How to travel the world and get companies to pay for it
By: Trevor Huffman
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Investing, Freelancing, Travel, Digital Nomads

Casey Neistat is a real speaker on the truth about being successful in your craft. People that want to travel the world and work while they travel need to understand how progress and improvement works. There are three questions you need to begin answering:

What can you start or offer that is rare and valuable to a market? How can you start learning the necessary skills or get the education to learn those skills to work abroad? How do you save money and invest money to make sure you can afford to eat, sleep, and drink tequila at least three times a week while living and traveling abroad while you work?

I admire Casey Neistat’s work and his honesty about how long it took him to succeed at his life’s craft. Why?

Because very few of us get to live abroad and make money doing something online, and if we do get to do it, it takes a lot of effort, planning, saving, investing, and preparation.

If you want to become great at something, become great at investing, saving, and understanding the value of money.

This way when you work those shitty jobs, and hone your craft, people can’t ignore you and your money works for you.

I believe if you can value $10 a day, you can become millionaire pretty quickly. The challenge is learning how to value money, save, invest, and do smart things instead of stupid things. Buying a new SUV that gets 3.4 miles to the gallon is dumb. Buying new clothes is dumb. New electronics and weekend drinking binges... DUMB.

Paying off your debt, starting with the highest interest rates first, and holding off anything that isn’t producing more value for you is smart. You want to drink that bad, sneak a flask into the bar and sip on that when you go pee (thank you).

Start investing in Vanguard funds, ETF’s, or things that pay you while you sleep. What pays you while you sleep? Other people, other companies, other businesses. I invest in Upstart.com. LendingClub.com. TD Ameritrade. Prosper.com. I do this because every dollar I invest works while I sleep.

My dad always told me to throw mud at the wall and see if it sticks.

From Mr. Money Mustache:

“If you save $796 per week for ten years, and get a 7% compounded investment return after inflation, you’ll have $600,000 sitting around ready to party for you. Let’s say you’ve got two income earners working together. Now each one has to save only $398 a week. There are 112 waking hours in each week. Each person has to make 40 successful $10 decisions each week — or one $10 decision every 2.8 waking hours.”

Now, you don’t have to stop there. You can buy real estate. You can get a mortgage for a duplex and rent out the other side. You can start writing on Medium. Now Casey doesn’t use Medium.com as a writing monetization model, but he shared his story and I appreciate it because it relates to everything we do in life. In a similar vein, I write because I want to do the work and become a writer one day. I don’t know if I really will. I don’ think Medium will ever pay me enough to retire. I don’t know if I even care.

But I still make small amounts of money each day I write.

If I write for ten more years, and continue to get better and write more and get better, like Casey Neistat, then maybe one day, I’ll be badass too and travel the world to do what I love.

I love Kristin Wilson’s advice on starting the digital nomad adventures.

I think you just put in the work and the small improvements and results happen over time and one day, you look back and say, “Damn, I did all that?”

It’s kind of like climbing Mt. Everest (or a really fucking tall mountain). You look up and see that distant, yet intimidatingly jagged, white peak. It looks so far away —in fact, it looks millions of miles away. You may never get there, you think. But if you love hiking or climbing (your craft which is ______?) mountains, you just start. You start moving your feet towards your goal. YOu get better. You prepare. Soon, you know the mountain and you feel good about starting your climb each day. You know even if you fail this year, you will get there eventually. If you keep trying to climb every day, you will get there. But you cannot stop walking. If you stop walking two days in a row, you are going back down the mountain. Successful habits don’t stop walking two days in a row.

The magic of success is in the compounding returns that occur from the small daily improvement towards your goals, investments, and efforts each day.

That is how habits and traveling the world for your dreams will happen. You put in the daily work and then you step back 10 years from now and say, “These daily choices I made, to do my work, defined who I am now.”

This is my version of success.

It doesn’t mean you will be rich immediately. There is no get rich quick scheme for reaching a dream. No, you will have to climb your mountain. But if you feel good about that effort everyday, then I say, do it. Value money. Become so good at e, people can’t ignore you (rare and valuable). Invest in things that pay you while you sleep and stop buying things to stroke your golden ego. Nobody really cares abroad if you have the iPhone 10 S.

This is the only success I care about as a human. Let society make and measure and judge and we’ll be over here climbing our passions, and travels, and adventures. This is a real life resume. You want to build dreams, then start with the realization you your goals and dreams are only as good as your habits and daily work.

If you take a step today. And tomorrow. And for the next 10,000 days. You will be at the top of any mountain you choose. Start traveling towards that first if you want to travel the world and live your dream.

That’s special to me.