When living anywhere is no longer an obstacle to getting exactly what you need…

Live outside of the US long enough and you’ll find something you can’t live without, something unavailable in local stores.

Occasionally (though not at the moment) I really miss home. This often comes in waves, or at certain times of year (most common in the fall). I often find I’m not missing a particular person or place, but something more mundane.

What I’m really trying to admit is that I miss Amazon Prime and Peanut Butter.

Or more generally, the US does a great job of getting you what you (think) you want when you want it.

Now I’m the first to point out that most Americans are astounded to learn you can find almost anything within walking distance, most places on earth.

Within 1 city block of my apartment in Budapest there are several pharmacies, a grocery store, 2 small markets, a 24-hour print shop, 4 hair salons, a ruin pub, two liquor stores, a specialty Belgian beer bar, a specialty tea shop (amazing!), and various restaurants offering sushi, turkish food, and lots local fare. The apocalypse could literally set in and we’d have almost everything we need within a stone’s throw.

Life is different in cities built before cars.

In most places when you need something you walk out and get it.

And this is great, except when:

• I don’t want to spend time walking around trying to find things
• I have esoteric needs, and not everything I want is available

After wishing for the nth time that I could just ‘order it on Amazon’ I realized this was a BS excuse – everything *is* available–it’s just a little more expensive, takes a little longer to receive, and there’s always a chance it gets nabbed by a customs official.

But over the last year or two I’ve steadily dialed this in. Here’s how I get anything I need anywhere I’m living on planet earth.

* One thing I should point out: if you’re in Asia, skip this post and just go to the nearest mall. You could easily survive the end of the world in most of them.

#1 Take advantage of local stores and markets

[The corner store in Budapest]

Whereas in the US a lot of the good stuff is restricted to farmer’s markets, CSA home delivery, or some select big box stores, most places I’ve lived abroad are chock full of local high-quality goods on every street corner.

The corner store next to my apartment has some of the best produce you can find, period. And the best part is you don’t have to ask if it’s sustainable/organic/grass-fed because there probably isn’t another option. Factory farms aren’t a big thing here.

You also find the same kinds of farmer’s markets and even CSA-type delivery options you had back home. The best way to find these is ask locals and scour listings on local websites or Facebook groups.

Household goods are readily available:

Unless you’re going to a remote Indonesian island, you can buy standard household goods anywhere.

I pick up the following every time I move (usually 2-3 times a year):

• An external monitor for work
• Sport specific gear (you can always get if something is happening locally)
• A blender (essential)
• A scale (for health experiments)
• A fan
• Yoga mat
• Printer paper/notepad – for work sketches
• Coffee mug (because I need a real cup of coffee in the morning)
• Can opener (because Airbnb apartments never seem to have these)

All you need is one trip to the mall and your set for all of this.

#2 Use one of the many international Amazon stores

I’m not sure why it took me so long to get this–probably the mental block that if I left the US Amazon was dead to me–but in Europe alone I can buy from any of the following:

• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.de (Germany)
• Amazon.es (Spain)
• Amazon.fr (France)
• Amazon.nl (Netherlands)
• Amazon.it (Italy)

That’s a lot of options. They key here is that you won’t pay any kind of tariff for importation which you would when shipping from outside the EU.

Here’s a full list of international Amazon websites.

So if you’re lucky enough to be in one of these countries you’re back on the Amazon gravy train.

My major complaint about country specific Amazon stores is availability of goods I want as well as international shipping restrictions. Amazon.co.uk will not ship most of what I want to Hungary. And Amazon.es does not have most of the things I’m looking to order, so you just have to take what you can get.

If what you need is only available on Amazon.com:

If you have a really speciality item you can start thinking about shipping to a US virtual mailbox and forwarding (more below)–but absolutely see if the item is available through the regional Amazon website first.

#3 Start using iHerb.com for Supplements (mostly)

I’ve been using iHerb for a few years now and it works like a charm.

They have nearly everything nutrition-related I would order on Amazon, and the shipping costs are very reasonable.

Most of my packages sent to Spain and Hungary have been about $3-7 shipping with an arrival time of average 10 days to 2 weeks. It’s no Amazon Prime, but it will get the job done, and with a little planning ahead you can have things waiting for you at various outposts on your trip, not to mention keeping you steadily supplied at a base of operations.

Oh yeah, and they have Peanut Butter.

It’s important to consider local customs when ordering, but iHerb is very helpful in breaking things down for you. The Canary Islands, for example, requires shipments to be less than $85 in value and under 4 lbs (the checkout page won’t let you select another option).

In Hungary you will get taken to the cleaners if you use DHL with orders of any real value (anything I’ve ordered over about $25) but you can squeak airmail packages through with no hassle and $0 in customs fees. Caveat: about 1 out of every 5 packages takes about 10 weeks or gets nabbed by customs and held for ransom. I usually just write this off as the cost of doing business. (I haven’t looked into where iHerb is shipping from but they do have country-specific domains like eu.iherb.com, so it may be better to order from whatever is closer).

That said, I usually don’t have any trouble with shipping, and it’s often cheap (e.g. $3-5).

• iHerb.com – International Amazon.com of nutrition supplements.

Pro Tip: If you’re staying in a place for a while it pays to test out the different shipping options if the first one you choose gets hammered in customs or takes forever.

#4 Get a Virtual Mailbox in the US

Having a virtual mailbox that functions as a US mailing address and mail forwarding service is key (related: 5 things I’d do differently if I left the US today).

Most of the problem with receiving products worldwide is not shipping itself it’s that the product you want only offers US shipping. Problem solved.

Personally I use Traveling Mailbox. When mail or packages arrive I’m notified by email. All I have to do is enter a forwarding address and request forwarding for that item. I also have the option to group several items into one bulk shipment.

Shipping this way takes a bit longer–a week to Traveling Mailbox and another week or two to your destination—and there can be a substantial added cost (as well as some risk with customs).

So let’s be clear: shipping this way is outrageously expensive.

• Shipping a single credit card from US address to Budapest – $6.00
• Shipping a bundle of 2 credit cards and a genetics kit from Athletigen – $17.00

But let’s think about this clearly: relative cost here is added shipping cost minus the amount of money I save by not living in the US.

So even if I ship a bundle of items worth $100 every quarter that’s only $400 a year, and I can absolutely guarantee I’m still accruing net savings by not living in California.

After getting over this particular stumbling block it’s clear that I should order whatever I need and not worry about it.

Don’t forget, there is always the chance that customs nabs your box too, but so far I haven’t had this happen with anything I’ve shipped (knock on wood).

• Traveling Mailbox – US-based Virtual Mailbox and forwarding service. Note that you can sign up even if you are already outside the US. The special form they need notarized can be done with an online notary service (last time I used this online notary service. Make sure you VPN to the US to get the best price on it).

#5 Find and Use Other Online Retailers

Very occasionally it makes sense to order from another online retailer that ships in your region.

I haven’t used too many of these but you can find them by:

• Asking expats who have lived in the area for a while (friends or local Facebook groups) or
• Searching around on Google.

• Example:
  • https://www.pinksun.co.uk/ ships what appear to be some pretty high-quality supplements around in Europe (no additive grass fed whey protein).

Like I said, this isn’t a common occurrence but it can be worth spending a few minutes looking around for these.

#6 Go to the Good Old Fashion Post Office (Moving Gear Regionally)

[One of the bags I shipped from the Canary Islands to Budapest last May.]

It’s easy to forget that the post office still works extremely well in many areas. I’ve shipped goods around Europe, and from Europe to and from the US with no problem. It isn’t extremely cheap and not necessarily fast, but if you need a box or duffel sent half way around the world (e.g. moving your base of operations) it can be done without much effort.

Earlier this year I shipped 2 large, heavy duffels full of clothing and surfing/kitesurfing equipment from the Canary Islands to Hungary for about $100 each. When you add up the hassle of lugging them around + airline luggage charges this ended up being a pretty good deal. Instead of dealing with luggage this freed up the option to travel around Southern Spain for a few weeks before heading back to Hungary.

And don’t forget one of my favorite uses for the post: jettisoning gear that you can’t give/throw away but you don’t really need anymore (I’ve done this after specific types of trips, like sending cycling gear home after a trip in France in a fixed rate box).

The post office can also be used to have friends and family ship stuff to you, but if you’re going that route it may be similar in travel time to (but much less expensive than) a virtual mailbox service.

At the moment I’m pooling a box of select travel upgrades at home that I expect to have shipped this month (thanks dad!).

#7 Get things Hand Delivered (it pays to have friends/family visiting)

And of course, having your friends visit and slamming them without about 20 lbs of extra luggage is an option.

This is more likely to go well if it’s a family member or a close friend with some kind of moral obligation to help you out, but occasionally you can sneak a pair of shoes or something small in with a traveler coming from the US.

Bottom Line: Get what you want when you (sort of) want it

It turns out you can actually survive without Amazon Prime, but you don’t have to live indefinitely without Peanut Butter.

After 5 years abroad I have no problem spending some extra money to get things I want, more or less when I want them.

One upside to a little added difficulty in ordering products online is a reduction in impulse buys. If I’m going to ship something for weeks with the potential for it not showing up, I’d better really want it.

If you have experience with another mail-forwarding service or know of other options here I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The post 7 Ways to Get Anything Anywhere appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

“In life, we must have flexibility. Our spirits must be able to move freely. To be too stiff and rigid is to be brittle and lacking in responsiveness.”
–Musashi

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that I’ve obsessed about work/life balance for a long time.

If you own 100% of your time you decide when to work, when to stop, and when to take a few days off. It’s a lot easier to just work endlessly while stressing out about how you’re not really ‘living the dream’.

At the beginning of this experiment I didn’t work enough, and now I work way too much. Most people who do this long enough realize the importance of staying in one place and developing routine, but excessive routine can become a self-imposed prison.

A few things I’ve learned about myself:

• I love to work.
• I need to feel like I’m 100% in control of my life.
• I need a lot of built-in recovery time.
• I can get really carried away with what I’m doing.

Big surprise, here’s the solution that balances this all out: Work in ruthlessly protected cycles with carefully-scheduled breaks.

As always, it’s the implementation of simple things that can trip you up.

“You are such a naive academic. I asked you how to do it, and you told me what I should do. I know what I need to do. I just don’t know how to do it.“

– Andy Grove quoted in Deep Work.

Taking a page straight out of strength-training I introduced a deload week into my life.

This is my second ‘One Thing’ this year, the first being reading a book a week. As I explained earlier, despite the simplicity these two things have had massive impacts on my life and trajectory.

The concept of the deload week is simple: every 4th week, drop the intensity and/or weight by 50% to give yourself a chance to recover.

This is already a fundamental part of my strength training–the key to preventing injury and maintaining progress–so the deload week wasn’t hard to apply to the rest of my life. I started working 3 weeks on followed by a deload week where I drop to 50% of my normal working time (which also syncs with my fitness schedule).

Practically speaking, cutting work time by 50% can mean:

• Working half days for part of the week and taking the last 2 days off.
• Shifting to work on something else I’ve been putting off, which creates a mental break through novelty.
• Traveling to a new place, which gives me a fresh perspective and shatters normal routines.

Having an enforced break every month also creates a deadline and sense of urgency during the 3 weeks leading up to it.

Having a week off a month frees up a ton of time and mental energy to explore things I haven’t had time for, to travel, get my shit together, or to just sit by the pool at home if that’s what I need to do.

The routines I use most of the time, while incredibly useful, can be damaging if pursued indefinitely. I’m one to put my head down and grind things out to a point of absurdity. Without picking your head up once and a while you can easily miss your the targets. Most of the time because the target has moved.

While routines are intended to automate basic decision-making so you can focus on what matters, I’ve noticed in my own life a significant emotional component that can go haywire. Sometimes, for whatever reason, a routine can go bad. Maybe you’re gradually loosing steam and motivation, maybe you’re living in a depressing place, etc, but the upshot is the routine starts to drive you into the ground instead of elevate you to the next level.

This is why the deload week is so useful: it’s good to tear the algorithm apart on a regular basis to keep it running properly. A lot of great ideas and energy for this comes from traveling, where I might pick up a new habit for the week that I find needs to be added in once I’m home. At the very least a great deal of new energy gets passed back into the system.

I’m not first or only one to think about the concept. I have a number of friends who have been doing variations of it for years with great success. It was also interesting to see Tim Ferris post about the same thing as I was working out the details of my own deload week.

Don’t you get less work done by ‘taking off’ a week a month?

No, it’s precisely the opposite, for a couple reasons.

First, during the deload week I 80/20 the hell out of any work I’m doing. That means I focus on the critical few things that need to get done. The rest of the work I would normally engage in is either very low-impact or experimental, with an unknown outcome. There’s no downside to temporarily cutting all of this.

Second, as Tim also wrote, my best ideas come during these weeks off. They’ve also led to some major changes in direction in life and business where more of the same would have only taken me further off course. Very often it’s more effective for me to not work than it is to blindly charge ahead without questioning the motives and the assumed outcomes.

“Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

My energy levels and motivation at the end of the deload week are sky-high, and I’m ready to jump back in with both feet. Grinding through a 4th, 5th, or 6th week without a break is way less effective than mixing it up.

The Deload week answers another important question.

“…beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.”

– Hunter Thompson’s Letter to a Friend

The big question has always been: how to get it all in?

