the dancing group I was performing with, as an intense period of (very) frequent travels begins.
Europe but also Middle East, I’m often home only on weekends, or not at all. The good thing is that I love it! It’s new, challenging, exciting.
Another taxi, another flight, another city, another hotel.
It gave me lots of time with myself, for reading, writing, thinking (“What could be more stimulating than thinking about your own life?” said Harry Browne) and completely free me from the office life. Yes, ’cause when not traveling, I’m working from home which I really enjoy.

September 2010 – All around

I read the book Your Money or Your Life from Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. This book really changed my relation with money, and open my eyes on personal finance and financial independence.
The really powerful lessons are that spending more is not synonymous of living better and happier, and that financial calculations must be based on how much you spend, not on how much you make.
Enters the word frugal in my dictionary.

October 2010 – Fuerteventura, Spain

I read the crazy book Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Fisker. It was an eye-opener about becoming financially independent and achieving early retirement through an (extreme!) frugal lifestyle.
The lesson I got from this book is not how to save money by making your own soap, but rather how to work out the math for financial independence.
This is why I laugh when people tell me we need 4.000.000 euro to retire.

December 2010 – Albiate, Italy

I enjoy so much being a frequent traveler (and travelling light) that during the Christmas lunch with my family and relatives I make an important and unexpected announcement.

I’m not getting married like the aunts were expecting, but instead I announce the decision to take 3 months off work in 2011 to travel South America.

It’s basically what Tim Ferriss calls a “mini-retirement” – I spare you the reactions from the aunts.

June/August 2011 – Panama & Colombia

I have the time of my life Vagabonding around (another great book, from Rolf Potts).
In this mini-retirement I had learnt a lot.

Especially, I came back with a clearer idea about what I want in my future: more freedom, more independence, more experiences And about how to get it: go back to my online businesses experiments I had abandoned.

October 2011 – Berlin, Germany

While guest of a friend for the Berlin Salsa Festival, I read on my BlackBerry a post called I Just Bought My First Website.
I realize that buying an already established website can be a great idea to become an Internet Investor.

December 2011 – Amsterdam, Netherlands

I’m in the game, with a website about job opportunities in México, Colombia and Perú.

January/March 2012

I had to take care of my knee to fix a broken ligament. In the long days and evenings at home I spend time on my websites and damn, I love it! It’s creative, it’s challenging, it’s fun and I have a lot to learn.
Me like it!

February 2012

I expand my online activities with another job board dedicated to International Development Aid and NGOs careers.

March 2012

I just feel a great energy working on my websites and I want to know more and more.
I decide to give a real go in this new World and see where I can go: my finances are in good order, I can live in a cheap place if I want and I have no commitments.
The first day of Spring 2012 I write my resignation letter.

April 2012

I’m leaving the company, I talk with more and more people about my resignation and my unclear plans.
I get very interesting reactions, ranging from “I wish I could do that!” to “don’t do it! there’s recession!” or “you’ll eat my garbage” or again “good that you can try!”.
I let everyone talk and I listen. I listen to their fear, and their concern.

I feel I don’t have to convince or even less inspire anyone.
I just do what I love and I believe every free person should do the same.

In few days a new chapter of my life will open, I’ll write to share how the first weeks will be and to elaborate about freedom, personal finance or maybe mini-retirements.

Thanks for reading and comments are welcome!

It’s not just resigning from a company.
I’m resigning from the rat race, the corporate lifestyle, the investors logic, the work for someone else interests, the trap of the high salary, the safety of being employee, the comfort of doing what you know you’re good at, the tax advantages for expats in Holland.

In 9 days will disappear the Daniele 12-years of experience IT consultant, pluri-certified network security expert, 3000$/day consultant, high-frequent traveler.

I decided to turn page and be a self-employed man, to dedicate my time to Internet businesses and the other things I love to do.

You may think: it’s risky, it’s global economic end-of-the-World recession, I should have wait longer, I should feel lucky to have a good job and so on and so forth (if you have more please tell me in a comment).

Whatever you think: you’re most likely right and I know it already. Thanks!

