The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Expanded and Updated

12. Disappearing Act. HOW TO ESCAPE THE OFFICE

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

“We’re not going to expense the phone.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

Silence. Then a nod, a laugh, and a crooked smile of resignation.

“OK, then—it’s fine.”

And that was that, lickity-split. Forty-four-year old Dave Camarillo, lifelong employee, had cracked the code and started his second life.

He hadn’t been fired; he hadn’t been yelled at. His boss seemed to be handling the whole situation quite well. Granted, Dave delivered the goods on the job, and it wasn’t like he was doing naked snow angels in client meetings, but still—he had just spent 30 days in China without telling anyone.

“It wasn’t half as hard as I thought it would be.”

Dave works among more than 10,000 employees at Hewlett- Packard (HP), and—against all odds—he actually likes it. He has no desire to start his own company and has spent the last seven years doing tech support for customers in 45 states and 22 countries. Six months ago, however, he had a small problem.

She measured 5′2″ and weighed 110 pounds.

Was he, like most men, afraid of commitment, unwilling to stop running around the house in Spider-Man underoos, or inseparable from the last refuge of any self-respecting man, the PlayStation? No, he was past all that. In fact, Dave was locked and loaded, ready to pop the big question, but he was short on vacation days and his girlfriend lived out of town. Waaaaay out of town—5,913 miles out of town.

He had met her on a client visit to Shenzhen, China, and it was now time to meet the parents, logistics be damned.

Dave had only recently begun to take tech calls at home, and, well, isn’t home where the heart is? One plane ticket and one T-Mobile GSM tri-band phone later, he was somewhere over the Pacific en route to his first seven-day experiment. Twelve time zones hence, he proposed, she accepted, and no one was the wiser stateside.

The second field trip was a 30-day tour of Chinese family and food (pig face, anyone?), ending with Shumei Wu becoming Shumei Camarillo. Back in Palo Alto, HP continued its quest for world domination, neither knowing nor caring where Dave was. He had his calls forwarded to his newly begotten wife’s cell phone and all was right in the world.

Now back in the U.S. after hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, Dave had earned his Eagle Scout mobility badge. The future looks flexible, indeed. He is going to start by spending two months in China every summer and then move to Australia and Europe to make up for lost time, all with the full support of his boss.

The key to cutting the leash was simple—he asked for forgiveness instead of permission.

“I didn’t travel for 30 years of my life—so why not?”

THAT’S PRECISELY THE question everyone should be asking—why the hell not?

From Caste to Castaway

The old rich, the upper class of yore with castles and ascots and irritating little lapdogs, are characterized as being well-established in one place. The Schwarzes of Nantucket and the McDonnells of Charlottesville. Blech. Summers in the Hamptons is sooooo 1990s.

The guard is changing. Being bound to one place will be the new defining feature of middle class. The New Rich are defined by a more elusive power than simple cash—unrestricted mobility. This jet-setting is not limited to start-up owners or freelancers. Employees can pull it off, too.⁵⁸

Not only can they pull it off, but more and more companies want them to pull it off. BestBuy, the consumer electronics giant, is now sending thousands of employees home from their HQ in Minnesota and claims not only lowered costs, but also a 10–20% increase in results. The new mantra is this: Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.

In Japan, a three-piece zombie who joins the 9–5 grind each morning is called a sarari-man—salaryman—and, in the last few years, a new verb has emerged: datsu-sara suru, to escape (datsu) the salaryman (sara) lifestyle.

It’s your turn to learn the datsu-sara dance.⁵⁹

Trading Bosses for Beer: An Oktoberfest Case Study

To create the proper leverage to be unshackled, we’ll do two things: demonstrate the business benefit of remote working and make it too expensive or excruciating to refuse a request for it.

Remember Sherwood?

His French shirts are beginning to move and he is itching to ditch the U.S. for a global walkabout. He has more than enough cash now but needs to escape constant supervision in the office before he can implement all the timesaving tools from Elimination and travel.

He is a mechanical engineer and is producing twice as many designs in half the time since erasing 90% of his time-wasters and interruptions. This quantum leap in performance has been noticed by his supervisors and his value to the company has increased, making it more expensive to lose him. More value means more leverage for negotiations. Sherwood has been sure to hold back some of his productivity and efficiency so that he can highlight a sudden jump in both during a remote work trial period.

Since eliminating most of his meetings and in-person discussions, he has naturally moved about 80% of all communication with his boss and colleagues to e-mail and the remaining 20% to phone. Not only this, but he has used tips from chapter 7, “Interrupting Interruption and the Art of Refusal,” to cut unimportant and repetitive e-mail volume in half. This will make the move to remote less noticeable, if at all noticeable, from a managerial standpoint. Sherwood is running at full speed with less and less supervision.

Sherwood implements his escape in five steps, beginning on July 12 during the slow business season and lasting two months, ending with a trip to Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, for two weeks as a final test before bigger and bolder vagabonding plans.

Step 1: Increase Investment

First, he speaks with his boss on July 12 about additional training that might be available to employees. He proposes having the company pay for a four-week industrial design class to help him better interface with clients, being sure to mention the benefit to the boss and business (i.e., he’ll decrease intradepartmental back-and-forth and increase both client results and billable time). Sherwood wants the company to invest as much as possible in him so that the loss is greater if he quits.

Step 2: Prove Increased Output Offsite

Second, he calls in sick the next Tuesday and Wednesday, July 18 and 19, to showcase his remote working productivity.⁶⁰ He decides to call in sick between Tuesday and Thursday for two reasons: It looks less like a lie for a three-day weekend and it also enables him to see how well he functions in social isolation without the imminent reprieve of the weekend. He ensures that he doubles his work output on both days, leaves an e-mail trail of some sort for his boss to notice, and keeps quantifiable records of what he accomplished for reference during later negotiations. Since he uses expensive CAD software that is only licensed on his office desktop, Sherwood installs a free trial of GoToMyPC remote access software so that he can pilot his office computer from home.

Step 3: Prepare the Quantifiable Business Benefit

Third, Sherwood creates a bullet-point list of how much more he achieved outside the office with explanations. He realizes that he needs to present remote working as a good business decision and not a personal perk. The quantifiable end result was three more designs per day than his usual average and three total hours of additional billable client time. For explanations, he identifies removal of commute and fewer distractions from office noise.

Step 4: Propose a Revocable Trial Period

Fourth, fresh off completing the comfort challenges from previous chapters, Sherwood confidently proposes an innocent one-day-per-week remote work trial period for two weeks. He plans a script in advance but does not make it a PowerPoint presentation or otherwise give it the appearance of something serious or irreversible.⁶¹

Sherwood knocks on his boss’s office door around 3 P.M. on a relatively relaxed Thursday, July 27, the week after his absence, and his script looks like the following. Stock phrases are underlined and footnotes explain negotiating points.

Sherwood: Hi, Bill. Do you have a quick second?

Bill: Sure. What’s up?

Sherwood: I just wanted to bounce an idea off of you that’s been on my mind. Two minutes should be plenty.

Bill: OK. Shoot.

Sherwood: Last week, as you know, I was sick. Long story short, I decided to work at home despite feeling terrible. So here’s the funny part. I thought I would get nothing done, but ended up finishing three more designs than usual on both days. Plus, I put in three more billable hours than usual without the commute, office noise, distractions, etc. OK, so here’s where I’m going. Just as a trial, I’d like to propose working from home Mondays and Tuesdays for just two weeks. You can veto it whenever you want, and I’ll come in if we need to do meetings, but I’d like to try it for just two weeks and review the results. I’m 100% confident that I’ll get twice as much done. Does that seem reasonable?

Bill: Hmm … What if we need to share client designs?

Sherwood: There’s a program called GoToMyPC that I used to access the office computer when I was sick. I can view everything remotely, and I’ll have my cell phone on me 24/7. Sooooo … What do you think? Test it out starting next Monday and see how much more I get done?⁶²

Bill: Ummm … OK, fine. But it’s just a test. I have a meeting in five and have to run, but let’s talk soon.

Sherwood: Great. Thanks for the time. I’ll keep you posted on it all. I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Sherwood didn’t expect to get two days per week approved. He asked for two so that, in the case his boss refused, he could ask for just one as a fallback position (bracketing). Why didn’t Sherwood go for five days remote per week? Two reasons. First, it’s a lot for management to accept off the bat. We need to ask for an inch and turn it into a foot without setting off panic alarms. Second, it is a good idea to hone your remote-working abilities—rehearse a bit—before shooting for the big time, as it decreases the likelihood of crises and screwups that will get remote rights revoked.

Step 5: Expand Remote Time

Sherwood ensures that his days outside of the office are his most productive to date, even minimally dropping in-office production to heighten the contrast. He sets a meeting to discuss the results with his boss on August 15 and prepares a bullet-point page detailing increased results and items completed compared to in-office time. He suggests upping the ante to four days per week remote for a two-week trial, fully prepared to concede to three days if need be.

Sherwood: It really turned out even better than I expected. If you look at the numbers, it makes a lot of business sense, and I’m enjoying work a lot more now. So, here we are. I’d like to suggest, if you think it makes sense, that I try four days a week for another two-week trial. I was thinking that coming in Friday⁶³would make sense to prepare for the coming week, but we could do whichever day you prefer.

Bill: Sherwood, I’m really not sure we can do that.

Sherwood: What’s your main concern?⁶⁴

Bill: It seems like you’re on your way out. I mean, are you going to quit on us? Second, what if everyone wants to do the same?

Sherwood: Fair enough. Good points.⁶⁵ First, to be honest, I was close to quitting before, with all the interruptions and commute and whatnot, but I’m actually feeling great now with the change in routine.⁶⁶ I’m doing more and feel relaxed for a change. Second, no one should be allowed to work remotely unless they can show increased productivity, and I’m the perfect experiment. If they can show it, however, why not let them do it on a trial basis? It lowers costs for the office, increases productivity, and makes employees happier. So, what do you say? Can I test it out for two weeks and come in Fridays to take care of the office stuff? I’ll still document everything, and you, of course, have the right to change your mind at any point.

Bill: Man, you are an insistent one. OK, we’ll give it a shot, but don’t go blabbing about it.

Sherwood: Of course. Thanks, Bill. I appreciate the trust. Talk to you soon.

Sherwood continues to be productive at home and maintains his lower in-office performance. He reviews the results with his boss after two weeks and continues with four remote days per week for an additional two weeks until Tuesday, September 19, when he requests a full-time remote trial of two weeks while he is visiting relatives out of state.⁶⁷ Sherwood’s team is in the middle of a project that requires his expertise, and he is prepared to quit if his boss refuses. He realizes that, just as you want to negotiate ad pricing close to deadlines, getting what you want often depends more on when you ask for it than how you ask for it. Though he would prefer not to quit, his income from shirts is more than enough to fund his dream-lines of Oktoberfest and beyond.

His boss acquiesces and Sherwood doesn’t have to use his threat of quitting. He goes home that evening and buys a $524 round-trip ticket, less than one week’s shirt sales, to Munich for Oktoberfest.

Now he can implement all the time-savers possible and hack out the inessentials. Somewhere between drinking wheat beer and dancing in lederhosen, Sherwood will get his work done in fine form, leaving his company better off than prior to 80/20 and leaving himself all the time in the world.

But hold on a second … What if your boss still refuses? Hmm … Then they force your hand. If upper management won’t see the light, you’ll just have to use the next chapter to fire their asses.

An Alternative: The Hourglass Approach

It can be effective to take a longer period of absence up front in what some NR have termed the “hourglass” approach, so named because you use a long proof-of-concept up front to get a short remote agreement and then negotiate back up to full-time out of the office. Here’s what it looks like.

Use a preplanned project or emergency (family issue, personal issue, relocation, home repairs, whatever) that requires you to take one or two weeks out of the office.

Say that you recognize you can’t just stop working and that you would prefer to work instead of taking vacation days.

Propose how you can work remotely and offer, if necessary, to take a pay cut for that period (and that period only) if performance isn’t up to par upon returning.

Allow the boss to collaborate on how to do it so that he or she is invested in the process.

Make the two weeks “off” the most productive period you’ve ever had at work.