Surprisingly enough, even with 100% control of your life it’s easy to slip into the deferred life plan. The thinking being something like ‘let me just build my business, then I’ll do X.’ Right.

I’ve recently been reminded that the warrior’s journey is long, and that if you want to ‘live the dream’ you should probably just do that now, don’t be in a hurry, and figure out how to make it work as you go along.

Taking one week partially- or fully- off means you have as many as 12 weeks a year to travel to a new country, start a new project or habit, or do something completely different. You’ll work twice as hard to make this work once you experience it.

I have no interest in doing anything, travel or work, indefinitely, but I want a lifestyle where I have an abundance of both.

I think 3 weeks on, 1 week off gets pretty close to this ideal.

A really important caveat

An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.

It’s very important to stress that the deload week is in no way synonymous with sitting around, especially at home. The point here is alternate activity: new places, new routines, etc.

Do not make the mistake of thinking you can sit at home for a few days and recharge.

The Logistics of the Deload Week

[Photo: Recent Deload Week in Slovenia]

What does this look like in practice?

Important point: I utterly failed at implementing a deload week the first 4-5 times due entirely to planning failure.

I started testing the idea in mid 2015, but my trips either didn’t happen or were converted to ‘stay-cations’ at the last minute.

On one trip I got as far as the airport before realizing that 100% of accommodation was booked out in the place I wanted to visit (see my deload SOP below to avoid this idiocy). The others fizzled out as I tried to make last-minute travel arrangements (good luck doing that in European summer).

So how does someone with 5 years of consecutive traveling experience fail so miserably at logistics? Couple reasons:

1. Planning and logistics are a lot harder during a tightly scheduled work sprint. There isn’t a whole lot of down-time to make travel planning happen when you’re in the zone. I also hadn’t totally committed to the concept of taking time off which meant prioritizing work over anything else (like trip planning).
2. Out-and-back travel is more expensive and requires tighter logistcs. Once you have a full-time apartment, have to pay for the return flight, and have fixed dates the costs go way up. All this is normal for the real world and not a big deal, but makes me more time and budget conscious when planning. And, unlike full-time travel where you usually have a time limit on the place you’re staying, without a fixed deload week there is nothing forcing you to hit the road. Easy to let this slip.

Here’s how I fixed the glitch:

1. Scheduling 2 hours per week on logistics on Saturdays, which gives me 6 total hours in 3 weeks to make it happen.
2. Booking flexible accommodation and transportation as early as possible. Booking.com and Agoda both have free cancellation on most rooms, which means no-risk and Zero-BTUs spent on thinking about this. I’ll now book 2-3 rooms in different locations and keep the best plan later. You can also do this with some transportation options: Wizzair out of Hungary has a $10 flexible fare fee, so you can change your flight indefinitely (only added cost is difference in fare price but this usually isn’t too bad).
3. Having 5-10 trip plans outlined a ready to go. Having a list of the next few places I’d like to visit with some basic logistics ready makes it easier to execute when the time comes. I have a Trello board called ‘trip planning’ where I can easily see this. I also create reusable trip plans so I can easily hit the same place again (Croatia, anyone?).
4. Keeping trips as simple as possible. I don’t need to see everything anymore and I much prefer going to 1 great place and staying there for a week.
5. Practicing effective decision-making. It doesn’t really matter where you go, the key is to get out of normal routines and living spaces, so pull a few options up and make it happen.

Deload Week Planning SOP

Here’s the actual standard operation procedure (SOP) I use now for trip planning.

Principles:

• The goal is to reboot, take a deep breath, get back up to 50,000 feet, and focus on other things besides grinding out work.
• You don’t have to travel, but travel helps get out of your routines and helps reflection.
• The goal is not constant movement, although it can be.
• You must plan these well ahead of time with a plan A and plan B, ready to deploy, with all logistics dealt with ahead of time.
• It’s better to leave on Saturday and come back earlier (Thursday/Friday) so there’s time to readjust before diving in again.
• Set 2 hours on Saturdays during your 3-week sprint to plan these out.
• Finalize the trip at least 1 week out.
• Book rooms on Booking.com or Agoda with free cancellation and set a reminder to confirm.
• Some weeks need to be ‘business of life weeks’, meaning that you are catching up on important things in your life:
  • Major Decisions
  • Focusing on getting closer to a non-work goal.
  • More complicated Trip planning
  • Etc.
  • Look at your goals, and evaluate where you are.
• In order for your personal life to flow correctly you must take these personal SOPs as seriously as work SOPs.
• The suggested options are:
  • Work 3 weeks, take 1 week off, repeat.
  • Or work 6 weeks with a weekend trip in the middle and then take a week.

The quick travel checklist for booking a trip:

1. 2 minutes – Check Booking.com and see what % booked is to make sure there are no holidays or events that time period. Goal is less than 80% booked.
2. 5 minutes – Check transportation on Rome2Rio, Momondo, Wizzair, and Kayak (flexible date search) and make sure there are cheap and hopefully flexible options. More: Travel Apps I use Daily
3. Make sure total trip cost is less than $100 per day.

Unplugging

A couple of rules:

• Keep your Tuesday work meetings, but skip the rest.
• Make sure all critical tasks are covered.
• Get the hell of the computer as much as possible for the week.

The Upshot

My first and most successful deload was a week spent hiking in Slovenia with some quality time sitting by the lake. Here’s the parting shot for this post:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BK0xWdujG1T/?taken-by=spartantraveler

Additional Resources:

• Deep Work by Cal Newport. See more on my /books/ page.
• Why You Need a “Deloading” Phase in Life (Tim Ferriss)
• 22 Things I’ve learned as a Digital Nomad
• The 9 Then 3 Lifestyle (TropicalMBA)

The post The Deload Week for Work and Life appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

If you haven’t read it, the premise is simple: to accomplish any goal, do the next thing makes all other tasks else easier or irrelevant.

That ‘one thing’ is the lead domino in a sequence that will take you where you want to go. All you have to do is stay focused on the next piece.

These ‘one things’ can be individual tasks or projects, or they can be routines, habits, major life upheavals, and so on. The hardest part is being clear-headed enough and doing the work to find the key next step.

And sometimes I just stumble into them. They’re usually incredibly simple and have been right in front of me the whole time.

Here are the things I’ve done in 2016 that changed the game:

#1 – Reading a book every 2 weeks

Wait, but you said ‘a book a week’! Yes, but things have to start somewhere-

Right after college I decided to read one non-fiction book a week for the rest of my life. It was clear to me from an early age that the faster I learned the faster I got what I wanted, and reading widely was the key. I started rising early and reading from 6:30-8:30 AM. With the time hard-scheduled I was tearing through books at a furious pace.

The only problem was: it wasn’t sustainable. I lasted 10 weeks, life intervened, and I resumed normal reading habits.

Over the next decade I tried a half-dozen times to pick the habit back up. This usually coincided with the start of the year and new aspirations, but like many new year’s resolutions it never stuck. I usually burned out after about 10 books and only managed to read a handful the rest of the year.

Then about a year ago I started seeing Facebook posts from friends who had made the same goal and actually accomplished it: 50+ books in a year. My first thought was “No way. They must not have work to do or lives.”

But they obviously did, and I started thinking it over. What if, I thought, instead of trying to read a book a week I tried to read one every 2 weeks. 2 books in a month is no big deal. All you have to do is read about 10% a day on the Kindle and even if you miss a few days you’ll still make it.

I started out on this in early 2016, and here’s the surprising thing that happened: I finished a few books. I got smarter. I started seeing immediate effects on my life and business. I had some massive shifts in my mindset and the framework I live my life in. Decisions in life and business that seemed difficult before became easier or irrelevant with the new information at my disposal.

And a powerful positive feedback loop was created. This led me to having intense motivation to read more, so I did. I carved out more time to read, and started to default to reading instead of doing other things to fill time.

So while my pace started out at a book every 2 weeks, I tricked myself into reading more than that. I’m now reading a book a week, which on a Kindle is 15% a day (14% and some change, but there’s always a day you won’t get through 15%).

And now we’re back to the Power of Habit. Start small, with something you can handle, and build from there. Don’t throw something out because it’s not perfect at the beginning. This is a manifestation of the well-known ‘floss one tooth’ strategy of habit formation (I’ve always called it the ‘let’s go a little further and see how we feel’ strategy, after my dad tricked both of us into climbing a 9,000’ peak one day. 9.5 hours later we were astounded at what we’d done). Since everything depends forming new good habits and breaking bad habits, learning how to make them stick is really important.

Instead of starting furiously and burning out, I’ve eased into a new schedule, which gradually gets more aggressive: reading is now my #1 priority first thing in the morning (it’s hard-scheduled on the calendar).

And what’s the upshot here? I’ve gotten a lot smarter, which translates into better decision-making, which means I’m getting more of what I want and less of what I don’t want, but I’m also more centered as a human since I have a few more 1/10% of the big picture. And so on.

Some practical advice on reading a book a week:

First of all, only read highly recommended books.

For the same reason I never watch a movie rated under 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, I rarely pull a book off the shelf that hasn’t be labelled ‘Best…’ or ‘One of the best books I read all year’ by a friend or believable person.

Start with friends in person or poll them on Facebook. From there, you can move onto a few of my favorite lists:

• Tim Ferris Book Club and this list from the podcast.
• Tim Ferris List of Fiction
• Derek Sivers Book List
• Ryan Holiday’s Book List
• And if I can add my 2 cents, they will be going on spartantraveler.com/books. So far I’ve posted all the books I’ve read in 2016.

Second, hard schedule time to read.

My next ‘one thing’ underneath trying to read a book every 2 weeks was to start reading for the first hour of the day. This was my original habit, and it sets a powerful precedent for the day. It’s also less likely your reading time will get thrown under the bus if it’s the first thing you do.

I also appreciate that learning from smart people for the first hour brings my thinking to a higher level before I dive into work.

My second One Thing for the year

Besides inhaling new information and perspectives, there’s another change in routine that had a profound effect on my life this year, mainly because it’s given me more time to ponder what I’ve learned and reflect on where I’m going.

Incredibly challenging to implement but another game changer.

Stay tuned, I’ll outline it in my next post.

[Photo: My original dog-eared copy of the 4-Hour Workweek]

The post Reading a Book a Week and Other ‘One Things’ in 2016 appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

How does one go about making money online? Or alternatively, what are the best investments one can make in online businesses?

I was recently surprised by my own answers to these questions. As one of the most basic ways to make money online, it didn’t occur to me until I saw the numbers that I was getting a 237% return on money invested (ROI) in building an authority site.

In other words, for ever $1 we spent on content in 2015 we made $3.37 back.You can get an idea of what this growth looks like from our internal dashboard above.

The rest of this post is about how this is possible, and how you can learn how to do the same.

—

One of the most common questions I get is: ‘how do you make money online’ and ‘how can I do that too?’

I’ve been purposefully vague on this site about the specifics, not necessarily to hide what I’m doing but more because it’s been a fluid progression from thing to thing and for a long-time was hard to pin down into one classification.

So here’s a partial answer: it all started with writing content and building websites.

When total beginners ask me “how can I get started working online” I usually answer:

• Get an account on Upwork.
• Start writing.

I’ll never forget the look on my girlfriend’s face when, in the midst of looking for a job locally (in Hungary), I told her to think about expanding her job search globally. Why would you restrict yourself to some pretty horrible options in your local area when you could land a job as a copywriter or virtual assistant for some busy executive in the USA? Fast forward a few months and she was cranking out content and receiving payments at a pace to exceed a salaried job here.

Content is still king on the internet, and many great business have been built on a solid content strategy.

Step 1 is learning how to write content. Step 2 is learning how to turn that content into an asset you own.

What Exactly is an Authority Website?

An authority website is just a high-quality, well-respected site on a topic, one that doesn’t cut corners and provides some real value.

And there’s a really important distinction here: there are two paths if you go down the road of building websites, which both have to do with Google (the primary, lowest maintenance, highest converting, long-term traffic source):

• White hat, meaning avoiding breaking Google’s terms of service, and
• Grey/Black Hat which means trying to game the system.

And in case you aren’t in the loop yet, here is the simple rule: any time you game a system you will eventually get caught.

I know a number of people who have lost large 6 figures in a single Google algorithm update. I’ve also personally been smacked in my early days for cheating, and I’ve watched a couple of my websites completely crash and burn.

With that in mind, I have no interest in doing any work that doesn’t build a long-term asset that will either make me money for a long time to come or can be sold later on. It’s ditch-digging where I know the ditch is going to be around for the foreseeable future. And it means we’re only talking about building high-quality, completely white-hat websites. It’s potentially slower and more difficult, but not necessarily when you factor in the cost of doing it wrong.

And the the hilarious punchline to many SEO discussions ends up being: “Well, you could always just try to create something of actual value…”. Make something great and people will link to it, and in the long run this is a lot easier than trying to game things (this applies to a lot more than online business).

Authority Sites vs Niche Sites vs Amazon Affiliate Sites

Many of you may be familiar with niche websites or Amazon Affiliate sites, which are often hyperfocused sites intended to dominate a specific keyword or product category. No doubt people are making big money off these and have for a long time. As I’ve mentioned before this is one of the first things I played around with online via Pat Flynn’s original niche site challenge.