But I resigned the first day of Spring 2012 and my last working day will be the 30th April, that ironically coincide with the biggest national holiday here in Netherlands: Queen’s Day.

I’ll put an orange t-shirt to celebrate in the streets of Amsterdam with millions of people – not the Queen, but my new freedom.

After a long long long time thinking I took the decision to resign on a Monday.
But when the day arrived, the doubts were all over me: “am I rushing it? shall I wait? am I crazy?” so I chose to wait few more days.
But life sent me a clear signal by e-mail: my manager was about to be out of office for 2 weeks, and my reaction was the very thing that convinced me to quit.

I reacted to that e-mail with something like “WHAAAAAT?!? I CAN’T WAIT 2 WEEKS!”.
That was the sign for me. My emotional reaction was so strong that I understood I was ready. I could not ignore myself.
So I wrote the “We gotta talk” message that was the beginning of the end.
I handed in my resignation via Skype as my company believes in remote working and we always use this instrument to communicate and to make $$$.

After I communicated my decision, I entered in a state of shock for a few days.
I was not sure if I really did it or not, and the day after I had to check the Sent Mail folder to double-check that I really did sent the resignation letter. It was there.

Looking backwards in the last 2,5 years I can now connect the dots, like Steve Jobs had explain in his renowned Stanford speech.
Below the video with the excerpt, it’s just 26 seconds:

I can now clearly see the path I followed.

I’ll talk about the path another time, now I really have to enjoy the last 9 days

It has been so much fun that Cloudio decided to set as a rule to condensate the last 3 articles in a single one, but of 333×3=999 words instead of the standard (for me, not for him apparently) 333 words format.

We believe that the 333 words format will become the de facto standard in the blogosphere, as Google Ranking algorithm responded extremely well to our posts and ranked our blogs very very high in the search result pages.

From my side, I decided to challenge Cloudio with this subject.

“What I appreciate in people” is not an easy one because both me and him are quite critical and have the “natural” tendency of see more the bad things than the good things in whomever we meet.

I keep on telling myself how great would be if I could stop judging people, but I can’t!
Do you know how I can stop being judgmental?

I noticed that the older I grow, the more I find difficult to find people I really appreciate.

On one side, became very easy for me to notice the things that I don’t appreciate, and I lower my level of tolerance towards them.

On the other side, I follow my own path and process to be where I’m now, leaving behind a lot of assumptions, dogmas, cliché and finding them in other people make me loose interest immediately.

But OK, this post is about what I appreciate in people and now about what I dislike so let’s focus on that.

Being this a 3×3 challenge, I specially appreciate 3 things in the people around me: genuineness, courage, life experiences.

Genuineness

I think being genuine is the gate to prosperity and fulfillment.
The famous “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” quote from Oscar Wilde has much more charm for me than “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.

Being genuine is not easy because it struggle with the “please everyone” approach. To please everyone we present our self to other people wearing a “mask” that we think they will like.

I suspect that the real reason why football is so popular has more to do with providing a common discussion topic than about the sport itself.

You like football? me too! WOW we click.

Unfortunately I never liked football but this didn’t make me more genuine, because I’m empathetic (meaning the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient being).
The necessity of connect with people made me create multiple Daniele’s versions to match the different people around me.

This made the way to genuineness particularly difficult for me, but when you less expect my biggest passion, Salsa, comes in the play to rescue me.

When you’re dancing, you can’t be anyone else than you.

Yes, you can emulate your favorite dancer, like I tried to emulate for long time Fermando Sosa, but ultimately is still you showing your genuinely limited skills.

You can perceive genuineness in people, as much as you can perceive that boring, sad, annoying feeling of pretending being someone they’re not.
Ultimately, I realized that everyone likes genuine people exactly because of that.
Everyone feels when someone is genuine, and it generates automatic appreciation.

Courage

When I left Italy to embrace the new exciting work career and life in Amsterdam, one of the more recurring question I got was “what a courage! don’t you have fear?”.

It made an impression on me because it took me sometime to understand what they meant.