Show your boss the quantifiable results upon returning, and tell him or her that—without all the distractions, commute, etc.—you can get twice as much done. Suggest two or three days at home per week as a trial for two weeks.

Make those remote days ultraproductive.

Suggest only one or two days in the office per week.

Make those days the least productive of the week.

Suggest complete mobility—the boss will go for it.

Q&A: QUESTIONS AND ACTIONS

Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him.

—THOMAS J. WATSON, founder of IBM

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

While entrepreneurs have the most trouble with Automation, since they fear giving up control, employees get stuck on Liberation because they fear taking control. Resolve to grab the reins—the rest of your life depends on it.

The following questions and actions will help you to replace presence-based work with performance-based freedom.

If you had a heart attack, and assuming your boss were sympathetic, how could you work remotely for four weeks?

If you hit a brick wall with a task that doesn’t seem remote-compatible or if you predict resistance from your boss, ask the following:

What are you accomplishing with this task—what is the purpose?

If you had to find other ways to accomplish the same—if your life depended on it—how would you do it? Remote conferencing? Video conferencing? GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, DimDim.com (Mac), or related services?

Why would your boss resist remote work? What is the immediate negative effect it would have on the company and what could you do to prevent or minimize it?

Put yourself in your boss’s shoes. Based on your work history, would you trust yourself to work outside of the office?

If you wouldn’t, reread Elimination to improve production and consider the hourglass option.

Practice environment-free productivity.

Attempt to work for two to three hours in a café for two Saturdays prior to proposing a remote trial. If you exercise in a gym, attempt to exercise for those two weeks at home or otherwise outside of the gym environment. The purpose here is to separate your activities from a single environment and ensure that you have the discipline to work solo.

Quantify current productivity.

If you have applied the 80/20 Principle, set the rules of interrupting interruption, and completed related groundwork, your performance should be at an all-time high in quantifiable terms, whether customers served, revenue generated, pages produced, speed of accounts receivable, or otherwise. Document this.

Create an opportunity to demonstrate remote work productivity before asking for it as a policy.

This is to test your ability to work outside of an office environment and rack up some proof that you can kick ass without constant supervision.

Practice the art of getting past “no” before proposing.

Go to farmers’ markets to negotiate prices, ask for free first-class upgrades, ask for compensation if you encounter poor service in restaurants, and otherwise ask for the world and practice using the following magic questions when people refuse to give it to you.

“What would I need to do to [desired outcome]?”

“Under what circumstances would you [desired outcome]?”

“Have you ever made an exception?”

“I’m sure you’ve made an exception before, haven’t you?”

(If no for either of the last two, ask, “Why not?” If yes, ask, “Why?”)

Put your employer on remote training wheels—propose Monday or Friday at home.

Consider doing this, or the following step, during a period when it would be too disruptive to fire you, even if you were marginally less productive while remote.

If your employer refuses, it’s time to get a new boss or become an entrepreneur. The job will never give you the requisite time freedom. If you decide to jump ship, consider letting them make you walk the plank—quitting is often less appealing than tactfully getting fired and using severance or unemployment to take a long vacation.

Extend each successful trial period until you reach full-time or your desired level of mobility.

Don’t underestimate how much your company needs you. Perform well and ask for what you want. If you don’t get it over time, leave. It’s too big a world to spend most of life in a cubicle.

LIFESTYLE DESIGN IN ACTION

Consider trying Earth Class Mail, a service that you can reroute all your mail to, at which point they scan and e-mail you everything that comes in, giving you the option of recycling/shredding junk, getting a scan of the contents, or having specific items forwarded to you or someone you designate. I have not personally used it yet (will be testing it out this month in preparation for an upcoming trip in May), but a friend and author in Portland swears by them and knows the CEO. Seems they’ve gotten good press and the idea seems far better than relying on friends/family who, if they’re anything like my friends/family … will surely drop the ball at some point:-).

—NATHALIE

I also use GreenByPhone.com to process checks electronically that come in through my Earth Class Mail account—they charge $5 a check, but I live in San Diego, my Earth Class Mail office address is in Seattle, and I bank in Ohio. It works great!

—ANDREW

To add to your excellent list (we’ve traveled just like that for several years SWEET!), I’d like to add my modifications as a female traveler and a new mom (16-month-old baby). Personal favorites: (1) Athleta carries excellent, light, quick-dry clothing that hold up well to sports but still look very fashionable. Skorts are a must for looking feminine but being fully covered for hiking and steep pyramid steps—you know what I mean, ladies! Just a note, a slightly longer length will serve you well in a lot of countries, as well as tankini tops and swim skirts for swimming. (2) Fresh & Go toothbrush is simple to use. (3) Marsona sound machine for drowning out unfamiliar noises is a must (regularly use with baby at home too so when they hear the sound they know it’s sleep time!). This has been a lifesaver for us on many trips, and we now use it regularly at home for better sleep. No more changing hotels midtrip to avoid noise. AND, I know we have to travel light, but with baby a lot of things are nonnegotiable. These make for smoother sailing: (1) Peanut shell sling in black fleece—it’s more comfy than the cotton and you can pop baby in and out wherever you are, from birth to 35 lbs. I never take mine off, it’s part of my outfit; (2) Peapod plus portable tent—this is baby’s main bed at home and travel so baby has the same sleep place everywhere we go, and the flaps give all travel parties privacy—great from small babies to five-year-olds. I can still jam this onto a little wheeled carry-on and pack mine and baby’s minimal clothing around it; (3) Go Go Kidz TravelMate (great for wheeling car seat up to the gate for gate check or use on plane); (4) Britax Diplomat car seat is small but kids can use it from birth to approx. four years old.

Make sure the wheeled carry-on bag you get is one size smaller than the allowed carry-on size so you don’t get bumped to check the bag in if the plane is full. You can always nicely argue/reason/bat your eyelashes that you will put the bag in your foot space. Also, very helpful to give baby something to sip or munch on during take off and landing so yours isn’t the baby screaming from ear pain. Happy travels!

—KARYL

PRE-EMPTING THE BOSS: COMMON CONCERNS ABOUT REMOTE WORK

In the linked article, Cisco acknowledges that remote work arrangements are “here to stay” yet lists a set of security issues. It makes sense to preemptively research solutions so that you are armed and ready if your employer raises these concerns. http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_020508.html.

—Contributed by RAINA

58. If you’re an entrepreneur, don’t skip this chapter. This introduction to remote working tools and tactics is integral to the international pieces of the puzzle that follow.

59. This verb is used by Japanese women as well, even though female workers are referred to as “OL”—office ladies.

60. Any reason to be home will do (cable or phone installation, home repairs, etc.) or, if you prefer not to use a ruse, work a weekend or take two vacation days.

61. Review the Puppy Dog Close from “Income Autopilot II: Testing the Muse.”

62. Do not digress from your goal. Once you’ve addressed an objection or concern, go for the close.

63. Friday is the best day to be in the office. People are relaxed and tend to leave early.

64. Do not accept a vague refusal. Pinpointing the main concern in detail enables you to overcome it.

65. Don’t jump to the defensive after an objection. Acknowledge the validity of a boss’s concerns to prevent an ego-driven battle of wills.

66. Note this indirect threat dressed as a confession. It will make the boss think twice about refusing but prevents the win-lose outcome of an ultimatum.

67. This removes the boss’s ability to call you to the office. This is critical for making the first jump overseas.

13. Beyond Repair. KILLING YOUR JOB

Existential Pleas and Resignations Mad Libs

BY ED MURRAY

Some jobs are simply beyond repair.

Improvements would be like adding a set of designer curtains to a jail cell: better but far from good. In the context of this chapter, “job” will refer to both a company if you run one and a normal job if you have one. Some recommendations are limited to one of the two but most are relevant to both. So we begin.

I have quit three jobs and been fired from most of the rest. Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend: Someone else makes the decision for you, and it’s impossible to sit in the wrong job for the rest of your life. Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30–40 years of tolerating the mediocre.

Pride and Punishment

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.

—CHINESE PROVERB

Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile.

Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons. I hate to be wrong and sat in a dead-end trajectory with my own company until I was forced to change directions or face total breakdown—I know how hard it is.

Now that we’re all on a level playing field: Pride is stupid.

Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner. Going into a project or job without defining when worthwhile becomes wasteful is like going into a casino without a cap on what you will gamble: dangerous and foolish.

“But, you don’t understand my situation. It’s complicated!” But is it really? Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon. The problem and the solution are usually obvious and simple. It’s not that you don’t know what to do. Of course you do. You are just terrified that you might end up worse off than you are now.

I’ll tell you right now: If you’re at this point, you won’t be worse off. Revisit fear-setting and cut the cord.

Like Pulling Off a Band-Aid: It’s Easier and Less Painful Than You Think

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

—COLIN WILSON, British author of The Outsider; New Existentialist

There are several principal phobias that keep people on sinking ships, and there are simple rebuttals for all of them.

1. Quitting is permanent.

Far from it. Use the Q&A questions in this chapter and chapter 3 (Fear-setting) to examine how you could pick up your chosen career track or start another company at a later point. I have never seen an example where a change of direction wasn’t somehow reversible.

2. I won’t be able to pay the bills.

Sure you will. First of all, the objective will be to have a new job or source of cash flow before quitting your current job. Problem solved.

If you jump ship or get fired, it isn’t hard to eliminate most expenses temporarily and live on savings for a brief period. From renting out your home to refinancing or selling it, there are options. There are always options.

It might be emotionally difficult, but you won’t starve. Park your car in the garage and cancel insurance for a few months. Carpool or take the bus until you find the next gig. Rack up some more credit card debt and cook instead of eating out. Sell all the crap that you spent hundreds or thousands on and never use.

Take a full inventory of your assets, cash reserves, debts, and monthly expenses. How long could you survive with your current resources or if you sold some assets?

Go through all expenses and ask yourself, If I had to eliminate this because I needed an extra kidney, how would I do it? Don’t be melodramatic when there is no need—few things are fatal, particularly for smart people. If you’ve made it this far in life, losing or dropping a job will often be little more than a few weeks of vacation (unless you want more) prior to something better.

3. Health insurance and retirement accounts disappear if I quit.

Untrue.

I was scared of both when I was eliminated from TrueSAN. I had visions of rotting teeth and working at Wal-Mart to survive.

Upon looking at the facts and exploring options, I realized that I could have identical medical and dental coverage—the same provider and network—for $300–500 per month. To transfer my 401(k) to another company (I chose Fidelity Investments) was even easier: It took less than 30 minutes via phone and cost nothing.

Covering both of these bases takes less time than getting a customer service rep on the phone to fix your electric bill.

4. It will ruin my resume.

I love creative nonfiction.

It is not at all difficult to sweep gaps under the rug and make uncommon items the very things that get job interviews. How? Do something interesting and make them jealous. If you quit and then sit on your ass, I wouldn’t hire you either.

On the other hand, if you have a one-to-two-year world circumnavigation on your resume or training with professional soccer teams in Europe to your credit, two interesting things happen upon returning to the working world. First, you will get more interviews because you will stand out. Second, interviewers bored in their own jobs will spend the entire meeting asking how you did it!

If there is any question of why you took a break or left your previous job, there is one answer that cannot be countered: “I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do [exotic and envy-producing experience] and couldn’t turn it down. I figured that, with [20–40] years of work to go, what’s the rush?”

The Cheesecake Factor

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.

—THOMAS J. WATSON, founder of IBM

SUMMER 1999

Even before I tasted it, I knew something wasn’t quite right. After eight hours in the refrigerator, this cheesecake still hadn’t set at all. It swished in the gallon bowl like a viscous soup, chunks shifting and bobbing as I tilted it under close inspection. Somewhere a mistake had been made. It could have been any number of things:

Three 1 lb. sticks of Philly Cream Cheese

Eggs

Stevia

Unflavored gelatin

Vanilla

Sour cream

In this case, it was probably a combination of things and the lack of a few simple ingredients that generally make cheesecake a form of cake.

I was on a no-carbohydrate diet, and I had used this recipe before. It had been so delicious that my roommates wanted their fair share and insisted on an attempt at bulk production. Hence began the mathematical shenanigans and problems.