The advantages of going niche can be increasing the chances of winning ranking on the keywords you’re after and the likelihood that site visitors will be willing to buy something, simply because it’s so focused on the topic.

The disadvantage of going too niche though the difficulty in getting white-hat links (especially if your site is pretty hollow on the content front) and pigeonholing yourself into a place where you have limited products or content options.

So here’s my litmus test for an authority site: can I get onto the front page of Reddit or get written about by a major newspaper with this site? There are many layers in between but that’s where I want to go.

Here are some details on what this kind of site can look like.

The Case Study: 237% Return With a Content Site

I was blown away when I finally did my 2015 taxes to see that every $1 we spent on content in 2015 we made a little over $3.37 back.

Here is what the actual numbers look like in 2015:

Writer Cost: $5,255.09
Revenue: $17,742.34

Net: $12,487.25

That’s technically a 237% return, which is quite frankly insane.

While I’ve commonly seen a 100% growth on overall business year to year the margins are much smaller, and it’s not quite as discreet, simple, and tangible as a standalone website like this.

Ok, fantastic numbers, but as usual this isn’t the whole story. I haven’t counted my time invested on the site, nor have I included staff and operating expenses like technology (e.g. hosting) either.

I actually spent very little time working directly on this project since it was managed by one of our full-time staff. Her time was split on this and other projects, so to fudge my personal investment in managing her we’ll just say she spent 100% of her time there.

Here’s what the complete numbers look like:

Revenue: $17,742.34

Writer Cost: $5,255.09
Staff Cost (site manager): $6,769.38
Other Costs (e.g. hosting): $720.00

Total Costs: $12,744.47

Net: $4,997.87
Return: 39.2%

Even with all the costs added back in it still beats the hell out of any other investment I’ve made.

For reference, the S&P 500 returned an estimated 1.19% in 2015.

The beauty of running an authority site like this–as opposed to a typical staff-heavy business that forever requires a workforce to run-is how easily we can reduce costs and still make money. Once the posts and rankings are in place we could cut writer and staff costs by 80% or more and still earn a similar amount.

The original niche site I built back in 2012 still makes $500+ a month and I haven’t looked at it in years.

How we built our Authority Site

Since we hadn’t really written much content as of early 2015 (the site was started in very late 2014 with just a few posts to get it going) it’s easy to attribute the growth and revenue to the added content.

Over the course of 2015 we wrote about 127 posts. This means our average cost / post was about $41.38.

Here’s what the organic traffic looked like in 2015:

This isn’t mind-blowing traffic, but the key is building traffic that has some potential to convert later. More on that in a second. Also note it looks like it stalls out at the end but that’s just because Thanksgiving-December sucks in our market.

So how much link-building did we do: Exactly zero, from my memory.

All of our focus was writing the most detailed, highest quality content we could afford, and making sure we had a good monetization strategy in place.

It also involved some basic keyword research and a rough content plan, but this was honestly pretty loose.

How did we make so much on so little traffic?

Ok, so here is the catch that I can’t easily gloss-over. The site was monetized very effectively, primarily by lead-generation, which is both a business I run (with a partner) and was in place ahead of time.

I need to underscore the point here: we had a damn good way to monetize this site before we ever thought about building it. In other words, we were thinking about and working on the end game before we implemented a thing.

Here are some numbers on what the monetization looks like:

• Pageviews (2015): 110,678
• Revenue (2015): $17,172.34
• Estimated RPM: $155

That means we made $155 for every 1000 page loads on the site. Back when I ran a blog network we were lucky to hit $10 for the same amount.

We also ran one 300×250 Adsense ad unit on the page (which is factored in here), and played around with some lead magnets to collect email addresses.

So is this is a non-typical case? In the sense that it will be hard to monetize a website this effectively from the beginning? Absolutely. But can you build out a monetization strategy like this later on? Yes, I’ve seen others do it with spectacular results.

And obviously this underscores the point that if you already have the product to sell, a content strategy makes a lot of business sense.

The key though is planning, thinking, and understanding how you’ll go about selling things on the site later on. The industry term for this is basically ‘keyword research’, which means finding out just how much the words people type into Google are worth, and how likely you are to rank well for them.

But I know websites that did not have the endgame in place before getting started, and now make 10s or even 100s of thousands of dollars a year. Because they chose the right category and kept plugging away.

My first website came at is from this direction too: building first and monetizing later. After building my first niche website back in 2012 and seeing $3-$5 clicks on Adsense on the site my thinking went along the lines of ‘there must be a lot more money here than I’m getting’, and a lead-generation business was born.

How things are progressing in 2016

We’re having similar results in 2016 so far, with about 151% return for money invested in content on the site.

If you add up all costs we’re running at about 17.2% overall return.

Here are the numbers through August 2016:

Revenue: $19,812.29

Writer Cost: $7,895.77
Staff Cost: $7,827.31
Other Costs: $1,181.00

Total Costs: $16,904.08

Net: $2,908.21
Return %: 17.2%

On initial glance it seems like we’re doing a little worse this year, but looking more closely:

• We’re on pace to do over $30,000+ in revenue on the site this year, which is a solid bump from $17,742 last year. Our monthly goal by the end of the year is actually to hit about $9,000 a month.
• We’ve invested much more heavily in content, and our writer costs have increased (we’re always trying to increase quality).
• We’ve paid for some fancier tools and training, which you can find at the bottom of this post.
• We’ve invested more staff time in building out the site, which adds overhead.

Some Downsides to Authority Site Building

If you’re thinking ‘wait, this doesn’t look like that great of an investment’, I understand.

First of all, this is pretty gnarly, grinding work. What I mean by that is there is no instant gratification here of the kind you might get with doing PPC (like ‘well, I made $500 on my first day!’). I’d liken it more to going to the gym: set a time horizon of at least 6 months before you expect real results. Anything before that is a bonus.

In reality, it took us about a year of work to get things moving on the website in this case study. Think about that for a minute if you’re just starting out: you need to be able to cover a year’s worth of content, hosting, and all other expenses associated with the site before you make any real money. Obviously, results vary, but since most people (myself included) f#ck up their first site or two it make sense to be really conservative when planning.

A lot of people also can’t live in $3000-$5000 a year either (unless you’re a westerner really scraping by in Chiang Mai or Bali). One thing to keep in mind about the numbers above though is we were paying a full-time employee to work on the site, so if you were bootstrapping you could cut a lot of those costs out.

But this major lag-time in revenue earning is part of the reason I got out of the site building business a while back and got into something that scaled a bit faster (lead-generation). It’s interesting to see how, once day-to-day cashflow needs were covered, I’ve circled back to websites as an obvious long-term investment and asset building activity.

In terms of grinding it out, if you proceed down this path you’ll probably do most of the work in the beginning. This is one reason Spartan Traveler has not grown sequentially, since I write 100% of the posts (not advisable) they come out in fits and starts between projects.

But as a business, building an authority website is very simple without too many moving parts. And I like that.

Alright, so if you’ve read this far you’re probably in one of a few buckets:

1. You already build sites like this and this is the equivalent of stats pr0n / procrastination.
2. You’re new, and want to figure out how to get started.
3. You’re sitting in an office somewhere trying to figure out how to get out of it.

I think the following resources will be useful no matter what stage you’re in:

Resources for Building Authority Sites

You don’t need that much gear to build authority sites, so choose wisely and upgrade only as needed.

• Authority Hacker Training – (Free and Paid: The Authority Site System (Beginners), Authority Hacker Pro, Free Get Started Webinar) – This is the most thorough, well-organized, and high-quality training I’ve seen for building websites. I originally bought this for my staff member who is in charge of building the site and it’s been instrumental in taking her from a basic to advanced level of capability.
• Hosting by Digital Ocean – A little bit more technical than the entry level stuff but fast as hell and super scalable. You’ll regret other crappy shared hosting providers later.
• WordPress Theme by Thrive Themes – I use Thrive for everything now, including recently moving SpartanTraveler to it. More on that later.
• Thrive Content Builder (for Landing Pages) – Tools of choice for building custom pages in WordPress.
• Thrive Leads (for email capture) – This is a plugin by the same people that built Thrive Themes and you can see some of the results on this site (e.g. any optin box here). I’ll publish results here but needless to say it massively increases the number of emails you’ll get from a website.
• Active Campaign – This is what all online marketers I know personally use. It’s really powerful and really cheap to start (as low as $9).
• Ahrefs – For more advanced content and keyword research and tracking, this is hard to beat.
• And a few other sites you may want to check out:
  • Niche Pursuits
  • Smart Passive Income
  • Cloud Living
  • Fatstacks

The post Case Study: How we made a 237% ROI on one Authority Site appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

What’s the best way to optimize overall fitness for surfing?

It’s a question I’ve been pondering since I took a crash course in human athletic performance at San Francisco CrossFit back in 2013. In about 17 collective months of surfing since–from being obliterated in Hawaii to washing up on various reefs as far away as Chile and Indonesia–I’ve had a lot more time to test the ideas. And more recently, last winter I spent 3 months surfing in the Canary Islands while trying to balance normal life and a somewhat demanding (if amateur) participation in the CrossFit Open.

If you read How I Broke my Body and Fixed it you know I’m a big fan of do-it-yourself physical therapy, but I’ve found very little information specific to surfing. Here are some tips on staying healthy during periods of intense activity in the water, something I originally wrote a few years ago during a month-long stay in the Mentawais Islands.

Feel free to skip directly to the breakdown.

My overall intention was to pull together what I’ve learned over the last few years from the available resources for improving mobility/range of motion/proper movement mechanics. This kind of focused ‘mobility-work’ is typically used in a gym and largely come from the CrossFit community (specifically MobilityWod), but applies to any movement, including surfing. After hundreds of hours of playing around with mobility work in and out of the gym, these are the handful of mobilizations that have the most bang for the buck for surfing.

Since most surfers I know do zero to very little warmup/cooldown–and really only pay lip service to stretching and mobility–adding almost anything here should be an improvement. Many surfers are already familiar with Yoga is great option for maintenance, but the work here is intended to be more specific for problem areas as opposed to a general approach (which is still highly recommended and important).

* A quick note: I’m not a doctor and in fact have no qualifications whatsover, so if you have any real issues make sure you talk to a professional first. The concepts I’m applying here were learned from Kelly Starrett and Roop Sihota at SF Crossfit/MobilityWod.

—

Some people will tell you surfing is not hard on the body.

Or that the best solution (for any kind of life issue, really) is just to surf more.  And sure, it’s one of the few sports you’ll see a 50-year age range still participating at a high level. But as you probably know from experience it can still wreak havoc on your shoulders, upper back, and knees.

For anyone out there thinking “not for me” keep in mind we aren’t just talking about injury fixes or prevention, we’re also talking maxing out our potential and optimizing what we’ve got.

I don’t think most people realize how much performance they’re leaving on the table (which applies to anything else as much as surfing). It took me years to understand how I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time fighting with my own body: a lack of mobility or quality movement that causes everything to be much more difficult than it should be (and sets us up for injury later).

Background: How a Lack of Mobility Affects Surfing (and everything else you do)

Here’s the old analogy: drive a car that’s out of alignment long enough and what happens? The tires wear out. And more specific to fighting with your own mechanics: you burn a ton of energy dealing with misaligned parts. Since surfing = paddling the name of the game is improving paddling efficiency.

The main problems with paddling (which is the same for swimming generally) are:

1. Defaulting to a really bad shoulder position, which sets you up for injury.
2. Fighting for overhead position, and wasting a ton of energy in the process.

A few years ago it surprised me to discover–despite swimming being commonly recommended as a good option for shoulder rehabilitation–the near impossibility of surfing or swimming with good form. There’s a tendency even at competition-level swimmers for the shoulders hinge forward during the bottom of the swim/surf stroke due to deficiencies in internal rotation.

The less internal rotation capacity you have in the shoulder (most people seem to be missing 50-90% of this range of motion) the harder it’s going to be to keep the shoulder in a good position as you complete the surf stroke.

Where else can this lack of range of motion cause problems?

• Pushups
• Pullups
• Rows
• etc…

In terms of battling for overhead position, the harder it is for you to raise your arms overhead while keeping your rib cage down, the more you’re going to have to arch your back and fight your shoulders to paddle.

The bottom line is that your shoulders seize up or get smoked much faster than they should.

So what happens when you can move without fighting your own body? Well, magic. And a hell of a lot more endurance.

Applying Mobility Work to Real-World Surfing Conditions

Mentawais Islands, March 2014:

Through a lot of real-world testing I’ve seen that a few basic mobility exercises a day–combined with better swimming mechanics–can keep you running for the long-haul.

Add to this some basic work on the engine–3-months of off-season CrossFit training–and I’ve never felt fitter in my life. That said, I’ve always had problems with my left shoulder, and it typically seizes up during periods of prolonged surfing (something like 3-4 hours per day x 4 days). On this trip I had a significant opportunity to see if anything had improved:

The test: Surfing 6-7 hours a day for 10 days straight after 3 months of no surfing and only a few swimming sessions in the pool.

The result: Sleep and nutrition play a major role here, but even after 10 days straight I could have continued without degradation in form or technique.

I was actually blown away by my endurance levels and the lack of wear and tear on my body on this trip.

Here is what I did:

 Remember, there are two basic pieces to fixing your own body-

1. Fixing mobility issues (tight muscles and joints) and
2. Fixing motor control issues (you can’t/ don’t know how to move properly).

