#70: How to Earn Your Freedom

This short episode is composed of two essays on "lifestyle," world travel, practical philosophies, and much more. Disclaimer: These might make you quit your job... even if you're the boss. I'm not kidding, as I've already seen it. If it happens, you'll thank me later. To see the movies I rave about in this episode, check out fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo For two free protein bars, visit exoprotein.com/tim http://www.exoprotein.com/tim (limited supplies) For more from my book club, check out audible.com/timsbooks http://www.audible.com/mt/TimsBooks?bp_ua=yes&source_code=AUDGBWS0908149AUW Thanks for listening! - Tim

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  No, what is an appropriate time?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is an in-between-isode, a short little morsel, instead of the longer interviews that I tend to do. But you can certainly find all of those at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. But today, I'm sitting in the CreativeLive offices. It's one of the startups that I work with, creativelive.com. The founder, or co-founder, Chase Jarvis, was also on the podcast. And it's a beautiful day in San Francisco. It makes me want to get outside to reassess what I'm so busy with. Why am I so busy? And perhaps it's time to loosen the ties and go off on an adventure, to really gain some perspective.

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  And this podcast, this particular episode, might cause you to quit your job. And that would be a good thing, even if you're the boss, in many cases. And even if you do not do that, I think it will provide you with some insight and perspective, and new angles on how to view lifestyle, lifestyle design, and much more than that. So I'm going to present two essays. These are two separate essays, but very closely related, by Rolf Potts. And they are from the book Vagabonding. And Vagabonding is one of the two books that I took with me. And I had next to nothing, a tiny little bag, when I traveled the world for a year and a half, starting in 2004.

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  And all of those experiences, of course, led to, or formed the basis for, The Four Hour Workweek. And Vagabonding is one of the four, fundamental four, as I call them, books that I recommend at the back of The Four Hour Workweek. And the other book, by the way, I had two books with me, that's it. The other one was Walden. But vagabonding, it is a game changer. And it's not just about travel, it is about a mindset for life. And it's very easy when we strive for achievement, achievement, achievement, to forget about appreciation and how to blend those two in a very pragmatic way so that you are not just a successful person, but a happy, fulfilled,

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  and adventuresome person, if that's a real word, to rediscover joy. So without further ado, I'm going to get us to those essays, which you guys, I think, are gonna love, and I'd really enjoy your feedback. So let me know on Twitter what you think, @Tferris, T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S. And the entire book can be found, and you can listen to more samples, at audible.com/timsbooks, audible.com/timsbooks. But these two essays definitely stand on their own, so you'll get a lot out of them. We have two new sponsors for this podcast, and I'm very excited about them. The first is related to movies, because I am an obsessively fanatical movie watcher.

• 3:15Tim Ferriss?

  I watch movies all the time, very often, instead of reading fiction before bed to turn my brain off, or my problem-solving brain off, I will watch movies. And they range very widely. But the sponsor is Vimeo, and specifically Vimeo On Demand. I've been a user, a consumer of Vimeo for many years. And on Vimeo, what makes them very interesting, you're buying from the creator. So you're supporting their work with a greater amount of your dollars going into their pockets directly. So I love that, number one, as a content creator myself. And on Vimeo On Demand, I'll give you four, actually, no, I'm not gonna give you four. I'm gonna give you three movies that I highly recommend you check out.

• 3:55Tim Ferriss?

  And you can find them all very easily by going to fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo. That's fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo. And here we go. So the first one is Tomorrowland. And a lot of you have probably never heard of this. This was a Grand Jury Prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival. It is the weirdest, most thought-provoking 16

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  ...minute short you've ever seen. And The Verge called it, quote, "A masterpiece, one of the best sci-fi movies in years," end quote. I'm not going to tell you too much about it. It's very cheap, so you should absolutely watch this. And it's short enough that you can watch it on a device, on an iPhone or whatnot. So, check out Tomorrowland. And the second is very, very different. This one is The Act of Killing. The Act of Killing should not be watched right before bed. It is one of the most powerful films I've ever seen, and it defies categorization. I'll give you a quote here.