Before Splenda® and other miracles of sugar imitation came on the scene, the hard core used stevia, an herb 300 times sweeter than sugar. One drop was like 300 packets of sugar. It was a delicate tool and I wasn’t a delicate cook. I had once made a small handful of cookies using baking soda instead of baking powder, and that was bad enough to drive my roommates to puke on the lawn. This new masterpiece made the cookies look like fine dining: It tasted like liquid cream cheese mixed with cold water and about 600 packets of sugar.

I then did what any normal and rational person would do: I grabbed the largest soup ladle with a sigh and sat down in front of the TV to face my punishment. I had wasted an entire Sunday and a boatload of ingredients—it was time to reap what I had sown.

One hour and 20 large spoonfuls later, I hadn’t made a dent in the enormous batch of soup, but I was down for the count. Not only could I not eat anything but soup for two days, I couldn’t bring myself to even look at cheesecake, previously my favorite dessert, for more than four years.

Stupid? Of course. It’s about as stupid as one can get. This is a ridiculous and micro example of what people do on a larger scale with jobs all the time: self-imposed suffering that can be avoided. Sure, I learned a lesson and paid for the mistake. The real question is—for what?

There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth.

The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold.

The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.

“Yeah, but what if I’m in an industry where jumping around is looked down upon? I’ve been here barely a year, and prospective employers would think…”

Would they? Test assumptions before condemning yourself to more misery. I’ve seen one determinant of sex appeal to good employers: performance. If you are a rock star when it comes to results, it doesn’t matter if you jump ship from a bad company after three weeks. On the other hand, if tolerating a punishing work environment for years at a time is a prerequisite for promotion in your field, could it be that you’re in a game not worth winning?

The consequences of bad decisions do not get better with age.

What cheesecake are you eating?

Q&A: QUESTIONS AND ACTIONS

Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.

—INGVAR KAMPRAD, founder of IKEA, world’s largest furniture brand

Tens of thousands of people, most of them less capable than you, leave their jobs every day. It’s neither uncommon nor fatal. Here are a few exercises to help you realize just how natural job changes are and how simple the transition can be.

First, a familiar reality check: Are you more likely to find what you want in your current job or somewhere else?

If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?

Take a sick day and post your resume on the major job sites. Even if you have no immediate plans to leave your job, post your resume on sites such as www.monster.com and www.career-builder.com, using a pseudonym if you prefer. This will show you that there are options besides your current place of work. Call headhunters if your level makes such a step appropriate, and send a brief e-mail such as the one below to friends and non-work contacts.

Dear All,

I am considering making a career move and am interested in all opportunities that might come to mind. Nothing is too outrageous or out of left field. [If you know what you want or don’t want on some level, feel free to add, “I am particularly interested in …” or “I would like to avoid …”]

Please let me know if anything comes to mind!

Tim

Call in sick or take a vacation day to complete all of these exercises during a normal 9–5 workday. This will simulate unemployment and lessen the fear factor of non-office limbo.

In the world of action and negotiation, there is one principle that governs all others: The person who has more options has more power. Don’t wait until you need options to search for them. Take a sneak peek at the future now and it will make both action and being assertive easier.

If you run or own a company, imagine that you have just been sued and must declare bankruptcy. The company is now insolvent and you must close up shop. This is something you must legally do, and there are no finances to entertain other options. How would you survive?

TOOLS AND TRICKS

Considering Options and Pulling the Trigger

I-Resign (www.i-resign.com)

This site provides everything from non-quitting options (work-leave, vacations) to sample resignation letters and second-life job-hunting advice. Don’t miss the helpful discussion forums and hysterical “web consultant from London” letter.

Opening Retirement Accounts

If you want an adviser and don’t mind some fees:

Franklin-Templeton (www.franklintempleton.com) (800–527–2020)

American Funds (www.americanfunds.com) (800–421–0180)

If you will do your own investing and want no-load funds:

Fidelity Investments (www.fidelity.com) (800–343–3548)

Vanguard (www.vanguard.com) (800–414–1321)

Health Insurance for Self-employed or Unemployed (in descending order of reader endorsement)

Ehealthinsurance (www.ehealthinsurance.com) (800–977–8860)

AETNA (www.aetna.com) (800-MY-HEALTH)

Kaiser Permanente (www.kaiserpermanente.com) (866–352–0290)

American Community Mutual (www.american-community.com) (800–991–2642)

14. Mini-Retirements. EMBRACING THE MOBILE LIFESTYLE

Upon Sherwood’s return from Oktoberfest, dazed from killing neurons but the happiest he’s been in four years, the remote trial is made policy and Sherwood is inducted into the world of the New Rich. All he needs now is an idea of how to exploit this freedom and the tools to give his finite cash near-infinite lifestyle output.

If you’ve gone through the previous steps, eliminating, automating, and severing the leashes that bind you to one location, it’s time to indulge in some fantasies and explore the world.

Even if you have no ache for extended travel or think it’s impossible—whether due to marriage or mortgage or those little things known as children—this chapter is still the next step. There are fundamental changes I and most others put off until absence (or preparation for it) forces them. This chapter is your final exam in muse design.

The transformation begins in a small Mexican village, in a parable that’s been shared in various forms around the world.

Fables and Fortune Hunters

An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.

“How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked.

“Only a little while,” the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English.

“Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked.

“I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.

“But … What do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican looked up and smiled. “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.”

The American laughed and stood tall. “Sir, I’m a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.”

He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, señor, how long will all this take?”

To which the American replied, “15–20 years. 25 tops.”

“But what then, señor?”

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.”

“Millions, señor? Then what?”

“Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos …”

I RECENTLY HAD lunch in San Francisco with a good friend and former college roommate. He will soon graduate from a top business school and return to investment banking. He hates coming home from the office at midnight but explained to me that, if he works 80-hour weeks for nine years, he could become a managing director and make a cool $3–10 million per year. Then he would be successful.

“Dude, what on earth would you do with $3–10 million per year?” I asked.

His answer? “I would take a long trip to Thailand.”

That just about sums up one of the biggest self-deceptions of our modern age: extended world travel as the domain of the ultrarich. I’ve also heard the following:

“I’ll just work in the firm for 15 years. Then I’ll be partner and I can cut back on hours. Once I have a million or two in the bank, I’ll put it in something safe like bonds, take $80,000 a year in interest, and retire to sail in the Caribbean.”

“I’ll only work in consulting until I’m 35, then retire and ride a motorcycle across China.”

If your dream, the pot of gold at the end of the career rainbow, is to live large in Thailand, sail around the Caribbean, or ride a motorcycle across China, guess what? All of them can be done for less than $3,000. I’ve done all three. Here are just two examples of how far a little can go.⁶⁸

$250 U.S. Five days on a private Smithsonian tropical research island with three local fishermen who caught and cooked all my food and also took me on tours of the best hidden dive spots in Panamá.

$150 U.S. Three days of chartering a private plane in Mendoza wine country in Argentina and flying over the most beautiful vineyards around the snowcapped Andes with a personal guide.

Question: What did you spend your last $400 on? It’s two or three weekends of nonsense and throwaway forget-the-workweek behavior in most U.S. cities. $400 is nothing for a full eight days of life-changing experiences. But eight days isn’t what I’m recommending at all. Those were just interludes in a much larger production. I’m proposing much, much more.

The Birth of Mini-Retirements and

the Death of Vacations

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

—MOHANDAS GANDHI

In February of 2004, I was miserable and overworked.

My travel fantasy began as a plan to visit Costa Rica in March 2004 for four weeks of Spanish and relaxation. I needed a recharge and four weeks seemed “reasonable” by whatever made-up benchmark you can use for such a thing.

A friend familiar with Central America dutifully pointed out that it would never work, as Costa Rica was about to enter its rainy season. Torrential downpours weren’t the uplifting jolt I needed, so I shifted my focus to four weeks in Spain. It’s a long trip over the Atlantic, though, and Spain was close to other countries I’d always wanted to visit. I lost “reasonable” somewhere shortly thereafter and decided that I deserved a full three months to explore my roots in Scandinavia after four weeks in Spain.

If there were any real-time bombs or pending disasters, they would certainly crop up in the first four weeks, so there really wasn’t any additional risk in extending my trip to three months. Three months would be great.

Those three months turned into 15, and I started to ask myself, “Why not take the usual 20–30-year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?”

The Alternative to Binge Traveling

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

—CHARLES KURALT, CBS news reporter

If you are accustomed to working 50 weeks per year, the tendency, even after creating the mobility to take extended trips, will be to go nuts and see 10 countries in 14 days and end up a wreck. It’s like taking a starving dog to an all-you-can-eat buffet. It will eat itself to death.

I did this three months into my 15-month vision quest, visiting seven countries and going through at least 20 check-ins and checkouts with a friend who had negotiated three weeks off. The trip was an adrenaline-packed blast but like watching life on fast-forward. It was hard for us to remember what had happened in which countries (except Amsterdam),⁶⁹ we were both sick most of the time, and we were upset to have to leave some places simply because our pre-purchased flights made it so.

I recommend doing the exact opposite.

The alternative to binge travel—the mini-retirement—entails relocating to one place for one to six months before going home or moving to another locale. It is the anti-vacation in the most positive sense. Though it can be relaxing, the mini-retirement is not an escape from your life but a reexamination of it—the creation of a blank slate. Following elimination and automation, what would you be escaping from? Rather than seeking to see the world through photo ops between foreign-but-familiar hotels, we aim to experience it at a speed that lets it change us.

This is also different from a sabbatical. Sabbaticals are often viewed much like retirement: as a one-time event. Savor it now while you can. The mini-retirement is defined as recurring—it is a lifestyle. I currently take three or four mini-retirements per year and know dozens who do the same. Sometimes these sojourns take me around the world; oftentimes they take me around the corner—Yosemite, Tahoe, Carmel—but to a different world psychologically, where meetings, e-mail, and phone calls don’t exist for a set period of time.

Purging the Demons: Emotional Freedom

This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own im perfection.

—SAINT AUGUSTINE (354 A.D.–430 A.D.)

True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want. It is quite possible—actually the rule rather than the exception—to have financial and time freedom but still be caught in the throes of the rat race. One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mind-set, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.

This takes time. The effect is not cumulative, and no number of two-week (also called “too weak”)⁷⁰ sightseeing trips can replace one good walkabout.⁷¹

In the experience of those I’ve interviewed, it takes two to three months just to unplug from obsolete routines and become aware of just how much we distract ourselves with constant motion. Can you have a two-hour dinner with Spanish friends without getting anxious? Can you get accustomed to a small town where all businesses take a siesta for two hours in the afternoon and then close at 4:00 P.M.? If not, you need to ask, Why?

Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you. Chances are that it’s been a while. Take at least two months to disincorporate old habits and rediscover yourself without the reminder of a looming return flight.

The Financial Realities: It Just Gets Better

The economic argument for mini-retirements is the icing on the cake. Four days in a decent hotel or a week for two at a nice hostel costs the same as a month in a nice posh apartment. If you relocate, the expenses abroad also begin to replace—often at much lower cost—bills you can then cancel stateside.

Here are some actual monthly figures from recent travels.

Highlights from both South America and Europe are shown side by side to prove that luxury is limited by your creativity and familiarity with the locale, not gross currency devaluation in third-world countries. It will be obvious that I did not survive on bread and begging—I lived like a rock star—and both experiences could be done for less than 50% of what I spent. My goal was enjoyment and not austere survival.