The best quote for courage comes from Anais Nin, that I don’t know who was but said the wisest words that “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage”.

How much true is that??

Fear is a big barrier to ability to live as we want, and I already wrote about it on my SalsaWalkAbout blog so I won’t repeat the 489 words of that post.

I admire people that have courage, I respect them a lot, being courage of being truly genuine or courage to take risks to follow their dream.

Courage is often confused with craziness, when the action is coming from a personal choice that goes against the convenience of a risk-adverse normal lifestyle.

Life experiences

I could have said honesty, respect, positiveness. All qualities seek in the people around me and that I really appreciate.

Instead I decided to write how much I appreciate the life experiences of people, because lately I found extremely fascinating to listen to them.

Thanks to my friend Laura, a person that has life experiences to sell, I got to discover a storytelling night held by the Iranian cultural center here in A’dam.

Both professional and amateurs are standing up to share their life stories in front of a very mixed crowd in a living-room style atmosphere.

Beside the mastering of the English language, was mesmerized me was the beauty of the life experiences of those people.
Not all happy stories, of course, but intense, educational, enriching, amazing.

I realized how much I appreciate people that had such experiences and how much boring my life seems compared to their.

That’s one of the reasons why I decided to spice it up quitting my comfortable corporate stellar salary job.

Now I feel like I spoke too much about myself and not enough about the people I appreciate, but the title I choose was unconsciously made for that, as it’s “What I appreciate in people” and not “People I appreciate”.

This 3×3 challenge, dear Claudio, ends here and it was a great opportunity to write terrible posts, be uncomfortable and have unneeded pressure.
And understand something about our self and each other.

Thanks for asking me to join this writing idea, it was a flattering honor.

People are entertaining. People are amazing. People, sometimes, are useless.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

The future end is actually something we should remember to fully enjoy our present.
Another inspiration about the art of living, comes from the book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing“, where a nurse working with terminally ill patients summarize the more commons regrets that people have at the end of their life:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Is there an art of dying?

I don’t see it. Death is a tool to help us living for real, but I wouldn’t  waste my time waiting to meet the “tall, dark stranger” that we’ll all meet one day.

In Japan, where Cloudio is now, the legend say that elderly leave their home to go to die somewhere, on top of a mountain or in a forest,  in order not to disgrace their families.

I leave with a video from Adam Shaw worth more than 333 words:

Ciao

Subject for post #9: what I appreciate in people.

but then you’ll get bored, and you’ll want variety
and think inside you, “is it time for a quest?”
But what you realize, almost immediately

what is it the think that takes breath out your chest
you’re safe, you’ve food, certainly you’re lucky
what else do you want? leave some for the rest!

you look around, why your mind feels sharky?
it may take some time, months or even years
to figure it out, to see again things brightly

you can have it all, but still burst in tears
’cause the truth you don’t know what you really want
there’s more, there’s less, there are fears

there is what you shouldn’t, mustn’t and can’t
but who choose, who decided, who said that?
there is a presence that we all fear and daunt

isn’t you, isn’t me, nor a dog or a rat
but society, expectations and rants
that stuff your mind with those things, till it’s fat

when that’s clear, you feel like without pants
you feel naked, exposed and fragile
you can crumble, if someone just farts

will I ever reach 333 words to finish this damn tale?
I better write more and use longer sentences
I can see Cloudio desperate and all pale

just in case, let’s add some adjectives
but it’s enough, now I go back to my masterpiece
I was saying, is not to anyone that you’re showing your naked beauties

but to yourself, to that yourself that came out of you like a soul piece
and is standing in front, strongly shouting
screw society and stop using someone else face

what’s the conclusion of this, is there a meaning?
sure there is, let me think, I’m confused too
meaning is, who are you listening?

don’t listen at me, I’m a foul, listen you
that’s what happiness if for me
set you free, just be you.

Rule for post #8: It must be 333 words long, as all the posts so far were suppose to be. Furthermore, each noun can’t be used more than 3 times.

“Geg, did you ever walk barefoot on the snow?”