I’d suggest tackling both at once.

How to fix or improve basic swimming technique 

It’s worth taking a look at Brian Mackenzie’s book Power.Speed.Endurance. To swim/paddle properly your shoulder has to maintain a neutral position vs pitching forward as the hand reaches the end of the stroke. That means actively thinking about keeping the shoulder back in the socket.

Before I initiate a swimming stroke the first thing I do is pull my shoulder back and down. In practice this makes a sort of 2-count stroke:

• Arm comes overhead + Pull shoulder back and down.
• Initiate stroke + Avoid letting the front of the shoulder roll over.

Focusing on this seems to make a major difference in how long I can paddle before my left shoulder seizes up. This takes a bit of mental focus to maintain but like running it turns out this is more complicated than we all initially thought.

Combine a little thought on positioning here with the mobility work below and you should see some results.

Side note on the surf stance:

Standing up quickly on a completely unstable surface complicated and maintaining a good position is not that easy. It’s not often discussed but surfing can cause some unpleasantness in the back knee, because it can put your trailing leg into a continuous wonky collapse (basically the exact opposite of how you want to load the knee) that opens up ample opportunity for tweaks and real injury.

Not only is your knee in a compromised position but there’s a constant rebalancing of weight between legs. It’s crucial to have the ability to instantly re-stabilize the back leg and avoid weighting a really bad position. I’ve noticed that weightlifting has improved this, especially the Olympic lifts like cleans, split jerks (the closest you can get to the surfing position), and snatches–basically anything that requires constantly finding a stable and safe knee position under load.

And don’t forget your trusty Indo balance board. Spending 10 minutes a day on this–focusing on constantly moving in and out of good positions–has made a huge difference for me and immediately applies to movement quality in the water.

The Daily Mobility WOD (Workout of the Day) For Surfers

It takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, but it’s a small investment to keep up with the ongoing wear and tear that’s part of any activity requiring repetitive motion.

You will need a couple props to get this done:

• A cylindrical object to hinge over, e.g.foam roller, double lacrosse balls, Nalgene bottle, baking pin, log, etc.
• Ideally a lacrosse ball (which I always travel with), but you can also use a tennis ball or any other sphere as long as it’s not too soft (wouldn’t go softer than a tennis ball).
• Not required, but you can do amazing things with a jump stretch band if you have one (something like the green band here).
• You can see what this looks like in the travel kit I took to Indonesia.

A couple rules on mobility work before you get started:

1. Commit to 2 minutes per mobilization (that means 2 minutes on each shoulder, for example). Nobody pays attention to this, but don’t waste your time by doing something for 10 seconds and wondering why nothing changed.
2. Test/Retest. Take a look in a mirror, take a selfie, or have a buddy check out the before after. If you don’t see/feel a change it didn’t work. Most of the time it means you didn’t do it right or long enough. But it can also mean this piece wasn’t the issue and you should work on something else.
3. If it feels sketchy it’s probably sketchy/’I’m not a doctor’/’don’t be a dumbass and hurt yourself’ (TM Kelly Starrett).

#1 Thoracic (Upper Back) Extension

If your spine isn’t stacking properly it’s going to be hard to get your shoulder into a good position, and this has the biggest bang for the buck of any overhead mobilization.

As I learned in Kelly’s mobility classes at SF Crossfit, this is upper-body PT 101: fix your thoracic spine (the scaffolding), then go on to the shoulder next.

Basically, all you’re doing is hinging over whatever object you have to open up those vertebral segments. The key is to work systematically through the whole spine and to spend enough time on each spot.

It’s much more effective if you can attack locally with double lacrosse balls first, then globally with something bigger like a foam roller or wall ball.

#2 Freeing the Scapula

This is a favorite and a crowd pleaser. Try one side and see just how much of a difference it makes by holding your arms overhead. What you want to do is work up the inside of the scapula, rib by rib, while completing the across-the-body motion with your hand. Bridge your butt up to add extra pressure. As Kelly says, ‘try to bore that lacrosse ball into your soul’.

#3 Opening up the front of the pec

Most of us have chronically tight tissue here that has shortened over time from a combination of surfing, bench pressing, and working at a desk. Your shoulder has a hard time fighting to get into proper position against this kind of resistance, so break things up by using a lacrosse ball and a doorframe. The key part is swinging your arm up as close to an overhead position as possible.

I’ve been getting a lot of mileage just hanging out here and contracting/relaxing the tissue while digging that lacrosse ball in. Sometimes I also you the door frame to lever my arm against the lacrosse ball. 30 seconds of this can feel like a half-hour massage.

#4 Top of the lats/First Rib Mob.

The lats are a used and abused tissue for surfers, so it helps to grind through this, but this also really opens up my ability to get my arms overhead. It’s a tender spot though, so as Kelly says, just try to avoid puking on the door-frame while you’re working on it.

The key here again is to swing through the full range of motion going past 90 degrees top and bottom.

#5 Battle for internal rotation

This is the most complicated but has a profound affect on shoulder function when done properly, and I’ve been working on this for the last year with slow and steady success. I’ve noticed a lot of shoulder pain was coming from lack of internal rotation, which affects any movement where the hand comes back or down (pushups, rowing, pullups, bench press etc).

The key here is:

Make 100% sure the backs of your shoulders stay on the ground. You have to be totally honest on this one or it’s useless. In order to get into the position I have to bridge my hips about 3 feet into the air to start. Your goal is to start wherever you are and very gently start to work on this. Beware it’s easy to tweak your shoulders if you go to hard right out of the gates, so DO NOT PUSH THIS ONE.

#6 Bonus – The Voodoo Band internal rotation

This requires a bit of special equipment. As of late 2013 I’ve been traveling with a Voodoo band that I bough at San Francisco Crossfit. However, if you have access to a bike shop you can make one out of a spare bike tube (which I ended up doing in the Canaries last winter and it worked great).

Fixing internal rotation is the key to avoiding movement faults in swimming, pushups, dips, and so on. Most of us are operating at 10% capacity here, so a little work can go a long way.

And that’s a wrap

If you have any thoughts about human performance and surfing (or for related sports) I’d love to hear them.

As a followup, it may be about time to write an update to the 2013 How I Broke My Body and Fixed it post, since I’ve learned a lot since. Stay tuned.

The post The MobilityWOD For Surfers appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

I’m a strong believer that budgeting and tracking are among the most important skills you can develop. Simply because to be in charge of your destiny you have to know what’s going on and what the plan is. Having access to good numbers is often the hardest part (running a business, fitness, health), but fortunately tracking personal expenses couldn’t be easier.

Since childhood I’ve been a a bit OCD about tracking money. I still remember the investing pamphlet my dad gave me around age 12 about saving money and compound interest. You know the one: clean little graphs illustrating how $1 saved a day will miraculously become $1,000,000 by age 50.

Skill in tracking and saving is what ultimately allowed me to save $15,000 for travel during my first job out of college.

Being a business owner takes the budgeting OCD up a notch. It’s a much bigger deal when the numbers don’t add up when you’re talking employees and cashflow. 

But the two simple points I want to make in this post:

1. First, I want to illustrate how easy it is to track personal expenses at home or on the road.
2. Second, I want to show you my actual cost of living around the world. It’s not all living on $20 a day, that’s for sure.

How to easily track your day-to-day expenses

First of all, forget Mint.com (although useful for seeing things in one place) or any other sort of bookkeeping service that requires you to sit down and look at it on a regular basis. If you’re anything like me this will never happen. Tracking after the fact doesn’t work that well unless you spend a lot of time fiddling with it and then dedicate time each month to sit down and deal with it.

A better option: track as you go.

I use the simple, free app TrailWallet (as mentioned in 18 travel apps I use daily) to enter my expenses as they happen. That means right after I’ve handed over the cash or right after I’ve hit the ‘Purchase’ button.

This takes a little discipline and the formation of a new habit, but the only time in my life I’ve seen costs get out of control was when I stopped doing this for a few months.

Real-time expense tracking does a few things:

• Awareness: The act of manually entering expenses means you can’t sleepwalk through a bunch of spending.
• Good, Real-time Data: You know in any given moment exactly how much money you’ve spent for the month.

This takes care of the hardest part of anything, which is the tracking (both finding and recording clear numbers) and, for those who travel, you end up with a really cool cost-of-living index for places you’ve been.

My actual monthly expenses for the last few years

So without further ado, here is the breakdown.

Note that the record is not 100% here. I have other spreadsheets tracking this but to make it simple I’m only pulling data where I used TrailWallet, which keeps it simple and is probably more accurate.

Here’s a yearly overview of average monthly cost of living:

• 2016 –  $2,321.39
• 2015 – $1,484.77
• 2014 – $1,716.20
• 2013 – ~$1,200-1,500?

And the only place I’ve lived long enough to have a location-specific average:

• Budapest, Hungary – $1,829.27

And here’s the month by month breakdown, pulled from TrailWallet (June did not make it in here):

2016 – Budapest and the  Canary Islands

• June – $1,951.31 (Budapest)
• May  – $2,656.25 (Canary Islands > S. Spain > Portugal > Budapest)
• April – $2,038.54 (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands)
• March – $1,782.85 (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands
• February – $3,123.65 (Madrid > Fuerteventura*)
• January – $2,005.65 (Baja, Mexico > Budapest)

2016 Average: $2,321.39

* Major gear investments totaling $892. Living in Fuerteventura also required renting a car.

2015 – Budapest

• December – $713.30 (California > Utah > Baja, Mexico)
• November – $1,903.93 (Budapest > Prague > California)
• October – $1,074.72 (Budapest > Bangkok, Thailand > Budapest)
• September – $1,586.33 (Budapest)
• August – Not Tracked
• July – $1,914.81 (Budapest > Malta > Budapest)
• June – Not tracked
• May – $1,995.16 (Budapest)
• April – $2,055.26 (Budapest > Zurich > Budapest)
• March – $1,570.36 (Budapest)
• February – $1,922.94 (Budapest > Amsterdam > Budapest)
• January – $2,106.03 (Baja, Mexico > San Francisco > Budapest)

2015 Average: $1,484.77

2014 – Chiang Mai to Budapest

• December – $1,022.92 (Utah > Baja, Mexico)
• November – $1,780.47 (Budapest > Utah)
• October – $2,089.91 (Budapest > Prague > Budapest)
• September – $1,781.43 (Budapest)
• August – $1,431.66 (Budapest)
• July – $1,940.91 (Mallorca > Budapest)
• June – $1,838.43 (Mallorca)

2014 Average: $1,716.20

2013 – Chiang Mai

• December – $1,273.17 (Chiang Mai)

Some general thoughts on the numbers

Cost of Living Trends

First of all, it looks like a trend going in the wrong direction, but June (not in the graph) shows things have calmed down a bit . The last few months involved a lot of travel, gear investments (for surfing and kitesurfing), and logistical requirements (renting a car for 3 months).

Overall, leaving SE Asia and moving to Europe involved a cost increase over baseline, though not as much as you might think (e.g. comparing December 2013’s $1,273 vs August 2014’s $1,431). The more expensive months involved some kind of ridiculous regional trip like Ibiza or a skiing trip in Switzerland.

So sure, there’s some lifestyle creep going on but we’re still shooting to keep costs below $2,000/mo without any major sacrifices in living conditions.

What’s not included

You might be wondering how much it costs to fly Business Class from Baja to Budapest, or round trip from Budapest to Bangkok. Well, this much:

• Baja to Budapest (Business Class) – 50,000 miles and $300 on American Airlines ($300 wiped out with CapitalOne rewards points).
• Budapest to Bangkok – 45,000 miles ($450 wiped out with British Airways points).

So no doubt some major expenses are being eliminated by airline miles, and it hasn’t changed much since I flew around the world for less than $220. But I don’t take too many long-haul flights each year and tend to pay for the regional flights. I’m sure my travel patterns would change if the cost of these trips went up.

If you’re American and you still haven’t gotten this part sorted, see my short credit card + airline miles FAQ.

Outliers

How can you live on $700?! This what happens when you wipe out rent as an expense, as in visiting home for an extended period of time. Rent is usually the biggest single cost in a month, except in Chiang Mai where it clocked in at $150. The interesting thing about this is it means my discretionary spending is pretty much the same in Chiang Mai (monthly total of about $1200 even with $150/mo rent) as Budapest where my rent is $650 but total is usually around $1500-$1800.

Final thoughts

Tracking is the key, not just to money but anything else. If you’re just getting started learning to track personal expenses is worth the effort.

It’s also worth revisiting these two posts:

• The key to freedom isn’t making more, but spending less.
• How I saved $15000 on a $29000 salary

The post What it Costs to Live Around the World appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

I remember trying to write a blog post in Buenos Aires in 2008. Wifi as we know it was not widely available, but internet cafes were everywhere, and they worked pretty well if you could get around the non-US keyboards and the impossibility of finding the ‘@’ symbol.

The ease of modern travel with a local SIM card powered smart-phone with broadband internet access is borderline ridiculous. Nothing is impossible when you can get on the internet, and wandering around looking for accommodation has been replaced by some quick tactical research. 

After 3 weeks of traveling through part of the Canary Islands, Southern Spain, and Portugal, this list of tools naturally rose to the surface through daily use. There is still a lot of room for improvement (used Skype recently?), but it’s a lot of fun when a new tool comes along and solves a major first world problem.