Airfare

Free, courtesy of AMEX gold card and Chase Continental Airlines Mastercard⁷²

Housing

Penthouse apartment on the equivalent of New York’s Fifth Avenue in Buenos Aires, including house cleaners, personal security guards, phone, energy, and high-speed Internet: $550 U.S. per month

Enormous apartment in the trendy SoHo-like Prenzlauerberg district of Berlin, including phone and energy: $300 U.S. per month

Meals

Four- or five-star restaurant meals twice daily in Buenos Aires: $10 U.S. ($300 U.S. per month)

Berlin: $18 U.S. ($540 U.S. per month)

Entertainment

VIP table and unlimited champagne for eight people at the hottest club, Opera Bay, in Buenos Aires: $150 U.S. ($18.75 U.S. per person x four visits per month = $75 U.S. per month per person)

Cover, drinks, and dancing at the hottest clubs in West Berlin: $20 U.S. per person per night x 4 = $80 U.S. per month

Education

Two hours daily of private Spanish lessons in Buenos Aires, fives times per week: $5 U.S. per hour x 40 hours per month = $200 U.S. per month

Two hours daily of private tango lessons with two world-class professional dancers: $8.33 U.S. per hour x 40 hours per month = $333.20 U.S. per month

Four hours daily of top-tier German-language instruction in Nollendorfplatz, Berlin: $175 U.S. per month, which would have paid for itself even if I had not attended classes, as the student ID card entitled me to over 40% discounts on all transportation

Six hours per week of mixed martial arts (MMA) training at the top Berlin academy: free in exchange for tutoring in English two hours per week

Transportation

Monthly subway pass and daily cab rides to and from tango lessons in Buenos Aires: $75 U.S. per month

Monthly subway, tram, and bus pass in Berlin with student discount: $85 U.S. per month

Four-Week Total for Luxury Living

Buenos Aires: $1533.20, including round-trip airfare from JFK, with a one-month stopover in Panamá. Nearly one-third of this total is from the daily one-on-one instruction from world-class teachers in Spanish and Tango.

Berlin: $1180, including round-trip airfare from JFK and a one-week stopover in London.

How do these numbers compare to your current domestic monthly expenses, including rent, car insurance, utilities, weekend expenditures, partying, public transportation, gas, memberships, subscriptions, food, and all the rest? Add it all up and you may well realize, like I did, that traveling around the world and having the time of your life can save you serious money.

Fear Factors: Overcoming Excuses

Not to Travel

Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

—FANNY BURNEY (1752–1840), English novelist

But I have a house and kids. I can’t travel!

What about health insurance? What if something happens?

Isn’t travel dangerous? What if I get kidnapped or mugged?

But I’m a woman—traveling alone would be dangerous.

Most excuses not to travel are exactly that—excuses. I’ve been there, so this isn’t a holier-than-thou sermon. I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.

I’ve since met paraplegics and the deaf, senior citizens and single mothers, home owners and the poor, all of whom have sought and found excellent life-changing reasons for extended travel instead of dwelling on the million small reasons against it.

Most of the concerns above are addressed in the Q&A, but one in particular requires a bit of preemptive nerve calming.

It’s 10:00 P.M. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

The prime fear of all parents prior to their first international trip is somehow losing a child in the shuffle.

The good news is that if you are comfortable taking your kids to New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or London, you will have even less to worry about in the starting cities I recommend in the Q&A. There are fewer guns and violent crimes in all of them compared to most large U.S. cities. The likelihood of problems is decreased further when travel is less airport and hotel-hopping among strangers and more relocation to a second home: a mini-retirement.

But still, what if?

Jen Errico, a single mother who took her two children on a five-month world tour, had a more acute fear than most, one that often woke her at 2:00 A.M. in a cold sweat: What if something happens to me?

She wanted to prime her kids for worst-case scenario but didn’t want to scare them to death, so—like all good mothers—she made it a game: Who can best memorize the itineraries, hotel addresses, and Mom’s phone number? She had emergency contacts in each country whose numbers were loaded into the speed dial of her cell phone, which had global roaming. In the end, nothing happened. Now she’s planning to move to a ski chalet in Europe and send her kids to school in multilingual France. Success begets success.

She was most afraid in Singapore, and in retrospect, it was where she had the least reason to be worried (she took her kids to South Africa, among other places). She was scared because it was the first stop and she was unaccustomed to traveling with her kids. It was perception, not reality.

Robin Malinsky-Rummell, who spent a year traveling through South America with her husband and seven-year-old son, was warned by friends and family not to visit Argentina after their devaluation riots in 2001. She did her homework, decided that the fear was unfounded, and proceeded to have the time of her life in Patagonia. When she told locals that she was originally from New York, their eyes widened and jaws dropped: “I saw those buildings blow up on TV! I would never go to such a dangerous place!” Don’t assume that places abroad are more dangerous than your hometown. Most aren’t.

Robin is convinced, as are other NR parents, that people use children as an excuse to stay in their comfort zones. It’s an easy excuse not to do something adventurous. How to overcome the fear? Robin recommends two things:

Before embarking on a long international trip with your children for the first time, take a trial run for a few weeks.

For each stop, arrange a week of language classes that begin upon arrival and take advantage of transportation from the airport if available. The school staff will often handle apartment rentals for you, and you will be able to make friends and learn the area before setting off on your own.

But what if your concern isn’t so much losing your children but losing your mind because of your children?

Several families interviewed for this book recommended the oldest persuasive tool known to man: bribery. Each child is given some amount of virtual cash, 25–50 cents, for each hour of good behavior. The same amount is subtracted from their accounts for breaking the rules. All purchases for fun—whether souvenirs, ice cream, or otherwise—come out of their own individual accounts. No balance, no goodies. This often requires more self-control on the part of the parents than the children.

How to Get Airfare at 50–80% Off

This is not a book on budget travel. Most of the cost-cutting recommendations found in such guides are designed with the binge traveler in mind. For someone embarking on a mini-retirement, an extra $150 for hassle-free airfare amortized over two months is a better deal than 20 hours of manipulating frequent-flier points on an unknown airline or chasing questionable deals.

Following two weeks of research, I once bought a one-way standby ticket to Europe for $120. I arrived at JFK brimming with enthusiasm and confidence—look at all these schmucks paying retail!—and 90% of the “participating” airlines refused my ticket. Those that didn’t were booked for weeks solid. I ended up staying in a hotel for two nights for a $300 tab, filing a complaint with AMEX, and eventually calling 1–800-FLY-EUROPE from the JFK terminal in frustration. I bought a round-trip ticket to London on Virgin Atlantic for $300 and left an hour later. The same ticket cost more than $700 a week earlier.

After 25 countries, I’ve found a few simple strategies that get you 90% of the possible savings without wasting time or producing migraines.

Use credit cards with reward points for large muse-related advertising and manufacturing expenses.

I am not spending more money to get pennies on the dollar—these costs are inevitable, so I capitalize on them. This alone gets me a free round-trip international ticket each three months.

Purchase tickets far in advance (three months or more) or last minute, and aim for both departure and return between Tues day and Thursday.

Long-term travel planning turns me off and can be expensive if plans change, so I opt for purchasing all tickets in the last four or five days prior to target departure. The value of empty seats is $0 as soon as the flight takes off, so true last-minute seats are cheap.

Use Orbitz (www.orbitz.com) and www.kayak.com first. Fix the departure and return dates between Tuesday and Thursday. Then look at prices for alternative departure dates each of three days into the past and each of three days into the future. Using the cheapest departure date, do the same with the return dates to find the cheapest combination. Check this price against the fares on the website of the airline itself. Then begin bidding on www.priceline.com at 50% of the better of the two, working up in $50 increments until you get a better price or realize it’s not possible.

Consider buying one ticket to an international hub and then an ongoing ticket with a cheap local airline.

If going to Europe on a tight budget, you could get three tickets. One free Southwest ticket (from transferring AMEX points) from CA to JFK, the cheapest ticket to Heathrow in London, and then an übercheap ticket on either Ryanair or EasyJet to a final destination. I have paid as little as $10 to go from London to Berlin or London to Spain. That is not a typo. Local airlines will often offer seats on flights for just the cost of taxes and gasoline. To Central or South American destinations, I’ll often look at local flights from Panama or international flights from Miami.

When More Is Less: Cutting the Clutter

Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need! … It is the modern Pandora’s box, and its plagues are loose upon the world.

—JULES HENRY

To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things

—ROBERT HENRI

I know the son of one deca-millionaire, a personal friend of Bill Gates, who now manages private investments and ranches. He has accumulated an assortment of beautiful homes over the last decade, each with full-time cooks, servants, cleaners, and support staff. How does he feel about having a home in each time zone? It’s a pain in the ass! He feels like he’s working for his staff, who spend more time in his homes than he does.

Extended travel is the perfect excuse to reverse the damage of years of consuming as much as you can afford. It’s time to get rid of clutter disguised as necessities before you drag a five-piece Samsonite set around the world. That is hell on earth.

I’m not going to tell you to walk around in a robe and sandals scowling at people who have televisions. I hate that kashi-crunching holier-than-thou stuff. Turning you into a possession-less scribe is not my intention. Let’s face it, though: There are tons of things in your home and life that you don’t use, need, or even particularly want. They just came into your life as impulsive flotsam and jetsam and never found a good exit. Whether you’re aware of it or not, this clutter creates indecision and distractions, consuming attention and making unfettered happiness a real chore. It is impossible to realize how distracting all the crap is—whether porcelain dolls, sports cars, or ragged T-shirts—until you get rid of it.

Prior to my 15-month trip, I was stressed about how to fit all of my belongings into a 14 x 10-foot rental storage space. Then I realized a few things: I would never reread the business magazines I’d saved, I wore the same five shirts and four pairs of pants 90% of the time, it was about time for new furniture, and I never used the outdoor grill or lawn furniture.

Even getting rid of things I never used proved to be like a capitalist short-circuit. It was hard to toss things I had once thought were valuable enough to spend money on. The first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die. I hadn’t exercised my throwing-out muscles in some time. It was a struggle to put nice Christmas clothing I’d never worn into the “go” pile and just as hard to separate myself from worn and ragged clothing I had for sentimental reasons. Once I’d passed through the first few tough decisions, though, the momentum had been built and it was a breeze. I donated all of the seldom-worn clothing to Goodwill. The furniture took less than 10 hours to offload using Craigslist, and though I was paid less than 50% of the retail prices for some and nothing for others, who cared? I’d used and abused them for five years and would get a new set when I landed back in the U.S. I gave the grill and lawn furniture to my friend, who lit up like a kid at Christmas. I had made his month. It felt wonderful and I had an extra $300 in pocket change to cover at least a few weeks of rent abroad.

I created 40% more space in my apartment and hadn’t even grazed the surface. It wasn’t the extra physical space that I felt most. It was the extra mental space. It was as if I had 20 mental applications running simultaneously before, and now I had just one or two. My thinking was clearer and I was much, much happier.

I asked every vagabond interviewee in this book what their one recommendation would be for first-time extended travelers. The answer was unanimous: Take less with you.

The overpacking impulse is hard to resist. The solution is to set what I call a “settling fund.” Rather than pack for all contingencies, I bring the absolute minimum and allocate $100–300 for purchasing things after I arrive and as I travel. I no longer take toiletries or more than a week’s worth of clothing. It’s a blast. Finding shaving cream or a dress shirt overseas can produce an adventure in and of itself.

Pack as if you were coming back in one week. Here are the bare essentials, listed in order of importance:

One week of clothing appropriate to the season, including one semiformal shirt and pair of pants or skirt for customs. Think T-shirts, one pair of shorts, and a multipurpose pair of jeans.

Backup photocopies or scanned copies of all important documents: health insurance, passport/visa, credit cards, debit cards, etc.

Debit cards, credit cards, and $200 worth of small bills in local currency (traveler’s checks are not accepted in most places and are a hassle)

Small cable bike lock for securing luggage while in transit or in hostels; a small padlock for lockers if needed

Electronic dictionaries for target languages (book versions are too slow to be of use in conversation) and small grammar guides or texts

One broad-strokes travel guide

That’s it.⁷³ To laptop or not to laptop? Unless you are a writer, I vote no. It’s far too cumbersome and distracting. Using GoToMyPC to access your home computer from Internet cafés encourages the habit we want to develop: making the best use of time instead of killing it.

The Bora-Bora Dealmaker

BAFFIN ISLAND, NUNAVUT

Josh Steinitz⁷⁴ stood at the edge of the world and stared in amazement. He dug his boots into the six feet of sea ice and the unicorns danced.

Ten narwhals—rare cousins of the beluga—came to the surface and pointed their six-foot-plus spiral tusks toward the heavens. The pod of 3,000-pound whales then fell into the depths once again. The narwhals are deep divers—more than 3,000 feet in some cases—so Josh had at least 20 minutes until their reappearance.

It seemed appropriate that he was with the narwhals. Their name came from Old Norse and referred to their mottled white and blue skin.

Náhvalr—corpse man.

He smiled as he had done often in the last few years. Josh himself was a dead man walking.