“Suuuure!”

“I did it once and was cool, let’s do it?”

“Why not?”

There we were, an Austrian and an Italian taking shoes and socks out, in a warm end-of -April day walking in the few snow left by the winter.

“Geg, don’t you feel pain in the feet?”

“No”

“Damn!!!!”

I run towards a big rock, where I could sit and energetically massage my frozen feet.

Geg was laughing while calmly continuing his walk.

Version 2

We were in a mountain somewhere in a park somewhere, somewhere in California.
Walking barefoot in the last snow that survived the spring sudden arrival.

My memory went back to a parish summer camps in the mountains in the north of Milano.
In one of the hikes we reached a beautiful glacier, and a young guy that was studying to become a priest, now Don Enrico, proposed us to try walking barefoot on the ice cold river.
Was so cold that I remember my friend  Davide peeing on his feet right after!
That experience made an impression on me.
We connected with nature doing something crazy, a moment so precious for us but completely silly for the rest.

Version 3

I was constantly amazed by the beauty of the country during the trip in US I did few years ago with 3 great friends.

We were hiking up to Neveda Fall, in the gorgeous Yosemite National Park in California, during a sunny day at the end of April.
25 degrees were rapidly melting the snow left covering the shadowed parts of the mountain, caught by surprise by the temperature increase of the last days.

With t-shirts and shorties, sweating by the effort and the heat, we reached a flat area covered by snow and I felt the urge of walking barefoot.
In on time my crazy Austrian friend and I were walking barefoot in the snow.

Soon after I was running towards salvation on a rock warmth by the sun.

Subject for post #7: What is Happiness for me

being the one that choose the subject for this post #5 of our 3×3 challenge, it’s easy to think that I picked up something I longed wanted to talk about, or something I just have a lot to say, or something I can easily write about.

But how could I have done that, if the spirit of our challenge is to challenge our self?
Didn’t you mention couple of time the famous “comfort zone”?
I surrounded myself with people that dislike their comfort zone, apparently.

So I did, and I choose this amazing title: “I will never do it again”.
I thought about it for a while, as I wanted at first to name it “3 things I will never do again”, but I knew that I would have struggle just to find a single one, plus you don’t like lists don’t you.

I’m not saying that everything I did in my life was good and went well – it wasn’t and I hope it will never be.

But everything has been made somehow positive, so let me think for 3 of the 33 minutes you gave me to write this post.

[3 minutes later...]

Can’t think of anything interesting that I won’t do it again.
I thought that I will never be someone I’m not just to be liked, I will never work in an office anymore, I will never stay 6 years in the same company anymore, I will never hurt someone I love anymore, boooooring!

What was a bad idea I had and that caused me trouble?

Surely, racing the motorbike on the coast of Como lake it’s something I *should* not do again!
It costed me 360 EUR, 3 months without driving license and 10 of the 20 points available to let you ever drive again.

But it’s no time to tell this story now, because I’m reaching the 33 minutes and 333 words.

I think I’ll never try to convince you, Cloudio, that my article is better than yours.

This post sucks.

I will never do it again!

Rule for post #6: Write 3 versions of the same story, keeping the post of 333 words.

My first apartment here, kindly offered by the company as part of the relocation package, was in a street leading to the park entrance, so I started falling in love with it… and since then, I choose my dwellings based on how far from the park they were.

Birds (including parrots!), old contorted trees, colorful flowers, little lakes and… people!
The human biodiversity that flood the park is as important as the nature in there.
A population doing all sorts of activities, enjoying the famous Dutch tolerance: sporting, BBQing, playing music, smoking joints, reading, practicing kung-fu, walking the family or the dog…

A full lap in Vondelpark main path is 3.3km.

I started jogging there in the beautiful spring of 2006, 1 lap, then 2, and increasing.
The first time I went for 3 laps, I had to stop in the bushes as I was feeling really really sick, sorry my Vondelpark!

With time things went better, I joined a group of expat runners and I got to run more more and more laps, till my proud personal record on 6th of April 2007: 8 consecutive laps 26.4Km!
By the end I knew by heart every hole, every bump and every step of the park.