Of course, any troubles we have today are minor inconveniences compared to traveling before the ATM was ubiquitous and where getting money on the road took days. While this list makes life on the road a bit easier, the catch is (as always) that increased efficiency does not equal better quality. Half the fun in the early days of travel was the getting lost while trying to find the internet cafe and figuring it out how to deal with it.

But for now, I’m happy to pass on the endless wandering around with printed maps, and this time and energy can be used for things I’d rather focus on.

Here is the basic travel toolkit:

• Finding things you need
• Getting from point A to Point B
• Staying Connected
• Web Stuff
• Accommodation
• Money & Budgeting
• Health
• Entertainment and Learning

Finding Things you Need

#1 Instabridge / Work Hard Anywhere (App) – Find free wifi anywhere.

This goes into the gamechanger category.

Say you arrive in a new city, and you need to find wifi. How about a map showing both location and speed of the available networks, not to mention automatically logging you in since a good samaritan has already saved the password for you.

Instabridge (and another app I just found this week, Work Hard Anywhere) make it much easier and faster to find usable internet since you can both sort by internet spend and venue type. With Work Hard Anywhere you can also see information about plug availability, price, even seating availability. Both of these apps also integrate with Foursquare (below) for more detailed venue information. Great for finding wifi on the road, but also finding new places at home to mix it up.

While I often end up tethering to my iPhone a lot while traveling, the cost adds up and it’s nice to work somewhere besides the room you sleep in.

Instabridge seems to be having some issues right now with regards to adding new wifi hotspots, but you can still see everything that has already been added. Both of these apps are worth checking out.

#2 Foursquare (App) – Find local things you need.

Obviously well-known for a long time but something I had never used until the last year or two. Foursquare can makes it a lot easier find great local places for the basics, like where to eat, coffee shops, where to get a haircut, etc. The reviews and pricing information give you some indication of what you’re getting, and I’ve used this app to find some of my favorite restaurants at home.

A couple of big fat caveats: Foursquare is often totally inaccurate on location. After repeatedly walking for 20 minutes in the wrong direction I always double check things on Google Maps before proceeding.

Also, take the pricing indications with a grain of salt. A $7 tapas plate with about 5 calories on it is not $ in my opinion.

#3 TripAdvisor (App) – Modern-day Lonely Planet

This one is a bit of a reversal for me–TripAdvisor used to be the actual worst site on the internet (no offense intended of course!). But sometime between then and now the app became really useful for figuring out where to go and what to see.

The only thing I use this for is checking out the ‘things to do’ section of the app, which is a sort of modern equivalent of reading the Lonely Planet highlights. There’s also a lot of information in the ratings section about how to get tickets, how long the line is going to take, etc. Again, take things with a grain of salt since you may not fit the average user demographic (‘the hike was impossibly difficult beware!‘), but it can point you in the right direction.

You can also use TripAdvisor to find things like Coffee shops and Restaurants but I have better luck with the other apps above.

Getting from Point A to point B

#4 Rome2Rio (App+Website) – Door to door route-finder.

Although I’ve used it for some time, Rome2Rio was a mind-blowing discovery. As the image above shows, Rome2Rio will tell you all of the transportation options between locations, with pricing information and links to the key websites. This is how I find, for example, the right website to buy tickets for the train from Lagos to Lisbon.

It also shows the amount of estimated time each type of transportation will take, which you can then weigh against the relative cost. Super useful as a standalone website but I also use the app constantly.

#5 Tripit Pro  (App+Website) – Makes traveling (a helluvalot) easier.

I have a recurring nightmare where I have an international flight in 2 hours but I can’t find the exact flight information in time. This will never happen with Tripit. You simply open up the app and everything is there.

If you aren’t familiar, Tripit will scan your inbox for flight, hotel, and other travel reservations and load them into their website and mobile app. From there you can instantly pull up reservation numbers, directions, flight times, check-in links, and anything else you might need. The pro version will also send notifications about flight delays and keep you (and anyone you share it with) up to date on the general status of your trip.

The greatest benefit is simply having all of your travel stuff in one place. It’s a no-brainer for frequent travelers. I’ve been using it for a while, as you can see from the travel stats here:

#6 Momondo (App+Website) – Finding Flights

This flight search engine seems to find things that others don’t, so it’s my first stop for flight searches.

It’s never a good idea to rely on one service though, so I always double check the flexible search option on Kayak.com, as well as go directly to discount airline sites (like RyanAir and Wizzair). I’ve also recently been playing around with Skyscanner and Google Flights a bit more, but Momondo is still my default choice.

#7 Uber (App) – On-call car service

Ok, sort of obvious and well-known one, but a lot of us also live in a relatively small population bubble. Given the raised eyebrows when I mention some of our tried and true services, until proven otherwise I am not assuming people know about or would seriously consider using these services.

What happens when you arrive in a city at 1am and public transportation is shut down or going to take another hour to arrive at your destination? Simple, open the Uber app and in 5 minutes you’re whisked away at (usually) a pretty reasonable cost (less than a taxi, but not less than a dedicated shuttle, though Uber will take you right to your door with no hassle/waiting for other passengers).

The downsides? Uber drivers aren’t always available, it can actually be quite expensive, and since most of the taxi lobbies worldwide have fought Uber tooth and nail, the company has been banned from a number of places (like Spain). It’s also apparently on it’s last legs after organized protests in Budapest.

But where it works this link will get you a free ride on Uber if you haven’t already signed up.

Staying Connected

#8 Google Voice (App mainly) – ‘International’ Number and Virtual voicemail

Most people may know about this by now, but if you don’t: get a free US phone number from Google Voice with your existing Gmail account. When someone calls you the voicemail is transcribed and emailed to you. This will also show up as a notification in the app on your phone (a few seconds later).

I’ve never been a huge fan of being interrupted by the phone ringing, so even in the US I usually had my phone on silent mode (this is also why having a Skype-in number doesn’t really work for me, but it’s another option). Google Voice allows me to receive phone calls internationally which I can call back as needed. This is also how I immediately receive all voicemails and pins for account validation, 2-factor authentication for services, etc.

Web Stuff

#9 PrivateInternetAccess VPN – Security + Change your location instantly.

I’m not sure which is more amusing: that some websites think they can block access based on the user’s location, or that many people don’t know how easy it is to change. I use a VPN both for general security, such as connecting to a public wifi hotspot, as well as to appear to be access the internet from within the US.

Example: if you login into Paypal from outside the US there’s a good chance they will shut your account off until you send in about 15 documents proving it’s you. After doing this 5 times I now just change my location to California before logging in.

Another great use for a VPN is on your phone. Some carriers (Vodafone) apparently try to block Skype use on the network. And for some reason connecting to a VPN instantly solves this.

A caveat: this service is a little low-tech and buggy, but it’s the fastest I tested using SpeedTest.net. I’d love to know if it actually encrypts anything (a little over my pay grade), but changing location is the main use for me.

#10 SpeedTest.net (Website+App) – How fast is your internet?

Another obvious one and a classic. One trick though is to have potential accommodation options check the wifi speed for you before you arrive. I always do this with any place I’m committing to for more than a few days, and most hosts will oblige.

I’ll also pull out my iPhone and check connections before booking if I’m in a hotel or guesthouse (if I need internet that badly).

Accommodation

#11 Booking.com – Short term accommodation

There are a couple reasons why I like this site: First, a lot of the listings have free cancellation up until a day or two before arrival. This solves a lot of the ‘to plan ahead or not to plan ahead’ dilemma. The other reason is a pretty good selection of decent, non-dormitory accommodation.

While Airbnb is great for longer stays, the need to interact with the host to get the keys, the looming threat of personal reviews, and the pretty exorbitant fee schedule make booking.com my first choice for any stay at 3 nights or less.

Another extremely useful thing about this site: the ‘% booked’ meter can help you decide whether or not to go somewhere. Basically any place/dates that say over 90% booked and you’re probably bumping up against a major event or high season. I’ve made a new rule to avoid any place at or above 90% and I check this whether or not I’m using booking.com for accommodation.

#12 Airbnb (Site+App) – Longer-term Accommodation

For longer trips Airbnb is a no-brainer. Although it can be a 100% markup on local prices if you book for a month there is usually a substantial discount. It’s easy to fall into the trap of only looking on Airbnb, but either way it’s a great place to start.

A couple key things I learned on this last trip about Airbnb:

• Don’t book anything that doesn’t already have reviews.
• There is no way to screen smoking hosts, so make sure ‘no smoking’ is specifically listed before committing (really important in places like Spain). It’s incredible, but a lot of people still smoke.
• Booking a shared house is usually just weird unless it’s like a hostel with multiple rooms booked out.
• Customer support is actually pretty damn good if you have a real issue.

For more on finding accommodation see this post on finding cheap accommodation anywhere.

Money & Budgeting

#13 Trailwallet (App) – Simple personal expense tracker.

Despite the somewhat irritating cartoon graphics, TrailWallet is a great app for keeping track of expenses. I use it to track everything at the point of purchase, meaning I enter cost information about every purchase I make right when it happens. This is the only way to really track cash expenditures because you will never do it later.

If you’re serious about budgeting, or have a strict travel budget, this is the only way to go. It also gives me some cool graphs about living expenses by country as well as by category which I hope to share later on.

#14 Xe.com (App) – Quick currency converter

Great, simple app for converting between currencies. Very helpful when you want to know what 37,562 HUF actually means in USD.

Health on the Road

#15 Sleep Cycle (App) – Smart alarm and sleep quality app.

I have now used the Sleep Cycle app for 862 days, and it can tell me things like my average ‘sleep quality’ is 87%, and my average time in bed is 9 hours and 4 minutes.

While Sleep Cycle doesn’t tell you the % time in various sleep state (e.g. deep vs light sleep), I find the overall quality score to be a pretty good indicator of how good I’m sleeping. You can also create tags to get an idea of specific things that kill your sleep quality, like for me drinking coffee after 2pm is game-over. Some of this has dubious statistical significance, but it’s still interesting.

Sleep Cycle will also try to wake you up between deep sleep cycles, which has a notable affect on how you feel when the ‘alarm’ goes off. This app is admittedly more fun at home, since while traveling it mainly tells me how badly I’m sleeping, but it also has some great white noise settings to cover up that domestic dispute that inevitably happens at 1am through the paper-thin walls. Personally I’m a fan of blasting the ‘heavy rain’ sleep aid.

Another very cool thing to do at home is connect Sleep Cycle to your HUE LED smart lightbulbs, which lights up the room slowly when it’s time to wake up.

#16 HRV4Training (App) – Overall health indicator.

Exactly how much is traveling/not sleeping/drinking alcohol affecting your well-being?

Heart-Rate Variability or HRV can give you a good indication of things going on below the surface. The HRV4Training app measures your heart-rate variability when you wake up (via the flash+camera on your phone) and after some time it can give you great insights into your overall health.

I use this daily at home to get an idea of recovery from athletic training, and used while traveling can be a great indication of when it’s time to go home (e.g. bottoming out on my scores in week 3 of this last trip).

Entertainment / Learning

#17 Casts (App) – Podcasts

I was never happy with the original iPhone podcast app, and this is a major improvement.

Anytime I’m traveling or commuting, when I can’t be reading, I’m probably listening to a podcast.

If you don’t know what to listen to these are my default:

• Tim Ferris Podcast
• TropicalMBA

#18 Pocket (Desktop+App) – Save articles to read later.

Pocket is the mini-magazine where you put together the content, mostly from ‘add this’ button in your browser.

Most of my reading happens on a Kindle, but the Pocket app is a great way to save things to read later. Load up the app with all the stuff you’ve been meaning to read but never can seem to get through when on your computer, and you have a sort of e-magazine with custom tailored articles.

That’s it! 

If you have any other suggestions I’d be interested to hear about them!

The post 18 Travel Apps and Tools I use Daily on the Road appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

More specifically–after nearly 5 years on the road–what time-tested equipment am I still willing to lug around in a backpack?

In late 2013 I left the US for a second trip around the world. That trip never really ended, and my original SE Asia Pack List had to survive a number countries, seasons, and activities that I’d never anticipated.

It’s now May 2016 and the core of my kit remains largely unchanged.  Here are the two biggest discoveries/upgrades to the list:

• The travel pant issue finally solved: Prana’s Brion Pant
• The virtually weightless Bose QC 20 Noise Cancelling Headphones

The biggest challenges to the original pack list were:

• Cold weather, including my first winter in 3 years (spent in Budapest!).
• More demanding health and fitness requirements (meaning little or no sacrifices of health or fitness routines while traveling or working).
• Scaled-up work efforts (meaning the need for a more powerful laptop and some higher-end office gear).
• The ongoing fantasy of a Jason-Bourne meets Ueli Steck gear kit and wardrobe (as in I want to have an ultra-light clothing kit that looks decent, but will hold up well if I decide to rappel out of the office window on a daily basis).
• More gear-centric activities (eg surfing, rock climbing, skiing, etc).
• The realization that I don’t actually travel that much anymore – Yes, I made it to 6 or 7 countries last year, but I spend most of my time living in one place and using that as a base of operations.