One year after graduating from college, Josh found out that he had oral squamous carcinoma—cancer. He had plans to be a management consultant. He had plans to be lots of things. Suddenly none of it mattered. Less than half of those who suffered from this particular type of cancer survived.⁷⁵ The reaper didn’t discriminate and came without warning.

It became clear that the biggest risk in life wasn’t making mistakes but regret: missing out on things. He could never go back and recapture years spent doing something he disliked.

Two years later and cancer-free, Josh set off on an indefinite global walkabout, covering expenses as a freelance writer. He later became the cofounder of a website that provides customized itineraries to would-be vagabonds. His executive status didn’t lessen his mobile addiction. He was as comfortable cutting deals from the over-water bungalows of Bora-Bora as he was in the log cabins of the Swiss Alps.

He once took a call from a client while at Camp Muir on Mt. Rainier. The client needed to confirm some sales numbers and asked Josh about all the wind in the background. Josh’s answer: “I’m standing at 10,000 feet on a glacier and this afternoon the wind is whipping us down the mountain.” The client said he’d let Josh get back to what he was doing.

Another client called Josh while he was leaving a Balinese temple and heard the gongs in the background. The client asked Josh if he was in church. Josh wasn’t quite sure what to say. All that came out was, “Yes?”

Back among the narwhals, Josh had a few minutes before heading to base camp to avoid polar bears. Twenty-four-hour daylight meant that he had much to share with his friends back in the land of cubicles. He sat down on the ice and produced his satellite phone and laptop from a waterproof bag. He began his e-mail in the usual way:

“I know you’re all sick of seeing me have so much fun, but guess where I am?”

Q&A: QUESTIONS AND ACTIONS

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot.

—PAUL THEROUX, To the Ends of the Earth

If this is your first time considering a commitment to the mobile lifestyle and long-term adventuring, I envy you! Making the jump and entering the new worlds that await is like upgrading your role in life from passenger to pilot.

The bulk of this Q&A will focus on the precise steps that you should take—and the countdown timeline you can use—when preparing for your first mini-retirement. Most steps can be eliminated or condensed once you get one trip under your belt. Some of the steps are one-time events, after which subsequent mini-retirements will require a maximum of two to three weeks of preparation. It now takes me three afternoons.

Grab a pencil and paper—this will be fun.

1. Take an asset and cash-flow snapshot.

Set two sheets of paper on a table. Use one to record all assets and corresponding values, including bank accounts, retirement accounts, stocks, bonds, home, and so forth. On the second, draw a line down the middle and write down all incoming cash flow (salary, muse income, investment income, etc.) and outgoing expenses (mortgage, rent, car payments, etc.). What can you eliminate that is either seldom used or that creates stress or distraction without adding a lot of value?

2. Fear-set a one-year mini-retirement in a dream location in Europe.

Use the questions from chapter 3 to evaluate your worst-case-scenario fears and evaluate the real potential consequences. Except in rare cases, most will be avoidable and the rest will be reversible.

3. Choose a location for your actual mini-retirement. Where to start?

This is the big question. There are two options that I advocate:

Choose a starting point and then wander until you find your second home. This is what I did with a one-way ticket to London, vagabonding throughout Europe until I fell in love with Berlin, where I remained for three months.

Scout a region and then settle in your favorite spot. This is what I did with a tour of Central and South America, where I spent one to four weeks in each of several cities, after which I returned to my favorite—Buenos Aires—for six months.

It is possible to take a mini-retirement in your own country, but the transformative effect is hampered if you are surrounded by people who carry the same socially reinforced baggage.

I recommend choosing an overseas location that will seem foreign but that isn’t dangerous. I box, race motorcycles, and do all sorts of macho things, but I draw the line at favelas,⁷⁶ civilians with machine guns, pedestrians with machetes, and social strife. Cheap is good, but bullet holes are bad. Check the U.S. Department of State for travel warnings before booking tickets (http:// travel.state.gov).

Here are just a few of my favorite starting points. Feel free to choose other locations. The most lifestyle for the dollar is underlined: Argentina (Buenos Aires, Córdoba), China (Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei), Japan (Tokyo, Osaka), England (London), Ireland (Galway), Thailand (Bangkok, Chiang Mai), Germany (Berlin, Munich), Norway (Oslo), Australia (Sydney), New Zealand (Queenstown), Italy (Rome, Milan, Florence), Spain (Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla), and Holland (Amsterdam). In all of these places, it is possible to live well while spending little. I spend less in Tokyo than in California because I know it well. Hip, recently gentrified artist areas, not unlike the Brooklyn of 10 years ago, can be found in almost all cities. The one place I can’t seem to find a decent lunch for less than $20 U.S.? London.

Here are a few exotic places I don’t recommend for vagabonding virgins, though veterans can make them all work: all countries in Africa, the Middle East, or Central and South America (excepting Costa Rica and Argentina). Mexico City and Mexican border areas are also a bit too kidnap-happy to make it onto my favorites list.

4. Prepare for your trip. Here’s the countdown.

Three months out—Eliminate

Get used to minimalism before the departure. Here are the questions to ask and act upon, even if you never plan to leave:

What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the time? Eliminate the other 80% in clothing, magazines, books, and all else. Be ruthless—you can always repurchase things you can’t live without.

Which belongings create stress in my life? This could relate to maintenance costs (money and energy), insurance, monthly expenses, time consumption, or simple distraction. Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. If you sell even a few expensive items, it could finance a good portion of your mini-retirement. Don’t rule out the car and home. It’s always possible to purchase either upon your return, often losing no money in the process.

Check current health insurance coverage for extended overseas travel. Get the wheels in motion to rent, swap, or sell your home—renting out is most recommended by serial vagabonds—or end your apartment lease and move all belongings into storage.

In all cases where doubts crop up, ask yourself, “If I had a gun to my head and had to do it, how would I do it?” It’s not as hard as you think.

Two months out—Automate

After eliminating the excess, contact companies (including suppliers) that bill you regularly and set up autopayment with credit cards that have reward points. Telling them that you will be traveling the world for a year often persuades them to accept credit cards rather than chase you around the planet like Carmen Sandiego.

For the credit card companies themselves and others that refuse, arrange automatic debit from your checking account. Set up online banking and bill payment. Set up all companies that won’t take credit cards or automatic debit as online payees. Set these scheduled checks for $15–20 more than expected when dealing with utilities and other variable expenses. This will cover miscellaneous fees, prevent time-consuming billing problems, and accrue as a credit. Cancel paper bank and credit card statement delivery. Get bank-issued credit cards for all checking accounts—generally one for business and one for personal—and set the cash advances to $0 to minimize abuse potential. Leave these cards at home, as they are just for emergency overdraft protection.

Give a trusted member of your family and/or your accountant power of attorney,⁷⁷ which gives that person authority to sign documents (tax filings and checks, for example) in your name. Nothing screws up foreign fun faster than having to sign original documents when faxes are unacceptable.

One month out—

Speak to the manager of your local post office and have all mail forwarded to a friend, family member, or personal assistant,⁷⁸who will be paid $100–200 per month to e-mail you brief descriptions of all nonjunk mail each Monday.

Get all required and recommended immunizations and vaccinations for your target region. Check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/travel/). Note that proof of immunizations is sometimes required to pass through foreign customs.

Set up a trial account with GoToMyPC or similar remote-access software and take a dry run to ensure that there are no technological glitches.⁷⁹

If resellers (or distributors) still send you checks—the fulfillment house should handle customer checks at this point—do one of three things: give the resellers direct bank deposit information (ideal), have the fulfillment house handle these checks (second choice), or have the resellers pay via PayPal or mail checks to one of the people you are trusting with power of attorney (far third). In the last case, give the person with power of attorney deposit slips so he or she can sign or stamp and mail in the checks. It is convenient to become a member of a large bank (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual, Citibank, etc.) with branches near the person assisting you so that they can drop off the deposits while running other errands. No need to move all accounts to this bank if you don’t want to; just open a single new account that is used solely for these deposits.

Two weeks out—

Scan all identification, health insurance, and credit/debit cards into a computer from which you can print multiple copies, several to be left with family members and several to be taken with you in separate bags. E-mail the scanned file to yourself so that you can access it while abroad if you lose the paper copies.

If you are an entrepreneur, downgrade your cell phone to the cheapest plan and set up a voicemail greeting that states, “I am currently overseas on business. Please do not leave a voicemail, as I will not be checking it while gone. Please send me an e-mail at __@__.com if the matter is important. Thank you for your understanding.” Then set up e-mail autoresponders that indicate responses could take up to seven days (or whatever you decide for frequency) due to international business travel.

If you are an employee, consider getting a quad-band or GSM-compatible cell phone so that the boss can contact you. Get a BlackBerry only if your boss will be checking to see if you are working via e-mail. Be sure to disable the dead giveaway “Sent from a BlackBerry” signature on outgoing e-mail! Other options include using a SkypeIn account that forwards to your foreign cell phone (my preference) or a Vonage IP box that allows you to receive landline calls anywhere in the world via a phone number that begins with your home area code.

Find an apartment for your ultimate mini-retirement destination or reserve a hostel or hotel at your starting point for three to four days. Reserving an apartment before you arrive is riskier and will be much more expensive than using the latter three to four days to find an apartment. I recommend hostels for the starting point if possible—not for cost considerations but because the staff and fellow travelers are more knowledgeable and helpful with relocations.

Get foreign medical evacuation insurance if needed for peace of mind. This tends to be redundant if you are in a first-world country and can buy local insurance to augment your own, which I do, and it is useless if you are a 10-hour flight from civilization. I had evacuation insurance in Panama, as it’s a 2-hour flight from Miami, but I didn’t bother elsewhere. Don’t freak out about this; it’s just as true if you’re in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the U.S.

One week out—

Decide on a schedule for routine batched tasks such as e-mail, online banking, etc. to eliminate excuses for senseless pseudo-work procrasterbating. I suggest Monday mornings for checking e-mail and online banking. The first and third Mondays of the month can be used for checking credit cards and making other online payments such as affiliates. These promises to yourself will be the hardest to keep, so make a commitment now and expect serious withdrawal cravings.

Save important documents—including the scan of your identification, insurance, and credit/debit cards—to a small handheld storage device that plugs into a computer USB port.

Move all things out of your home or apartment into storage, pack a single small backpack and carry-on bag for the adventure, and move in briefly with a family member or friend.

Two days out—

Put remaining automobiles into storage or a friend’s garage. Put fuel stabilizer like Sta-Bil® in the gas tanks, disconnect the negative leads from batteries to prevent drain, and put the vehicles on jack stands to prevent tire and shock damage. Cancel all auto insurance except for theft coverage.

Upon arrival (assuming you have not booked an apartment in advance)—

First morning and afternoon after check-in Take a hop-on-hop-off bus tour of the city followed by a bike tour of potential apartment neighborhoods.

First late afternoon or evening Purchase an unlocked⁸⁰cell phone with a SIM card that can be recharged with simple prepaid cards. E-mail apartment owners or brokers on Craigslist.com and online versions of local newspapers for viewings over the next two days.

Second and third days Find and book an apartment for one month. Don’t commit to more than one month until you’ve slept there. I once prepaid two months only to find that the busiest bus stop downtown was on the other side of my bedroom wall.

Move-in day Get settled and purchase local health insurance. Ask hostel owners and other locals what insurance they use. Resolve not to buy souvenirs or other take-home items until two weeks prior to departure.

One week later Eliminate all the extra crap you brought but won’t use often. Either give it to someone who needs it more, mail it back to the U.S., or throw it out.

TOOLS AND TRICKS

Brainstorming Mini-Retirement Locations

Virtual Tourist (www.virtualtourist.com)

The single largest source of unbiased, user-generated travel content in the world. More than 1,000,000 members contribute tips and warnings for more than 25,000 locations. Each location is covered in 13 separate categories, including Things to Do, Local Customs, Shopping, and Tourist Traps. This is one-stop shopping for most mini-retirements.

Escape Artist (www.escapeartist.com)

Interested in second passports, starting your own country, Swiss banking, and all the other things I wouldn’t dare put in this book? This site is a fantastic resource. Drop me a note from the Caymans or jail, whichever comes first. Also search “How to Be Jason Bourne” at www.fourhourblog.com.