Or at least I thought so, because actually I just discovered that there’s a sculpture of Pablo Picasso in Vondelpark!
I saw it a million times and I think is terrible.

Surely the park knows me more than I know him.

He saw me at day and at night, +30 or -10 degrees, doing an healthy run or cycling home drunk, alone or with friends, reading a book or having a BBQ.
Sometimes dancing Salsa, sometimes barefoot.
Sometimes kissing.
Once watching a fire dance show at night.

But there was something I never ever did in Vondelpark, even if it’s completely legal: public sex!!

Subject for post #5:  I will never do it again

That’s the simplest question ever. But I felt like if I was reaching my pocket looking for the wallet just to discover that was not there anymore. My answer wasn’t there anymore either.

Daniele,  you thought so long about life purpose, goals, dreams, and now that your friend asks you, you have no ready answer?

How is that possible. I got frustrated first, then disappointed with myself.

The answer was there. But it’s gone, like the wallet. Dreams change, you get closer to them and they change into something else, something different, something more.

I was dreaming to be a Terra Nova the other day, happily running around Vondel Park, getting close to a couple of lovers sit on a bench, happily sniffing around, and then for no reason loosing interest and run away towards something else. Like jumping from a dream to another.

My friend’s dream is to write a book, like a new Gabriel Garcia Márquez but with some innovative elements in it that I can’t share ’cause I mind my own dreams.

“My dream is to live in my own way. Before I was dreaming to inspire people, but I realize that that can’t be a goal. The goal can’t be to inspire. Inspire someone can only be a side-effect of living on your own terms…”

My friend interrupted: “Concrete, please!”

He was right, I was improvising an answer, side-tracking to avoid the frustration of admitting that I had no clear dream in my mind…

“Keep calm and be fearless“ I repeated to myself till I had some clarity.

“My dream is to live in my own way. I want to be financial independent. Free myself from the slavery of money. That ‘s the ultimate form of freedom. I value freedom and that’s a great achievement…”

Looks like this answer satisfied my friend. At least satisfied me.

Happy super Tuesday! But is Friday. Never stop dreaming!

Rule for post #4: Work on the article each of the 3 days, not just the last day!

To me, mom is love. To Google, “mom” is Ministry of Manpower in Singapore.
Google wants the web to be more human, more real, more natural, so why Google doesn’t start being more human too?
Why Mom is an institution of a city-state with little democracy? Someone searching for his “mom” should be taken with more respect, and sensibility than this, Google!

Or you probably serve someone bigger interest, Google, like the Singaporean regime showing us that there’s even a ministry taking in the upper consideration the work-life balance of the national workforce of this uber-developed island?

What do I know about Singapore, anyway? Only what Terzani says…

Free writing session #2 (3 minutes)

My mom doesn’t deserve this. Sorry mom, it’s Cloudio’s fault. I promise I’ll write you something better than this, and also better than the Christmas letter of this year.

My mom understands things in a hearthbeat. She can see through me, and if she meets someone I’m with, after 5 minutes, talking normally a different language, she understands everything. Then she tells me the obvious I couldn’t see, but only when I’m ready to listen.

2 Christmas ago with the family I watched for the first time the recording of my parents wedding. It was a kind of a shock for me because for the first time I saw my parents acting, moving, and getting married… and in the video they were younger than me!

Free writing session #3 (3 minutes)

But wait a second, I don’t have to talk about my mom. The subject is just mom. Can be any mom?
Like the mom of my friend, that talks nothing but money, success, houses and cars?
Or the moms that always threat their sons like kids.
I wouldn’t change my mom with any other mom around.
My mom always supported me, unconditional support on any of my choices, and she knows very well that there will be more strange choices to come.
When I start talking about something out of her normality, like moving to live in Amsterdam, like buying a van, like taking a sabbatical or vagabonding around, first she reacts twisting her nose.
Then she start reading. Studying. Understanding. Till she’s ready to provide her unconditional support.

Subject for post #3: Dreams