It may seem like all of this requires more stuff, not less, but my overall travel pack weight has actually decreased. There are a couple reasons for this:

• The time-tested knowledge of what 20% of gear gets me through 80% of situations.
• Figuring out what/where I can buy things to fill in the gaps (eg. H&M, rock climbing stores, etc)

Turns out I’m pretty happy to wear the same clothes most of the time, with a little variety provided by an extra t-shirt or two. The photo above shows a set of clothing that can get me through 95% of travel situations.

Weight and Space Considerations

Here are my target travel specs: maximum 15lbs/7kgs in the backpack and as little as possible in my laptop bag.

My last extended trip (5 weeks in the US and Mexico) I hit 6kg in the backpack. it’s hard to describe the ease of travel at that weight.

While you’ll find lighter gear kits out there, I’ve come to terms with the difference between serious travel and long-term location-independent living. Moving less means a little extra weight can help create some baseline level of comfort and consistency. I’m also in the process of building a business, as well as ongoing physical training, and everything centers around facilitating productive output.

These days I modify that pack list for 3 types of travel:

1. Going fast and light – trips around 1-5 weeks (first video above, while moving through S. Spain)
2. Location independent living – Staying in one place for 1-6 months.
3. Base of operations/Mission Control – Same idea as #2, but with a lot more gear.

Traveling from a base of operations

When I travel now it’s typically a combination of all 3 of these. I tend to move in shorter bursts with an ultra-light travel kit while storing a larger amount of stuff in a regional base. I’ve done this in a few places now, including Chiang Mai and Budapest. It’s a good idea to make friends with someone who owns a house or runs a CrossFit gym.

Establishing a base may mean I have to move a large duffle or surfboards regionally, or mail a box of stuff, but I try to avoid doing this very often. I also buy gear and leave it in a location for later, e.g. travel caching. Once I’ve got a base established I can travel with the gear kit below but keep doing what I need to do. This makes basing yourself in places like Chiang Mai and Budapest particularly appealing for exploring the region.

As an example, after living in the Canary Islands for 3 months I mailed 2 large duffels (via the post office) back to Budapest at a cost of about 70-90 euros each. While not the cheapest, the price is totally worth traveling unencumbered in Southern Spain and Portugal for the next 3 weeks. This gear also allowed me to do a bunch of cool activities while living in the Canaries (e.g. surfing, kitesurfing, and participating in the CrossFit Open).

A important note for those starting out:

You don’t need to buy a bunch of expensive gear to start traveling. In fact, don’t buy anything. Take what you have and as little as possible. Keep in mind that I’ve been on the road since July 2011–professionally since mid 2012–and this kit didn’t come together all at once. There is no need to buy, for example, a Macbook Pro unless you’re actually doing some serious work, and this kit is specific to location-independent living, not just traveling. For fun, check out the $280 netbook that I started my business with.

What I’ve detailed below is a bit of a hybrid pack list for longer trips since it includes cold weather gear. As you can see in the video at the top of the page I’ve already sent a lot of this stuff home.

The Spartan Digital Nomad Gear Kit for 2016

*Note: not everything is featured in the photos, nor is it organized very well for mass consumption but I made a handy video and tried to link to everything.

The Mobile Office

The biggest upgrade here is the need for serious computing power. Stakes are a bit higher these days in terms of getting effective work done, and I can’t make compromises on this part of the kit.

• Laptop (2015 Macbook Pro 13”) – Retina with maxed out ram, basic processor + Case Logic Soft Case + Lightning adaptor for plugging into an external monitor. My Macbook Air (11”) was fantastic for 2 years but started to slow down toward the end. Unfortunately the newest and lighter Macbook is less powerful (slower) than the original Air, which makes the Pro the obvious step-up. As a side note, the resolution of these Retina screens is so powerful I think it’s changed the clarity of my general vision. I still think the Macbook Air is the best notebook out there and I’d still consider going with that ( with fully maxed out processor and ram).
• Phone/Camera/Office (Unlocked 65gb iPhone 6s) – (upgraded mainly as my iPhone 5s battery was almost non-functional), also used for video, photos, etc. Still the key swiss army knife for business and travel. My first move in every new country is getting a SIM card at the airport, which makes life really easy.
• Reading Material (Amazon Kindle + neoprene case – unchanged) – If I lost everything except this I’d still be pretty happy.
• Noise Cancelling Headphones (Bose QC20) – No question that noise-cancelling headphones–which can turn about any environment into a library–are a game-changer. The added pound of my Macbook Pro is offset by eliminating the over-ear Bose QC15s (which essentially disintegrated after 2 years). The noise-cancelling ability of these headphones is unbelievable.

A few additional observations about these:

• The battery life is fantastic, easily solid day of use or longer.
• They are virtually weightless and take up almost no space.
• You can fall asleep in them – just turning noise cancelling on is like a supercharged earplug.
• Biggest Downside: The design. Specifically where the battery sits + the connector needs some work (it should be moved up the cable toward the ears). It’s fine when plugged into a laptop as the connector makes a right angle and the battery sits neatly to the side. Problem is when you connect your phone (or try to put it into the insanely small case) and place it in your pocket you have a major kink which is clearly going to decrease the longevity of this thing. After my Bose QC20s literally disintegrated after 2 years I’m not convinced these products have the best durability. I thought I would use these more while traveling but they are much better suited for sitting down and setting up the work station. That said, as I write this in the middle of the Denver airport (during Holiday traffic) I can’t hear anything and happy to use these as long as they last.

All compromises aside, well worth the investment if you’re trying to get things done. Hopefully there will be new and better models of this kind of thing in the near future.

Some accessories:

• Small USB key (unchanged)
• A lightning adapter for an external monitor. In case I have the opportunity to go dual-screen.
• A couple European plug connectors. It’s a drag to use a universal plug adapter all the time so I swapped out the default connectors on all plugs.
• Universal plug adapter – works very well for a cheap-o travel adapter.
• A backup battery charger for the iPhone (2.5 charges). I threw this out after upgrading to a new iPhone but it’s still a ‘nice-to-have’ item for long travel days.

The Backpack and Laptop Bag

• Black Diamond Sonar (unchanged)
• Laptop bag I’ve always had (unchanged)

If I was going to upgrade this I would *strongly* consider the gear that Minaal makes. Check out the all-around digital nomad backpack and carry-on combo (which recently raised over $700k on Kickstarter).

A note about why I carry two bags:

I learned this trick from multi-day backpacking trips. At some point on a big hike the idea of taking off your 50lb. backpack (yet again) to get the map/compass/sunscreen/whatever is too much to bear. A friend of mine always solved this dilemma with a simple add-on compartment, like an over the shoulder fanny pack. That way you can access the small frequently used items without disassembling the entire kit.

That’s how I use the laptop bag here – the ready accessible laptop bag always has my plane tickets, passport, kindle, laptop, iPhone, snacks etc so I never have to stop and take off the backpack to get where I’m going. Sounds like a no brainer but simple things like this are what make traveling easy.

Travel Clothing

What’s here:

(upper body)

• Merino wool long underwear top (Icebreaker Everyday Crewe) – The difference between comfort and discomfort in cold climates is long underwear. I tend to interchangeably use a set of Patagonia Capilene and Icebreaker Merino depending on the temperature (merino is a bit warmer and goes much further without washing).

• Basic t-shirts (2) from H&M – These $5 shirts are lightweight, comfy, surprisingly durable, and a bit more stylish than your typical travel shirt.

• Merino wool t-shirt (Icebreaker Tech Light T) – Still the classic. My original finally shredded along the lower back to a point where I’m embarrassed it wear it in public. But I’m not sure what else you would expect from wearing something every day for 1.5 years.
• Rain jacket (Quechua) – Not pictured. Cheap and available. Picked this up at Decathlon (European REI) for $10.
• Sweatshirt/Fleece (Patagonia R1 Hoody) – This replaced a cheap zip up hoody I bought in Chiang Mai. The difference is weight, durability, and warmth to weight ratio. I’ve lived in this hoody since 2009. This + merino + a shell and you’re covered through some nasty weather.
• Down Jacket (Patagonia down sweater) – The key cold weather addition. Weighs nothing, lasts forever.

(lower body)

• Merino Wool boxer briefs (2) (Icebreaker) – These are amazing and really go the distance traveling They’re also smaller and use less fabric than some of the other popular travel brands. Only downside is they don’t last forever.

• Travel/Dress pant (Prana Brion Pant) – Hat tip to my buddy Scott for this one, but I believe we’ve solved the travel pant issue. They look like a normal pair of pants, interchangeable as dress/travel/climbing pants. The secret lies in the technical fabric and durability of the material. One of my oldest pieces of gear are Prana Stretch Zion which I’ve rock climbed in since 2005 (that’s correct, 11 years). These new pants look good (finally get to ditch the side pocket) and will probably last forever, and they cost a reasonable $70.
• All-around travel pants (Patagonia Rock Craft Pant, no longer made) – The original stretchy climbing pants that double as ‘slacks’. I’ve worn these unchanged since something like 2010 and they still look new. The upgraded versions (see Patagonia Quandary Pant) seem better: a slimmer cut and different inseams.
• All-round travel/dress shorts (Patagonia Rock Craft Short, now call the Quandary Short) – The same pair, unbelievably comfortable, stretchy, and shed water. The also look pretty decent.
• Board Shorts (2) (Rip Curl Mirage)- I use these for any kind of activity, CrossFit, surfing, rock climbing, hitting up the bathhouse. My favorite are the Rip Curl Mirage which you can usually find in the US for $30 a pair online. A staple, and I usually have one or two pairs.
• Merino Wool Socks (Icebreaker) – Same deal here, these really go the distance.
• Random socks (3 pair)
• UL hiking/travel shoes (Inov-8 F-lite 195) – Still my favorite shoes, ever. Minimalist, near barefoot, and comfy. It literally hurts me to wear other shoes at this point. I’ve been through 3 pairs of these since I left.

Fitness/Mobility Accessories

For longer trips (e.g. a couple of months) I throw in a few items to make sure I get good, consistent workouts and keep the nutrition program going.

• Speed jump rope (Rogue) – Takes no space, a great workout tool to take everywhere.
• 7 days worth of supplements – The staples: Fish oil, Vitamin D, Magnesium & Zinc (Pure Pharma, note I have the individual bottles not this pack), Vitamin B Complex, whey protein. I’m playing around with a particularly nasty (in a good way) travel cocktail of chocolate whey protein, ‘Green’ powder, and MCT powder (which I can’t seem to find in Europe), mixed up and stored in the Nalgene bottle. Here’s where I learned about MCT powder. Note that you can often buy good supplements at CrossFit gyms, or order them ahead to a destination via the amazing iHerb.com.
• Lacrosse Ball – Never leave home without it. More on fixing your body.
• Water bottle/’foam roller’ (Standard Nalgene) – Key mobilitywod tool and great for storing food/powders etc.
• Swim Goggles
• My trusty $1 Chiang Mai City workout shirt.
• Synthetic Boxer briefs (REI brand)
• Compression Socks. Not shown and not used except for long-haul flights. These make a huge difference on 10+ hour flights.
• Note: Image shows a blue jump stretch band but I threw this out last minute as I knew I’d have unlimited access to a CrossFit gym.

Fitness gear for longer trips, e.g. a few months:

• Workout shoes (Reebok Nano 4.0s) – I don’t always carry these around but it makes my Inov-8’s last a lot longer. Plus it’s a tougher, more stable shoe for weightlifting.
• Powerlifting shoes (Inov-8 FastLift 335) – Typically stashed with my gear in Budapest but light enough to carry around if needed.

Travel Essentials /Accessories

• Passport + bag (customized Eddie Bauer travel pouch) – (unchanged)
• UL towel (MSR Packtowl Ultralight) – Still going with the original.
• UL headlamp (Princeton Tec Byte)- A big change I made about a year ago was buying a headlamp with a red light setting to avoid disrupting circadian rhythms. If you’re still exposing yourself to blue light before bed you may want to think twice about it (iPhone/computer screens, any white light). Check out the book Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival for more.
• Sunglasses + case (Ocean / Julbo) – Same ones.
• Micro steel cable – Haven’t used this in a long time but occassinsaly nice to lock things up.
• Mini-padlock – The same one I ‘borrowed’ from a hostel in Guatemala in 2011.
• Collapsible 20L backpack (Sea to Summit Ultra-Sil Daypack) – Has a few holes but still going strong and really great for day trips. Weighs nothing and takes up no space.
• Leather wallet (not pictured)
• UL pack cover for the backpack (Sea to Summit pack cover) – For rainy climates.
• Eye mask – Free one I got on British Airways.
• Waterproof travel watch (Timex Digital Watch, cheapest one you can find) – Good to have an extra alarm, also used for swimming/running etc.
• Journal (Mead Composition, basic college-ruled) – It’s a bit heavy but I still enjoy journaling from time to time.
• Ear plugs – Absolutely essential.
• Waterproof dry bag (Sea to summit Ultra-sil dry bag) – Full of holes at this point but still useful.
• Travel belt – Lightweight nylon webbing I bought in Panama for $1.
• Portable washing machine (Universal drain plug) – Not using much these days but always keep it in there.
• For longer trips:
  • A latte whisk. This is my sort of hilarious concession to bullet-proof coffee and green tea, along with:
  • A small tea strainer

Bathroom kit

• Contact lenses + contact solution – Yes, I still haven’t gotten laser surgery (but hoping to this year).
• Sonicare Toothbrush + charger – Still one of the major concessions I make for traveling long term. Really saves the teeth. On shorter trips I throw this out.
• Beard trimmer – Cheap super light one, bought in Panama for a few bucks.
• Sunscreen (Sunbum) – Known and loved by surfers worldwide. Suncsreen is a toxic sludge. Do your homework on this one.
• Chapstick
• Hair product
• Deodorant
• Cactus tweezers
• Nail clippers

Travel Gear you can Buy on the Road

There are a number of things you might want to have for a longer stay somewhere. My advice is to buy them if needed.