Outside Magazine Online Free Archives (http://outside.away.com)

The entire archive of Outside magazine available online for free. From meditation camps to worldwide adrenaline hotspots, dream jobs to Patagonia winter highlights, there are hundreds of articles with beautiful photos to give you the walkabout itch.

GridSkipper: The Urban Travel Guide (www.gridskipper.com)

For those who love Blade Runner-like settings and exploring the cool nooks and crannies of cities worldwide, this is the site. It is one of Forbes’s Top 13 Travel sites and is “high-falootin’ and low-brow all in the same breath” (Frommer’s). Translation: Much of the content is not G-rated. If four-letter words or a “world’s sluttiest city” poll bother you, don’t bother visiting this site (or Rio de Janeiro, for that matter). Otherwise, check out the hysterical writing and “$100 a day” info for cities worldwide.

Lonely Planet: The Thorn Tree (http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com)

Discussion forum for global travelers with threads separated by region.

Family Travel Forum (www.familytravelforum.com)

A comprehensive forum on, you guessed it, family travel. Want to sell your kids for top dollar in the Eastern Bloc? Or save a few dollars and cremate Grannie in Thailand? Then this isn’t the site. But if you have kids and are planning a big trip, this is the place.

U.S. Department of State Country Profiles

(www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/)

World Travel Watch (www.worldtravelwatch.com)

Larry Habegger and James O’Reilly’s weekly online report of global events and odd happenings relevant to travel safety, sorted by topic and geographic region. Concise and a must-see prior to finalizing plans.

U.S. Department of State Worldwide Travel Warnings (http://travel.state.gov)

Mini-Retirement Planning and Preparation—Fundamentals

Round-the-World FAQ (includes travel insurance) (www.perpetualtravel.com/rtw)

This FAQ is a lifesaver. Originally written by Marc Brosius, it has been added to by newsgroup participants for years and now covers nuts and bolts from financial planning to return culture shock and all in between. How long can you afford to be away? Do you need travel insurance? Leave of absence or resignation? This is an around-the-world almanac.

Removing Clutter: 1–800-GOT-JUNK (www.1800gotjunk.com), Freecycle (www.freecycle.org), and Craigslist (www.craigslist.org)

I used Craigslist’s “Free” category to get rid of four years of accumulated possessions in less than three hours on a Saturday evening. There were some for-sale items that I also cleared out at 30–40% of original retail. I then hauled off the last remaining items using the überfast 1–800-GOT-JUNK paid service. Freecycle is comparable to Craigslist for giving away, and getting, things for free when you’re short on time. Get unattached and you’ll make it a habit. I purge every 6–9 months, often including donations to Goodwill (www.goodwill.org), which can do pickups for free with advanced notice.

One-Bag: The Art and Science of Packing Light (www.onebag.com)

One of PC magazine’s “Top 100 [Can’t Live Without] Sites.” Pack light and experience lightness of being.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/travel)

Recommended vaccinations and health planning for every nation in the world. Certain countries require proof of inoculations to pass through customs. Get the shots well ahead of time, as some take weeks to order.

Tax Planning (www.irs.gov/publications/p54/index.html)

More good news. Even if you permanently relocate to another country, you will have to pay U.S. taxes as long as you have a U.S. passport! Not to fret—there are some creative legal sidesteps, such as form 2555-EZ, which can provide up to an $85,700 income exemption if you spend at least 330 days of a consecutive 365 days off U.S. soil. This means you have 35 days in a given 12-month period to spend in the U.S. as you like, but no more. That’s part of the reason my 2004 trip extended to 15 months. Get a good accountant and let them do the detail work to keep yourself out of trouble.

U.S.-Sponsored Overseas Schools (www.state.gov/m/a/os)

If the idea of pulling your children out of school for a year or two isn’t appealing, stick them in one of more than 190 elementary and secondary schools sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in 135 countries. Kids love home work.

Homeschooling 101 and Quickstart Guide (http://bit.ly/homeschooling101)

This subsection of http://homeschooling.about.com/provides a step-by-step process for considering homeschooling options that can be applied to education during extended travel. Children can often return to traditional public or private schools ahead of their classmates.

Home Education Magazine (www.homeedmag.com) Rich collection of resources for homeschoolers, traveling families, and unschoolers. Links include curriculum, virtual support groups, legal resources, and archives. Good reasons to learn the law: Some U.S. states offer up to $1,600 of funding per year for qualified homeschooling expenditures, as it saves the state money to not educate your child in the public school system.

Universal Currency Converter (www.xe.com)

Before you get caught up in the excitement and forget that five British pounds does not equal five U.S. dollars, use this to translate local costs into numbers you understand. Try not to have too many “Those coins are each worth four dollars?” moments.

Universal Plug Adapter (www.franzus.com)

Carrying bulky cables and connectors is irritating—get a Travel Smart all-in-one adapter with surge protection. The size of a pack of cards folded in half, it is the only adapter that I’ve used everywhere without problems. Note that it is an adapter (helps you plug things in), but it is not a transformer. If the foreign wall outlet has twice as much voltage as in the U.S., your gadgets will self-destruct. Yet another reason to purchase necessities abroad instead of taking them all with you.

World Electric Guide (www.kropla.com)

Figure out outlets, voltage, mobile phones, international dialing codes, and all sorts of things related to electric mismatching worldwide.

Cheap and Round-the-World Airfare

Orbitz (www.orbitz.com), Kayak (www.kayak.com), and Sidestep (www.sidestep.com)

Search 400+ airlines worldwide for each service. Orbitz is my starting point for pricing comparisons, after which I check both Kayak and Sidestep. Sidestep has proven most effective when searching for flights that start and end outside of the U.S.

TravelZoo Top 20 (http://top20.travelzoo.com/)

Moscow for $129 one-way? These last-minute weekly travel specials might be the push you need to pull the trigger.

Priceline (www.priceline.com)

Start bidding at 50% of the lowest Orbitz fare and move up in $50 increments.

CFares (www.cfares.com)

Consolidator fares with free and low-cost memberships. I found a round-trip ticket from California to Japan for $500.

1–800-FLY-EUROPE (www.1800flyeurope.com)

I used this to get the $300 roundtrip from JFK to London that left two hours later.

Discount Airlines for Flights within Europe (www.ryanair.com, www.easyjet.com)

Free Worldwide Housing—Short Term

Global Freeloaders (www.globalfreeloaders.com)

This online community brings people together to offer you free accommodation all over the world. Save money and make new friends while seeing the world from a local’s perspective.

The Couchsurfing Project (www.couchsurfing.com)

Similar to the above but tends to attract a younger, more party-hearty crowd.

Hospitality Club (www.hospitalityclub.org)

Meet locals worldwide who can provide free tours or housing through this well-run network of more than 200,000 members in 200+ countries.

Free Worldwide Housing—Long Term

Home Exchange International (www.homeexchange.com) This is a home exchange listing and search service with more than 12,000 listings in more than 85 countries. E-mail directly owners of potential homes, put your own home/apartment on the site, and have unlimited access to view listings for one year for a small membership fee.

Paid Housing—from Arrival to the Long Haul

Otalo (www.otalo.com)

Otalo is a search engine for vacation rentals that searches across the Internet’s many different vacation rentals sites and 200,000+ homes. Otalo is like a Kayak.com for vacation rentals. The site scours a variety of other rental search sites and aggregates the results in one easy-to-use search tool.

Hostels.com (www.hostels.com)

This site isn’t just for youth hostels. I found a nice hotel in downtown Tokyo for $20 per night and have used this site for similar housing in eight countries. Think location and reviews (see HotelChatter next) instead of amenities. Four-star hotels are for binge travelers; this site can offer a real local flavor before you find an apartment or other longer-term housing.

HotelChatter (www.hotelchatter.com)

Get the real scoop on this daily web journal with detailed and honest reviews of housing worldwide. Updated several times daily, this site offers the stories of frustrated guests and those who have found hidden gems. Online booking is available.

Craigslist (www.craigslist.org)

Besides local weekly magazines with housing listings, such as Bild or Zitty (no joke) in Berlin, I have found Craigslist to be the single best starting point for long-term overseas furnished apartments. As of this writing, there are more than 50 countries represented. That said, prices will be 30–70% less in the local magazines—if you have a tight budget, get a hostel employee or other local to help you make a few calls and strike a deal. Ask the local helper not to mention you’re a foreigner until pricing is agreed upon.

Interhome International (www.interhome.com)

Based in Zurich, more than 20,000 homes for rent in Europe.

Rentvillas.com (www.rentvillas.com)

Provides unique renting experiences—from cottages and farmhouses to castles—throughout Europe, including France, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal.

Computer Remote Access and Backup Tools

GoToMyPC (www.gotomypc.com)

This software facilitates quick and easy remote access to your computer’s files, programs, e-mail, and network. It can be used from any web browser or wireless device and works in real time. I have used GoToMyPC religiously for more than five years to access my U.S.-based computers from countries and islands worldwide. This gives me the freedom to leave all computers at home.

WebExPCNow (http://pcnow.webex.com)

WebEx, the leader in corporate remote access, now offers software that does most of what GoToMyPC offers, including cut and paste between remote computers, local printing from remote computers, file transfers, and more.

DropBox (www.getdropbox.com) and SugarSync

(www.sugarsync.com); then JungleDisk (www.jungledisk.com) and Mozy (www.mozy.com) Both DropBox and SugarSync perform backups and synching of files between multiple computers (home and travel computers, for example). JungleDisk and Mozy—I use the latter—have fewer features and are more specifically designed for automatic backups to their online storage.

Free and Low-Cost Internet (IP) Telephones

Skype (www.skype.com)

Skype is my default for all phone calls. It allows you to call landlines and mobile phones across the globe for an average of 2–5 cents per minute, or connect with other Skype users worldwide for free. For about 40 euros per year, you can get a U.S. number with your home area code and receive calls that forward to a foreign cell phone. This makes your travel invisible. Lounge on the beach in Rio and answer calls to your “office” in California. Nice. Skype Chat, which comes with the service, is also perfect for sharing sensitive log-in and password information with others, as it’s encrypted.

Vonage (www.vonage.com) and Ooma (www.ooma.com)

Vonage offers a small adapter for a monthly fee that connects your broadband modem to a normal phone. Take it on your travels and set it up in your apartment to receive calls to a U.S. number. Ooma has no monthly fees and doesn’t require a landline, but it offers similar hardware you can connect to broadband for a local U.S. number anywhere in the world.

VoIPBuster (www.voipbuster.com) and RebTel (www.rebtel.com)

Both VoIPBuster and RebTel can provide “alias” numbers. Enter a friend’s overseas number on their sites, and both will give you a local number in your area code that will forward to your friend. VoIPBuster also acts as a cheaper Skype with free calls to more than 20 countries.

International Multi-Band and GSM-Compatible Phones

My World Phone (www.myworldphone.com)

I’m partial to Nokia phones. Ensure whichever phone you purchase is “unlocked”—that the SIM card can be swapped out in different countries with different providers.

World Electronics USA (www.worldelectronicsusa.com)

Good explanation of which GSM frequencies and “bands” function in which countries, which will determine which phone you purchase for travel (and perhaps home).

Tools for Off-the-Beaten Path

Satellite Phones (www.satphonestore.com)

If you will be in the mountains of Nepal or on a remote island and want the peace of mind (or headache) of having a phone nearby, these phones work via satellite instead of towers. Iridium has been recommended for widest reception (pole to pole), with GlobalStar in second place (three continents). Rent or purchase.

Pocket-size Solar Panels (www.solio.com)

Satellite phones and other small electronics are of little use (skipping stones, perhaps?) if their batteries die. Solio is about the size of two packs of cards and fans out into small solar panels. I was surprised to find that it charged my cell phone in less than 15 minutes—more than twice as fast as a wall outlet. Adapters are available for almost anything.

What to Do Once You Get There—Career Experiments and More

Verge Magazine (see Restricted Reading appendix)

Meet Up (www.meetup.com)

Search by city and activity to find people who share similar interests all over the world.

Become a Travel Writer (www.writtenroad.com)

Get paid to travel the world and record your thoughts? This is a dream job for millions. Get the inside scoop on the travel publishing world from veteran Jen Leo, author of Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write from the Road. This blog was a Frommer’s Budget Travel Top Choice and also features great practical articles about low-tech travel and going gadgetless.

Teach Engrish (www.eslcafe.com)

Dave’s ESL Café is one of the oldest and most useful resources for teachers, would-be teachers, and learners of English. Features discussion boards and “teachers wanted” job postings worldwide.

Turn Your Brain into Play-Doh (www.jiwire.com)

Travel the world so you can instant message (IM) with your friends in the U.S. This site lists more than 150,000 hotspots where you can feed your information OCD. Be ashamed if this becomes your default activity. If you’re bored, just remember—it’s your fault. I’ve been there, so I’m not preaching. It happens to the best of us from time to time, but get more creative.

Test a New Career Part- or Full-Time: Working Overseas (www.workingoverseas.com)

This encyclopedia is an exhaustive menu of options for the globally minded, compiled and updated by Jean-Marc Hachey, former international careers editor of Transitions Abroad magazine.

World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (www.wwoof.com)

Learn and then teach sustainable organic farming techniques in dozens of countries, including Turkey, New Zealand, Norway, and French Polynesia.

Chat and E-mail in a Language You Don’t Know

Google Chat Bots (http://bit.ly/imbot)

Use this to chat in real time using almost any language. Instant message (IM) directly from your Gmail e-mail account with anyone in the world.

Nice Translator (www.nicetranslator.com) and Free Translation (www.freetranslation.com)

Translate text from English into a dozen languages and vice versa. Surprisingly accurate, though the lost-in-translation 10–20% can get you in trouble. Nice Translator is faster and can be used on the iPhone.

Become Fluent in Record Time

Language Addicts and Accelerated Learning

For all things language related, from detailed how-to articles (how to reactivate forgotten languages, memorize 1,000 words per week, master tones, etc.) to mnemonics and the best electronic shortcuts, click on “language” at www.fourhourblog.com. Learning languages is an addiction of mine and a skill I have taken apart and reassembled to be faster. It is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in 3–6 months.

Find Language Exchange Partners and Materials

LiveMocha (www.livemocha.com),

EduFire (www.edufire.com), and

Smart.fm (http://smart.fm/)

I particularly like their BrainSpeed learning game.

About.com (www.about.com)

Some of the more popular languages have excellent tutorials on About.com:

http://italian.about.com

http://spanish.about.com

http://german.about.com

http://french.about.com

68. The dollar figures in this chapter are all from a period immediately following President Bush’s reelection in 2004, which correlated to the worst dollar exchange rates of the last 20 years.

69. I refer, of course, to the amazing bike-riding opportunities and famous pastries.

70. Coined by Joel Stein of the LA Times.

71. By all means, go ahead and take a post-office celebratory trip and go nuts for a few weeks. I know I did. Rock on. Ibiza and glow sticks here I come. Have some absinthe and drink lots of water. Following that, sit down and plan an introspective mini-retirement.

72. Muses are low maintenance but often expensive in one or both of two tactical areas: manufacturing and advertising. Shop for providers of both that are willing to accept credit cards as payment, and negotiate this up front if necessary by saying, “Rather than trying to negotiate you down on pricing, I just ask that you accept payment by credit card. If you can do that, we’ll choose you over Competitor X.” This is yet another example of a “firm offer,” and not a question, that puts you in a stronger negotiating position. For a detailed explanation of how I multiply points for travel using concepts like “piggybacking” and “recycling,” search for both terms on www.fourhourblog.com.

73. To see a video of how I pack to travel the world with less than 10 pounds, click on “travel” at www.fourhourblog.com.

74. Founder of www.nileproject.com.

75. http://www.usc.edu/hsc/dental/opfs/SC/indexSC.html.

76. Brazilian shantytowns. See the movie City of God (Cidade de Deus) to get a taste of how fun these are.

77. This is a serious step and should not be taken with those you do not trust. In this case, it helps because your accountant can then sign tax documents or checks in your name instead of consuming hours and days of your time with faxes, scanners, and expensive international FedEx’ing of documents.

78. There are also services like www.earthclassmail.com, which will receive, scan, and e-mail all of your non-junk mail to you as PDFs.

79. This would be used if you leave your computer at home or in someone else’s home while traveling. This step can be skipped if you bring your computer, but that is like a recovering heroin addict bringing a bag of opium to rehab. Don’t tempt yourself to kill time instead of rediscovering it.

80. “Unlocked” means that it is recharged with prepaid cards instead of being on a monthly payment plan with a single carrier such as O2 or Vodafone. This also means that the same phone can be used with carriers in other countries (assuming the frequency is the same) with a simple switch of the SIM memory card for $10–30 U.S. in most cases. Some U.S.-compatible quad-band phones can use SIM cards.

15. Filling the Void. ADDING LIFE AFTER SUBTRACTING WORK

KING’S CROSS, LONDON

I stumbled into the deli across the cobblestone street and ordered a prosciutto sandwich. It was 10:33 A.M. now, the fifth time I’d checked the time, and the twentieth time I’d asked myself, “What the &%$# am I going to do today?”

The best answer I had come up with so far was: get a sandwich.

Thirty minutes earlier, I had woken up without an alarm clock for the first time in four years, fresh off arriving from JFK the night before. I had soooo been looking forward to it: awakening to musical birdsong outside, sitting up in bed with a smile, smelling the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, and stretching out overhead like a cat in the shade of a Spanish villa. Magnificent. It turned out more like this: bolt upright as if blasted with a foghorn, grab clock, curse, jump out of bed in underwear to check e-mail, remember that I was forbidden to do so, curse again, look for my host and former classmate, realize that he was off to work like the rest of the world, and proceed to have a panic attack.

I spent the rest of the day in a haze, wandering from museum to botanical garden to museum as if on rinse and repeat, avoiding Internet cafés with some vague sense of guilt. I needed a to-do list to feel productive and so put down things like “eat dinner.”

This was going to be a lot harder than I had thought.

Postpartum Depression: It’s Normal

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

—ANATOLE FRANCE, author of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

I’ve Got More Money and Time Than I Ever Dreamed Possible … Why Am I Depressed?

It’s a good question with a good answer. Just be glad you’re figuring this out now and not at the end of life! The retired and ultrarich are often unfulfilled and neurotic for the same reason: too much idle time.

But wait a second … Isn’t more time what we’re after? Isn’t that what this book is all about? No, not at all. Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal. Living more—and becoming more—is.

In the beginning, the external fantasies will be enough, and there is nothing wrong with this. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this period. Go nuts and live your dreams. This is not superficial or selfish. It is critical to stop repressing yourself and get out of the postponement habit.

Let’s suppose you decide to dip your toe in dreams like relocating to the Caribbean for island-hopping or taking a safari in the Serengeti. It will be wonderful and unforgettable, and you should do it. There will come a time, however—be it three weeks or three years later—when you won’t be able to drink another piña colada or photograph another damn red-assed baboon. Self-criticism and existential panic attacks start around this time.

But This Is What I Always Wanted! How Can I Be Bored?!

Don’t freak out and fuel the fire. This is normal among all high-performers who downshift after working hard for a long time. The smarter and more goal-oriented you are, the tougher these growing pains will be. Learning to replace the perception of time famine with appreciation of time abundance is like going from triple espressos to decaf.

But there’s more! Retirees get depressed for a second reason, and you will too: social isolation.

Offices are good for some things: free bad coffee and complaining thereof, gossip and commiserating, stupid video clips via e-mail with even stupider comments, and meetings that accomplish nothing but kill a few hours with a few laughs. The job itself might be a dead end, but it’s the web of human interactions—the social environment—that keeps us there. Once liberated, this automatic tribal unit disappears, which makes the voices in your head louder.

Don’t be afraid of the existential or social challenges. Freedom is like a new sport. In the beginning, the sheer newness of it is exciting enough to keep things interesting at all times. Once you have learned the basics, though, it becomes clear that to be even a half-decent player requires some serious practice.

Don’t fret. The greatest rewards are to come, and you’re 10 feet from the finish line.

Frustrations and Doubts: You’re Not Alone

People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.

—JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Power of Myth

Once you eliminate the 9–5 and the rubber hits the road, it’s not all roses and white-sand bliss, though much of it can be. Without the distraction of deadlines and co-workers, the big questions (such as “What does it all mean?”) become harder to fend off for a later time. In a sea of infinite options, decisions also become harder—What the hell should I do with my life? It’s like senior year in college all over again.

Like all innovators ahead of the curve, you will have frightening moments of doubt. Once past the kid-in-a-candy-store phase, the comparative impulse will creep in. The rest of the world will continue with its 9–5 grind, and you’ll begin to question your decision to step off the treadmill. Common doubts and self-flagellation include the following:

Am I really doing this to be more free and lead a better life, or am I just lazy?

Did I quit the rat race because it’s bad, or just because I couldn’t hack it? Did I just cop out?

Is this as good as it gets? Perhaps I was better off when I was following orders and ignorant of the possibilities. It was easier at least.

Am I really successful or just kidding myself?

Have I lowered my standards to make myself a winner? Are my friends, who are now making twice as much as three years ago, really on the right track?

Why am I not happy? I can do anything and I’m still not happy. Do I even deserve it?

Most of this can be overcome as soon as we recognize it for what it is: outdated comparisons using the more-is-better and money-as-success mind-sets that got us into trouble to begin with. Even so, there is a more profound observation to be made.

These doubts invade the mind when nothing else fills it. Think of a time when you felt 100% alive and undistracted—in the zone. Chances are that it was when you were completely focused in the moment on something external: someone or something else. Sports and sex are two great examples. Lacking an external focus, the mind turns inward on itself and creates problems to solve, even if the problems are undefined or unimportant. If you find a focus, an ambitious goal that seems impossible and forces you to grow,⁸¹ these doubts disappear.

In the process of searching for a new focus, it is almost inevitable that the “big” questions will creep in. There is pressure from pseudo-philosophers everywhere to cast aside the impertinent and answer the eternal. Two popular examples are “What is the meaning of life?” and “What is the point of it all?”

There are many more, ranging from the introspective to the ontological, but I have one answer for almost all of them—I don’t answer them at all.

I’m no nihilist. In fact, I’ve spent more than a decade investigating the mind and concept of meaning, a quest that has taken me from the neuroscience laboratories of top universities to the halls of religious institutions worldwide. The conclusion after it all is surprising.

I am 100% convinced that most big questions we feel compelled to face—handed down through centuries of overthinking and mistranslation—use terms so undefined as to make attempting to answer them a complete waste of time.⁸² This isn’t depressing. It’s liberating.

Consider the question of questions: What is the meaning of life?

If pressed, I have but one response: It is the characteristic state or condition of a living organism. “But that’s just a definition,” the questioner will retort, “that’s not what I mean at all.” What do you mean, then? Until the question is clear—each term in it defined—there is no point in answering it. The “meaning” of “life” question is unanswerable without further elaboration.

Before spending time on a stress-inducing question, big or otherwise, ensure that the answer is “yes” to the following two questions:

Have I decided on a single meaning for each term in this question?

Can an answer to this question be acted upon to improve things?

“What is the meaning of life?” fails the first and thus the second. Questions about things beyond your sphere of influence like “What if the train is late tomorrow?” fail the second and should thus be ignored. These are not worthwhile questions. If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it. If you take just this point from this book, it will put you in the top 1% of performers in the world and keep most philosophical distress out of your life.

Sharpening your logical and practical mental toolbox is not being an atheist or unspiritual. It’s not being crass and it’s not being superficial. It’s being smart and putting your effort where it can make the biggest difference for yourself and others.

The Point of It All: Drumroll, Please

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

—VIKTOR E. FRANKL, Holocaust survivor; author of Man’s Search for Meaning

I believe that life exists to be enjoyed and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.

Each person will have his or her own vehicles for both, and those vehicles will change over time. For some, the answer will be working with orphans, and for others, it will be composing music. I have a personal answer to both—to love, be loved, and never stop learning—but I don’t expect that to be universal.

Some criticize a focus on self-love and enjoyment as selfish or hedonistic, but it’s neither. Enjoying life and helping others—or feeling good about yourself and increasing the greater good—are no more mutually exclusive than being agnostic and leading a moral life. One does not preclude the other. Let’s assume we agree on this. It still leaves the question, “What can I do with my time to enjoy life and feel good about myself?”