Take it from someone who hates shopping for clothing more than anyone: you can get the following just about anywhere:

• jeans – never worth traveling with these for the weight.
• sweatshirt/hoody – always easy to get a warm layer somewhere.
• cheap t-shirts – for working out, hiking, wearing around the house.
• ‘dress’ shoes – My favorite find so far are the 10 euro H&M sneakers I’ve worn for the last year.
• climbing gear – e.g. a pair of shoes and a harness. You have to make new friends to climb anyway, and hopefully they have a rope and quickdraws (and local knowledge).
• surf gear – most surf towns have cheap boards to rent or buy, which you can sell back. Wetsuits, booties, etc, are also available.
• anything a pharmacy sells – trust me they are everywhere on earth. You don’t need much of a first aid kit unless you’re going way out there.
• camping gear (at least in Europe) – just go to Decathlon.

Closing thoughts

While it’s fun to talk about gear, the focus here is still on facilitating an adventure with as little baggage as possible. In general that means taking as little as possible, investing in good gear that will last a long time, and periodically giving away what you don’t need.

Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions, or a favorite travel item that I missed.

The post A Digital Nomad Pack List After 5 Years on the Road appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

September 2015 – Throwing weights around in Budapest

“OH, WHAT’S UP NOW MOTHER——!”

The words were out before the weight hit the ground. Thankfully there were only a few observers in the gym that day, but it seemed like a reasonable response to my 4th or 5th personal best (PR) that week.

This time in the snatch, which at 67.5kg (89% bodyweight) was not going to make anyone with weightlifting experience bat an eyelash, but it was the trajectory that impressed me. My PR had increased 2.5 kg per week–for the last 5 weeks–with no end in sight.

A lot of this has to do with what the learning curve–beginners make huge gains early on as technique improvements catch up with power and strength. It also had to do with great coaching and programming.

But I had a couple years of CrossFit under my belt, and I wasn’t totally new to Olympic lifting. What really struck me was the ease with which I was beating previous records. If I had to put a number on it I felt about 30% stronger than normal. My recovery time was also lower, and I had a hell of a lot more energy.

At first, I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

The week before I noticed I was getting more than irritated by seemingly trivial work issues. OK–I was getting *seriously pissed off* by things I would normally brush off without much thought.

There were also other effects, er, lapses in concentration in what I’ll just call not Disney-rated trains of thought. In fact, I was having trouble focusing or getting any work done at all. After three days of this it finally dawned on me–“Ahhhhhhhhhhh…It’s working!”

One Month Earlier – How this experiment got started.

“Hmmm, well looking at these numbers one thing jumps out at me. I wouldn’t say your testosterone is low necessarily, but it could be higher.”

I’m paraphrasing a discussion during an online consultation with Dr Alexis. A friend and digital-nomad, Alexis also happens to be a naturopathic Doctor and CrossFitter. She was reading over my most recent bloodwork, and we’d been incrementally dialing things in over the course of the year. We started with the basics, e.g. Vitamin D, B Vitamins, basic cholesterol ratios etc, but with an overall eye of filling in the blanks and getting things to ‘optimal’ wherever possible.

Lesson #1 – The most important piece here is access to cheap lab work. I spent most of 2015 in Budapest, where $1500 worth of bloodwork can be had for $120. If you don’t have access to the information in your blood, you’re flying blind when it comes to your overall health.

Some people are turned off by the word ‘naturopath’ which makes sense only if you don’t understand the difference between a naturopath (non-medical school training, maybe online certificate) and a naturopathic Doctor (requiring 4 years of medical school and a board examination). I didn’t get this at first and it’s clear that most people I’ve talked to don’t either.

“Naturopathic doctors are functional medicine practitioners who specialize in a drug-free, natural approach to healing the body through diet and lifestyle modifications and the use of natural medicines.” – dralexisshields.com

Either way, it’s hard to argue with the idea that one should start with diet and lifestyle before using refined or synthetic substances. If you can eat the plant, eat the damn plant, don’t take the pill.

Bottom line: science is observable, measurable, repeatable. Doesn’t matter what you call it if it follows the criteria and it works.

“So, how do I get my testosterone up then?” 

The obvious question for someone who wants to be kicking as much ass as possible.

Lesson #2 – Big surprise, but you can make large, measurable changes to your blood chemistry, energy levels, and performance with simple dietary changes and no supplements. Food is the #1 drug.

Alexis came up with the following dietary recommendations which I expanded on with a little research (and re-reading the chapter on tripling testosterone in the 4-Hour Body). I want to emphasize here that most of the changes are related to changes in diet–I was already doing most of the activity-related pieces.

Also important: my general eating plan already tends to be somewhere on the lower carb, higher fat, higher protein end of the spectrum.

Here’s the initial advice Alexis gave me on eating, which formed the backbone of my experiment:

Eating more zinc and IF both help with boosting testosterone- yes!
Eat 1-3 servings of a high zinc food daily- beef, lamb, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, lentils, garbanzo beans, cashews, quinoa, turkey, shrimp

Other dietary tips:
1. Add an additional serving of animal protein daily
2. Eat 1/4 cup of a fermented food daily- to help with proper gut flora effecting hormones and the immune system (sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, miso, tempeh, keifer (if well tolerated), any other fermented vegetable)
3. Eat full fat as much as possible (dairy if you tolerate it, and coconut milk, etc). The higher fat the better at this point to keep hormones improving.

Here is the Testosterone-Boosting Action Plan

I took the advice above and ran with it. Here is my full list:

1. Eat *a lot* more fat & cholesterol.
2. Eat foods high in Zinc.
3. Eat fermented foods.
4. Keep the carbs relatively low and avoid white death, I mean sugar, completely (as always).
5. Avoid alcohol as much as possible. (a drink or two a week is probably OK).
6. Lift heavy weights.
7. Experiment with ice baths if you can take them.
8. Sleep as much as possible.
9. Play around with a few wildcards (e.g. posture, cinnamon in coffee, nettle root, etc).

The Dietary Component – Eat more fat and zinc-rich foods + fermented foods

Here are the specific fats and zinc-rich foods I ate:

Fats

• Grass-fed cow butter (Kerry Gold)
• Keifir
• Avocados
• Coconut oil
• Eggs
• Full fat Greek yogurt

High-Zinc Foods

• Brazil nuts
• Turkey
• Quinoa
• Pumpkin seeds

Fermented Foods

• Keifir
• Miso Soup

Basic Supplements (I was already taking these with one exception):

• Magnesium + Zinc – 3 tabs per day
• Fish Oil – 3 tabs per day
• Vitamin D – 2-5000 IU/day depending on whether I’m in the sun or not
• B-Vitamin complex
• Creatine (5g/day)
• Whey protein (ON)
• Saw Palmetto/Nettle Root – The only new addition for this test. Some background on this.

What these additions look like day-to-day:

A couple weeks into this upgraded eating plan and I was throwing barbells around like they were toys.

Breakfast

• Added a sprinkle of Cinnamon to ground coffee (Info on cinnamon and testosterone).
• Bulked up the bulletproof coffee: I may have gotten up to 2 TBs butter + 2 Tbs of coconut oil per cup (1 cup total). More like a milkshake than coffee, but damn good if you mix it properly (I use a battery powered latte whisk).
• Added another scoop of coconut oil and a half cup of pumpkin seeds to my morning smoothie.

Snacks

• Full-Fat Greek Yogurt – Ate one of these as a snack each day, 400g per serving.
• Brazil Nuts (2 nuts per day. Do NOT exceed this).
• Keifir – Found a local dairy with amazing Kefir and drank nearly one of these per day, about 0.5 L.
• Turkey Breast

Lunch/Dinner

• Miso Soup
• Eggs – Would eat about 4 per day.
• Added an extra Tbs of butter and or Olive oil to each meal.
• Avocado – I threw an extra avo onto almost everything.
• Quinoa – The occasional carb-load post workout.

Here’s a snapshot from MyFitnessPal:

Activity Pieces for Boosting Testosterone

#1 – Lift Heavy weights

It is known that activating deep skeletal muscles, e.g. heavy squats will do all kinds of wonderful things to your body’s hormones. Plenty of literature out there, nothing new.

#2 – Sleep as much as you possibly can

After I heard Kelly Starrett mention he gained a bunch of lean muscle mass in a month simply from adding an hour of sleep each night (from 8 to 9 hours) I gave it a shot. That was around the beginning of 2015, and this was one of the best moves I’ve made in a long time.

I’ve needed a lot of sleep at every age (even between the ages of 17-21 when I was playing soccer), but these days I have zero guilt about sleeping for 9 hours. Part of this comes from starting to understand the full importance of working with individual variability. The genetic piece is also getting more accessible: how genetics influences performance (sorry that’s behind a paywall but worth the $).

Side note: I plan to do some genetic testing this year and I’m nearly certain it’s going to show ‘you need significant downtime to recover’. Stay tuned.

#3 – Experiment with ice baths

Another one from the 4-hour body / Podcast. Cold water has some awesome effects, and it will do some amazing things for recovery and energy levels. Still playing around with this one.

#4 – ‘Power pose’ Added to Morning routine

This was a sort of hilarious ‘why the hell not’ addition which I threw into my morning routine. We know that action creates emotion (see Thinking, Fast and Slow), e.g. force yourself to smile for a few minutes by putting a pen in your mouth and you will have a positive mood boost. So why not spend the first 2 minutes of each day emulating the posture of a champion. Here’s the science (Ted Talk): How your Body Language Shapes who you are.

Here are the actual lab measurements-

*Technical note – Hardest part about getting measurements done in another country is converting units and ranges. I had professional help to do this (Dr. Alexis) but we’re not ready for peer-reviewed journal submission here.

June 2, 2015

• Total Testosterone – 544.67 ng/dl (Low end of Normal)
• Free Testosterone – 1.74 nmol/l (Normal)
• SHBG – 59 nmol/L (HIGH)
• DHEA-S 3.98 umol/K

Sept 3, 2015

• Total Testosterone – 1148.4 lab ng/dl (HIGH)
• Free Testosterone – 1.72 nmol/l (Normal)
• SHBG – 74.71 nmol/l (HIGH)
• DHT – 344 nmol/l (Low)
• DHEA-S – 5.55 umol/l

Oct 6, 2015

• Total Testosterone – 697.41 ng/dl
• SHBG – 73 nmol/l (HIGH)

Important questions about this experiment-

Is this even remotely scientific?

Well, not really. As you can see we threw everything at the wall to see what sticks. It’s impossible for me to say what had the greatest affect on testosterone levels from the changes above. The only way to do that would be testing each change individually–something I don’t have the time or budget for.

What affect did this diet have on other biomarkers?

This is a great question, and here’s what happened between the tests on June 2 and Oct 6th:

• Triglycerides stayed the same, 67.26 mg/dL
• Total Cholesterol also stayed the same, at 208.49 mg/dL
• HDL increased, from 63.32 to 66.8 mg/dL
• LDL increased slightly from 139 to 145.17 mg/dL
• Lp(a) dropped (confusing units so not including)

I have a hunch that my high LDL is due to high dairy consumption, something I’m going to test next. More on this can be found in the interview with Dom D’Agostino on Ketosis.

How long can you sustain this diet?

Sustaining it is one thing. The question is will testosterone levels stay elevated and/or is it worth the affects on concentration. I ran with the diet for a few months with no problems. You can see that despite this my my testosterone peaked and then dropped off–enough to allow me to concentrate but not so much that I lost my strength gains. Lot’s more to explore there in terms of how to cycle this and if that’s worthwhile.

Is long-term elevated testosterone a bad thing?

Great question I don’t have an answer for. Our goal here was not extremely high levels but really trying to bring things up to ‘optimal’. More work is needed. Extremely elevated anything long-term is probably not good.

What about other things that affect testosterone availability?

This is key: you may have a lot of testosterone but it may be in an ‘unavailable’ form. When testing we looked at free testosterone vs total, as well as the wonderfully named SHBG (sex hormone binding globulin) which can take testosterone out of commission. My understanding of how to reduce SHBG and increase free testosterone is still pretty fuzzy.

Which tests do I get to repeat this experiment?

Make sure you test before you start as a baseline. These are the markers we used:

• Testosterone Free
• Testosterone Total
• SHBG (sex hormone binding globulin)
• DHT (dihydrotestosterone)
• DHEA-S

What programming/training plan did you use?

My buddy who is co-owner of the Reebok CrossFit Duna in Budapest wrote all my programming. He’s working on a publicly available version, so if you’re interested in the full Olympic lifting programming or basic beginner weightlifting progressions, click here and enter your email.

What other activity pieces have you not tested?