I can’t offer a single answer that will fit all people, but, based on the dozens of fulfilled NR I’ve interviewed, there are two components that are fundamental: continual learning and service.

Learning Unlimited: Sharpening the Saw

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.

—DAVE BARRY

To live is to learn. I see no other option. This is why I’ve felt compelled to quit or be fired from jobs within the first six months or so. The learning curve flattens out and I get bored.

Though you can upgrade your brain domestically, traveling and relocating provides unique conditions that make progress much faster. The different surroundings act as a counterpoint and mirror for your own prejudices, making weaknesses that much easier to fix. I rarely travel somewhere without deciding first how I’ll obsess on a specific skill. Here are a few examples:

Connemara, Ireland: Gaelic Irish, Irish flute, and hurling, the fastest field sport in the world (imagine a mix of lacrosse and rugby played with axe handles)

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Brazilian Portuguese and Brazilian jujitsu

Berlin, Germany: German and locking (a form of upright break-dancing)

I tend to focus on language acquisition and one kinesthetic skill, sometimes finding the latter after landing overseas. The most successful serial vagabonds tend to blend the mental and the physical. Notice that I often transport a skill I practice domestically—martial arts—to other countries where they are also practiced. Instant social life and camaraderie. It need not be a competitive sport—it could be hiking, chess, or almost anything that keeps your nose out of a textbook and you out of your apartment. Sports just happen to be excellent for avoiding foreign-language stage fright and developing lasting friendships while still sounding like Tarzan.

Language learning deserves special mention. It is, bar none, the best thing you can do to hone clear thinking.

Quite aside from the fact that it is impossible to understand a culture without understanding its language, acquiring a new language makes you aware of your own language: your own thoughts. The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children⁸³ when constant 9–5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months. It is beyond the scope of this book to explain applied linguistics and the 80/20 of language learning, but resources and complete how-to guides can be found under “language” at www.fourhourblog.com. I learned six languages after failing Spanish in high school, and you can do the same with the right tools.

Gain a language and you gain a second lens through which to question and understand the world. Cursing at people when you go home is fun, too.

Don’t miss the chance to double your life experience.

Service for the Right Reasons: To Save the Whales, or Kill Them and Feed the Children?

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.

—OSCAR WILDE

One would expect me to mention service in this chapter, and here it is. Like all before it, the twist is a bit different. Service to me is simple: doing something that improves life besides your own. This is not the same as philanthropy. Philanthropy is the altruistic concern for the well-being of mankind—human life. Human life has long been focused on the exclusion of the environment and the rest of the food chain, hence our current race to imminent extinction. Serves us right. The world does not exist solely for the betterment and multiplication of mankind.

Before I start chaining myself to trees and saving the dart frogs, though, I should take my own advice: Do not become a cause snob.

How can you help starving children in Africa when there are starving children in Los Angeles? How can you save the whales when homeless people are freezing to death? How does doing volunteer research on coral destruction help those people who need help now?

Children, please. Everything out there needs help, so don’t get baited into “my cause can beat up your cause” arguments with no right answer. There are no qualitative or quantitative comparisons that make sense. The truth is this: Those thousands of lives you save could contribute to a famine that kills millions, or that one bush in Bolivia that you protect could hold the cure for cancer. The downstream effects are unknown. Do your best and hope for the best. If you’re improving the world—however you define that—consider your job well done.

Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment either. It can also improve life. If you are a musician and put a smile on the faces of thousands or millions, I view that as service. If you are a mentor and change the life of one child for the better, the world has been improved. Improving the quality of life in the world is in no fashion inferior to adding more lives.

Service is an attitude.

Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make no apologies.

Q&A: QUESTIONS AND ACTIONS

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.

—PAULA POUNDSTONE

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.

—THICH NHAT HANH

But I can’t just travel, learn languages, or fight for one cause for the rest of my life! Of course you can’t. That’s not my suggestion at all. These are just good “life hubs”—starting points that lead to opportunities and experiences that otherwise wouldn’t be found.

There is no right answer to the question “What should I do with my life?” Forget “should” altogether. The next step—and that’s all it is—is pursuing something, it matters little what, that seems fun or rewarding. Don’t be in a rush to jump into a full-time long-term commitment. Take time to find something that calls to you, not just the first acceptable form of surrogate work. That calling will, in turn, lead you to something else.

Here is a good sequence for getting started that dozens of NR have used with success.

1. Revisit ground zero: Do nothing.

Before we can escape the goblins of the mind, we need to face them. Principal among them is speed addiction. It is hard to recalibrate your internal clock without taking a break from constant overstimulation. Travel and the impulse to see a million things can exacerbate this.

Slowing down doesn’t mean accomplishing less; it means cutting out counterproductive distractions and the perception of being rushed. Consider attending a short silence retreat of 3–7 days during which all media and speaking is prohibited.

Learn to turn down the static of the mind so you can appreciate more before doing more:

The Art of Living Foundation (Course II)—International—(www.artofliving.org)

Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California (http://www.spiritrock.org)

Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Massachusetts (http://www.kripalu.org)

Sky Lake Lodge in New York (http://www.sky-lake.org)

2. Make an anonymous donation to the service organization of your choice.

This helps to get the juices flowing and disassociate feeling good about service with getting credit for it. It feels even better when it’s pure. Here are some good sites to get started:

Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org)

This independent service ranks more than 5,000 charities using criteria you select. Create a personalized page of favorites and compare them side by side, all free of charge.

Firstgiving (www.firstgiving.com)

Firstgiving.com allows you to create an online fund-raising page. Donations can be made through your personal URL. I have used Firstgiving in coordination with a nonprofit called Room to Read to build schools in both Nepal and Vietnam, with more countries pending: www.firstgiving.com/timferriss and www.firstgiving.com/timferriss2. If you specifically want to help animals, for example, you can click on a related link and access websites for hundreds of different animal charities, and then decide which one you want to donate to. The UK version of the website is http://www.justgiving.com.

Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org)

Visitors to this website will find links to charities in need of donations as well as opportunities to do volunteer work. They can also set up an automated credit card donation online.

3. Take a learning mini-retirement in combination with local volunteering.

Take a mini-retirement—six months or more if possible—to focus on learning and serving. The longer duration will permit a language focus, which in turn enables more meaningful interaction and contribution through volunteering.

For the duration of this trip, note self-criticisms and negative self-talk in a journal. Whenever upset or anxious, ask “why” at least three times and put the answers down on paper. Describing these doubts in writing reduces their impact twofold. First, it’s often the ambiguous nature of self-doubt that hurts most. Defining and exploring it in writing—just as with forcing colleagues to e-mail—demands clarity of thought, after which most concerns are found to be baseless. Second, recording these concerns seems to somehow remove them from your head.

But where to go and what to do? There is no one right answer to either. Use the following questions and resources to brainstorm:

What makes you most angry about the state of the world?

What are you most afraid of for the next generation, whether you have children or not?

What makes you happiest in your life? How can you help others have the same?

There is no need to limit yourself to one location. Remember Robin, who traveled through South America for a year with her husband and seven-year-old son? The three of them spent one to two months doing volunteer work in each location, including building wheelchairs in Banos, Ecuador, rehabilitating exotic animals in the Bolivian rain forest, and shepherding leather-back sea turtles in Suriname.

How about doing archaeological excavation in Jordan or tsunami relief on the islands of Thailand? These are just two of the dozens of foreign relocation and volunteering case studies in each issue of Verge Magazine (www.vergemagazine.com). Reader-tested resources include:

Hands on Disaster Response: www.hodr.org

Project Hope: www.projecthope.org

Relief International: www.ri.org

International Relief Teams: www.irteams.org

Airline Ambassadors International: www.airlineamb.org

Ambassadors for Children:

www.ambassadorsforchildren.org

Relief Riders International:

www.reliefridersinternational.com

Habitat for Humanity Global Village Program:

www.habitat.org

Planeta: Global Listings for Practical Ecotourism:

www.planeta.com

4. Revisit and reset dreamlines.

Following the mini-retirement, revisit the dreamlines set in Definition and reset them as needed. The following questions will help:

What are you good at?

What could you be the best at?

What makes you happy?

What excites you?

What makes you feel accomplished and good about yourself?

What are you most proud of having accomplished in your life? Can you repeat this or further develop it?

What do you enjoy sharing or experiencing with other people?

5. Based on the outcomes of steps 1–4, consider testing new part- or full-time vocations.

Full-time work isn’t bad if it’s what you’d rather be doing. This is where we distinguish “work” from a “vocation.”

If you have created a muse or cut your hours down to next to nothing, consider testing a part-time or full-time vocation: a true calling or dream occupation. This is what I did with this book. I can now tell people I’m a writer rather than giving them the two-hour drug dealer explanation. What did you dream of being when you were a kid? Perhaps it’s time to sign up for Space Camp or intern as an assistant to a marine biologist.

Recapturing the excitement of childhood isn’t impossible. In fact, it’s required. There are no more chains—or excuses—to hold you back.

81. Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist famous for proposing “Mas-low’s Hierarchy of Needs,” would term this goal a “peak experience.”

82. There is a place for koans and rhetorical meditative questions, but these tools are optional and outside the scope of this book. Most questions without answers are just poorly worded.

83. Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta, In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition (Basic Books, 1995).

16. The Top 13 New Rich Mistakes

Mistake are the name of the game in lifestyle design. It requires fighting impulse after impulse from the old world of retirement-based life deferral. Here are the slipups you will make. Don’t get frustrated. It’s all part of the process.

1. Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake (W4W) Please reread the introduction and next chapter of this book whenever you feel yourself falling into this trap. Everyone does it, but many get stuck and never get out.

2. Micromanaging and e-mailing to fill time Set the responsibilities, problem scenarios and rules, and limits of autonomous decision-making—then stop, for the sanity of everyone involved.

3. Handling problems your outsourcers or co-workers can handle

4. Helping outsourcers or co-workers with the same problem more than once, or with noncrisis problems Give them if-then rules for solving all but the largest problems. Give them the freedom to act without your input, set the limits in writing, and then emphasize in writing that you will not respond to help with problems that are covered by these rules. In my particular case, all outsourcers have at their discretion the ability to fix any problem that will cost less than $400. At the end of each month or quarter, depending on the outsourcer, I review how their decisions have affected profit and adjust the rules accordingly, often adding new rules based on their good decisions and creative solutions.

5. Chasing customers, particularly unqualified or international prospects, when you have sufficient cash flow to finance your nonfinancial pursuits

6. Answering e-mail that will not result in a sale or that can be answered by a FAQ or auto-responder For a good example of an auto-responder that directs people to the appropriate information and outsourcers, e-mailinfo@fourhourworkweek.com.

7. Working where you live, sleep, or should relax Separate your environments—designate a single space for work and solely work—or you will never be able to escape it.⁸⁴

8. Not performing a thorough 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life

9. Striving for endless perfection rather than great or simply good enough, whether in your personal or professional life Recognize that this is often just another W4W excuse. Most endeavors are like learning to speak a foreign language: to be correct 95% of the time requires six months of concentrated effort, whereas to be correct 98% of the time requires 20–30 years. Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest. Perfection is a good ideal and direction to have, but recognize it for what it is: an impossible destination.

10. Blowing minutiae and small problems out of proportion as an excuse to work

11. Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent in order to justify work How many times do I have to say it? Focus on life outside of your bank accounts, as scary as that void can be in the initial stages. If you cannot find meaning in your life, it is your responsibility as a human being to create it, whether that is fulfilling dreams or finding work that gives you purpose and self-worth—ideally a combination of both.

12. Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence Life is too short to waste, but it is also too long to be a pessimist or nihilist. Whatever you’re doing now is just a stepping-stone to the next project or adventure. Any rut you get into is one you can get yourself out of. Doubts are no more than a signal for action of some type. When in doubt or overwhelmed, take a break and 80/20 both business and personal activities and relationships.

13. Ignoring the social rewards of life Surround yourself with smiling, positive people who have absolutely nothing to do with work. Create your muses alone if you must, but do not live your life alone. Happiness shared in the form of friendships and love is happiness multiplied.

84. To avoid the living room and coffee shop as offices, consider using a social “co-working” space on occasion: http://coworking.pbwiki.com.