A few people recommended intermittent-fasting (IF), e.g. pack all eating into a fixed time window each day (like 8 hours). I did not have a chance to test this out but I think longer term it makes a lot of sense to work part of this in.

Were there any side effects?

One thing I noticed from this was the increasing tendency to get angry over trivial events. Since anger is self-perpetuating and habitual, I realized while writing this that I’ve been much more prone to irritation ever since. This is something I’ve combatted since adolescence, and as another habit can be broken. But something to pay attention to.

Do you own any other shirts besides that green Chiang Mai City shirt?

Yes I promise. But this one cost $2 and it’s pretty Spartan.

Some conclusions

This was a great experiment for me, not just for the results but also how quickly and dramatically it affected performance and overall energy levels.

I’m always looking for sustainable ways to boost energy levels and increase performance (this is about more than just fitness), and this is definitely going into the bag of tricks.

Would love to hear your comments if you’ve tried this or something similar. More on these topics to come, including experiments in ketosis, training, fitness for outdoor sports.

And remember kids, I’m not a doctor, so don’t take this as prescriptive in any way. It crucial to figure out how your own body responds to diet (especially macronutrient percentages) and activity.

Further Research

• Dietary Fats and Testosterone Production – AnabolicMen.com
• How to gain 20 lbs in 28 days (Tim Ferris)
• The 4-Hour Body (Tim Ferris), esp. chapter on Tripling Testosterone (see cliff notes here)
• The One thing that will make you better at everything – Barbell Shrugged podcast

The post The Diet that Doubled my Testosterone in 2015 appeared first on SpartanTraveler.

Editor’s Note: Many thanks to all those who encouraged me to get back to writing. 2015 was a bit of a grind, but the good news is I’ve got plenty to share from the experience.

Fear not, trusty readers, SpartanTraveler is alive and well.

But getting somewhere in life is about making hard choices, and the reality in 2015 was simple: focus or die.

Because when you do everything you do nothing.

‘Like the sculptor, who does not add clay, but strips away the inessentials until the truth is revealed.’
– Bruce Lee character from Dragon

I’ve always thrived at the breaking point of manageable activity. That place where positive stress forces focus and serious action. Where the goals and the necessity for completing them are immediately clear.

As a result, I always assumed as life went I’d continue to be doing more. More traveling, more and different types of adventures, and more varieties of work. 

But bigger goals require more focus and refinement, which means you can do fewer big things and expect to get anywhere. Laser-focus can move mountains, but spread that focus out and you end up wondering how a year went by with nothing to show for it.

Every year the key things I’m willing to spend effort on get fewer, not greater. It’s actually amazing how little I can effectively do at once.

The rule of keeping it simple is even clearer in business: every variable in the system adds a disproportionate amount of time and work. It also increases the chance of failure.

Brilliant simplification is the key. Do one thing, do it extremely well, and hammer on it until there is nothing left to hammer.

Building the System Takes Longer than you Think

In The 6 Phases of Lifestyle Design, I wrote about what I called The Transition, Phase IV: the ‘get it built or forget about it’ phase of building an online business. The punchline here is that when I wrote this post in mid-2014 I thought I’d already graduated to the next phase.

It’s now mid-January 2016, and I’m having a good laugh about it.

To be clear, what I’m talking about here is building a business, which is defined as a self-perpetuating system that makes a profit. Not passive income, not a remote job, not consulting, and not being a super affiliate. These can be great ways to make money, but in my mind the only one that has an ending is building a business. Because one day I can push the ship out to sea and know it’s going to keep sailing with or without me.

When I landed back in Budapest in January 2015 the priorities were simple:

1. Refine the systems that would run my business in the future, and hire the great people I need to run them.
2. Maintain a tremendously high energy level that would make building and simultaneously running a startup possible.

The first meant grinding through a lot of intelligently planned hard work, and the second meant not sacrificing my health in the process (a mistake I’ve made before).

So, what were the results of 2015?

From the standpoint of these two goals, fantastic. The business maintained a growth rate of 150% while I got stronger and healthier than I’ve ever been before (more on this later).

But it also meant this is all I did this year.

Key Lessons From Business Building

Let’s just say I’ve done a deep dive on some of the issues I brought up in 22 things I’ve learned as a digital-nomad.

#1 Find a Base and Eliminate All Inefficiency

A controlled environment is key to experimental progress, because only then can you hold everything constant and make small adjustments to minimize the ‘monkey motion’ and max out effective work.

Parking myself in Budapest allowed me to work 6-12 hours per day, workout up to 3, and still sleep 9 hours per night. I threw out all non-essential activities and decision-making in order to focus on the priorities.

Specifically:

• I rented an apartment in the city center (no commuting) and did not move for 10 months, save for one or two trips around Europe each quarter.
• I worked out of my apartment with 2 monitors 3-4 days a week and a fixed co-working space with my team twice per week.
• I hired a weekly cleaner which eliminated cleaning, dishes, and doing laundry.
• I had my groceries along with a week of prepaid meals delivered at the beginning of each week, which eliminated cooking and grocery shopping. I also more or less eat the same thing every day, with only a few meal-related decisions of where to eat out each week .
• I helped convince my friend and CrossFit coach to start a productized-service writing goal-specific workout programming for me (and others) so I didn’t have to think about what to do at the gym.
• I continued to wear the same clothes every day, a habit that still serves me well.

Once this was all in place all I had to do was hammer on the laptop and get to the gym each day.

The other bonus here? My basic cost of living was about $1500 a month.

#2 Temporary Location-Dependence can Pay Massive Dividends

When I originally thought about heading to Budapest I figured I could both live comfortably here and hire key software developer talent. After 2 years I was tired of remote communication with transient developers who seemed to disappear right when I needed them most.

The solution seemed clear: Central/Eastern Europe, and specifically Budapest could offer a chance to work face-to-face time with key hires in a place I could see myself long term.

You didn’t read that wrong: a blog about location-independence just told you to work out of an office with your employees.

(I understand if you leave now, I mean, how many more digital nomad fantasies can I throw under the bus?)

But wait! Here’s the caveat: there’s a phase in every business–at least in the startups I’ve worked in–where the efficiency of face-to-face communication is a massive multiplier. It pays to hunker around a table, eat pizza, and hack until you have something to show for it.

There’s also a point where this multiplier starts to diminish, and can actually regress well into the negative. Anyone who has ever worked in a typical office environment knows what I’m talking about: sitting around a table can encourage lazy communication habits, e.g. asking for something you could easily look up (“heard of Google?”).

I also don’t really want to reserve 20 minutes a day to talk about what I did last weekend, or the latest sports scores, despite the team building element here. It my sound harsh, but my view about work is surgical: get in, do the job, and get the hell out of there.

This location-dependent phase doesn’t have to last forever, but you may find working in the same room with others is extremely rewarding. It’s also worth paying your dues the right way, vs trying to sync up over a Skype on a 9-hour time difference with a connection that cuts out every 5 minutes.

The other major lesson here is: you can achieve balance here by scheduling regular in-person meetups with your team. The billion-dollar 200+ person location-independent company Automattic (makes WordPress) does this and there’s a worthwhile read about it: The Year Without Pants.

https://www.instagram.com/p/-t14FatXSN/?taken-by=spartantraveler

#3 Transitioning from ‘Maker to Manager’ is harder than I thought

No matter how many times you read about the transition–from doing the work to managing someone else doing the work–it doesn’t make it any easier.

I’ve made solid progress on making every mistake possible with regard to hiring and managing people at this point: hiring the wrong person, not training them well, expecting people to work without direction, you name it.

Turns out I also really like doing the work, and it’s hard to let go of that.

The good news is: because I know so specifically what kind of work I like to do, which approximates to the work I’m best at, I can and should hire others to do the rest. It makes me happier and more productive, and the sum is a more efficient system.

The best hiring advice I’ve heard comes from the book Traction, and is a modified version of the heuristic I’ve used for years: only hire people you’d go have a beer with.

Pulling from a few sources here in terms of hiring:

• Write down your mission and values, and take this seriously.
• Write compelling job descriptions based on who you are, but still double-easter egg them (eg bury a couple things like ‘include the words inigo montoya somewhere in your application’ which clears about 80% of crap immediately).
• Hire people based on compatibility first, and skillset second. I’d rather teach a smart enthusiastic person how to do something than hire a jaded expert.

And here’s a good way to think about managing others that would have saved me a lot of trouble:

• Do the first 5-10% of work–the hard thinking, organization, and higher-level planning.
• Hand off the next 80-90% of work, which is the bulldozing through the work to achieve the plan.
• Circle back for the last 5-10% of refinement and feedback.

And f*cking put a metric on everything.

Hiring the right people is the key to shifting gears and scaling and (for better or worse) being a solopreneur is never going to build you a shippable business.

That said, nothing is easy.

#4 On the Difficulties of Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping just means not spending more money than you have coming in (vs taking investment or spending savings). So if you’re making a dollar a day don’t spend more than $1 a day. 

There are pros and cons to this approach. Looking back, boostrapping has been massively beneficial for the following:

1. Being lean, mean, and hungry.
2. 100% focus on finding profit, wherever it is, and the fast iteration to get there.
3. Prevents you from over-extending massively by not doing the first two.

But, the problem can be:

1. Can’t hire full-time employees for a long time, so you pay some part-time guy 9 time-zones away to work when he feels like it (or attempt to play the equity game)…
2. Both of these can mean mean hamstrung growth in the beginning.

I don’t think either approach is always right, but bootstrapping definitely fits my general criteria around money and business:

1. Don’t go into debt, ever.
2. Don’t lose money.

That said, we could have moved a lot faster if we hired a full-time high-quality developer early on. It’s possible that not doing this cost more (via opportunity-cost and technological debt) in the long-run than going into debt early, hard to say.

#5 A few Lessons on How to Effectively Burn Out

How do you maintain extremely high-level output long term?

2015 showed me some great things not to do.

Not to do:

• Work 6.5 days per week every week.
• Never take breaks.

I know, I’ve written about cycling being key before, but like the main character in Memento I almost have to have this tattooed on my forehead to remember it (refer to image at top of post).

While getting into crazy startup mode is fun and sometimes you just have to get things done, the net result of overworking both on a daily basis and longer term is lower work output and lower quality work.

The key lesson from this for 2016 is: schedule your breaks before you get into it.

That could mean book a flight or at the very least block the trip out on the calendar. Because 4 weeks from now you’re going to be in too deep to pull your head out. I tend to work best in 3 week cycles with some kind of re-set in the middle, or a longer one after 6 weeks.

And on a day-to-day basis, if I’m completely honest most of my work after 6-7 hours is not A+. If I’m working more than this it probably means I’m over-extending by either doing work that doesn’t need to be done or by sweeping up grains of sand when I need to be moving boulders.

This is where both proper planning and following the mission comes in, as well as learning proper triage for determining what work actually matters.

Accepting that improvements can be made I have to balance this out by saying 2015 wasn’t a total failure to have some fun, and in general terms it was pretty damn good. Some highlights (all part of total budget of <= $2000/mo. USD):

• ASOT700, Utrecht, Netherlands
• A few days of skiing in the Alps, Switzerland
• Wine tasting in Balaton, Hungary
• Catamaran Trip around Ibiza, Spain
• Explored the island of Malta
• Transmission, Prague, Czech Republic
• Week of surfing, Santa Cruz, CA
• Couple weeks of kiteboarding/surfing, La Ventana, Mexico

https://www.instagram.com/p/_zNeQ_NXYS/

#6 Setting a Kill/Revise Threshold

‘The further away your goal is from your current skills and abilities the more of your life has to be organized around making it happen.’

– Joe Friel, paraphrased from the Triathletes Training Bible

If you fully dedicate yourself to something how much of your life are you willing to give up to make it a reality?

While the most important success factor in business is often just to not die, we as lifestyle-designers have slightly different criteria here, including the enjoyment of our life as we move through it (vs massive payoff at some unknown date).

It’s important to have a timeline for any project, and I’ve repeatedly gone above this to set specific kill thresholds for certain projects or even whole businesses. The most important thing is simply to have fixed and ongoing review periods for reviewing/revising the plan.

And always reserve the right to pull the plug.

There is always more opportunity out there, and it’s important to consider what you’re not doing by focusing on what you’re doing now.

But don’t forget (Clayton), that by taking breaks and balancing out intense work periods with intense rest you can gear up for the long-haul. And also:

#7 Don’t be in a hurry to build the System

The reality is, as much as you want to outsource everything and travel or whatever else you can’t systemize or hand off broken or unbuilt processes.

This means you will have to do every business process about 100,000 times yourself, then build the tech to automate it, then troubleshoot that 50,000 times, then change it because everything else has changed by this point, then train someone and help them another 80,000 times, then watch them do it the next 50,000 times, then maybe, just maybe it will run itself (until it breaks).

“Don’t shirk challenges just because they are hard, but know your limits. Work as an entrepreneur can be threading the needle between burnout and laziness, all while shooting for breakthroughs. Avoid schleps that will likely result in burnout but don’t be lazy (continue pushing yourself).”

– Paul Graham

I’ve reached a point of being ok with this, and my mentality is to relentlessly grind through it with the understanding that someday this ship will float.

And I clearly have no plans to stop working anytime soon. Onward.

[Image Credits: 1 (Memento), 2 Yours Truly]

The post 7 Key Lessons From Business Building in 2015 appeared first on SpartanTraveler.