• 5:01Tim Ferriss?

  And Werner Herzog, once you know he's involved, craziness is going to ensue. Fader Magazine said this is, quote, "The most innovative masterpiece of documentary filmmaking, bar none," end quote. So we have Tomorrowland, super short. The Act of Killing, super intense. And then the third one I'm going to tell you about is Waking Up. And this is actually a lecture by Sam Harris, and it focuses on mindfulness and meditation. Sam is one of the smartest people I know. He was also on this podcast. And this is a tutorial and a guide to waking up. And as someone who's been meditating regularly now for the last six months or to a year, I would say, it is a complete game changer.

• 5:43Tim Ferriss?

  And it's been the most consistent behavior that I've noticed across all of the top performers that I interview for this podcast. And I'm not going to tell you about the fourth one. You can see that yourself. Go to fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo. All right? That's V-I-M-E-O. Second sponsor, I'm going to keep this short, but it is one of the startups that I work with, that I love, and that is ExoProtein. So ExoProtein is a startup that is making...

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  Protein bars using cricket flour. And they're designed by an award-winning three Michelin-star chef who was the former head of R&D at The Fat Duck, which was ranked the number-one restaurant in the world. So these are paleo-friendly, no gluten, grains, soy, dairy, et cetera. And they are amazing. And the reason that I wanted to put them in the podcast is you can get two free bars. People are like, "What? Insects? Forget that." And I want to encourage all of you to try it. So you can get two free bars, you just have to pay for shipping and handling. And you can find that by going to ExoProtein. That's E-X-O-protein.com/tim. That's ExoProtein.com/tim.

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  And this is a very nimble but small startup. So when I say, "Get it while it lasts," I really mean it. They do run out of stock because they've become very popular and they will sell out. They do it all the time. So, check it out. That's ExoProtein.com/tim. And without further ado, here is my good friend Rolf Potts and two amazing essays from the book, "Bag of Bonding." Enjoy.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Chapter One: Declare Your Independence. Of all the outrageous throwaway lines one hears in movies, there's one that stands out for me. It doesn't come from a madcap comedy, an esoteric science fiction flick, or a special effects-laden action thriller. It comes from Oliver Stone's Wall Street, when the Charlie Sheen character, a promising big shot in the stock market, is telling his girlfriend about his dreams. "I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I'm 30 and get out of this racket," he says, "I'll be able to ride my motorcycle across China." When I first saw this scene on video a few years ago, I nearly fell out of my seat in astonishment. After all, Charlie Sheen or anyone else could work for eight months as a toilet cleaner

• 8:05Speaker 03

  and have enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. Even if they didn't yet have their own motorcycle, another couple months of scrubbing toilets would earn them enough to buy one when they got to China. The thing is, most Americans probably wouldn't find this movie scene odd. For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream, or an exotic temptation, but not as something that applies to the here and now. Instead, out of our insane duty to fear fashion and monthly payments on things we don't really need, we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle", travel becomes just another accessory,

• 8:46Speaker 03

  a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase in the same way we buy clothing and furniture. Not long ago, I read that nearly a quarter of a million short-term monastery-and-convent-based vacations had been booked and sold by tour agents in the previous year. Spiritual enclaves from Greece to Tibet were turning into hot tourist draws, and travel pundits attributed this "solace boom" to the fact that "busy overachievers are seeking a simpler life." What nobody bothered to point out, of course, is that purchasing a package vacation to find a simpler life is kind of like using a mirror to see what you look like when you aren't looking in the mirror. All that's really sold is the romantic notion of a simpler life, and, just as no amount of turning your head or flicking your eyes

• 9:28Speaker 03

  will allow you to unself-consciously see yourself in the looking glass, no combination of one-week-or-10-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home. Ultimately, this shotgun wedding of time and money has a way of keeping us in a holding pattern. The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we're too poor to buy our own freedom. With this kind of mindset, it's no wonder so many Americans think extended overseas travel is the exclusive realm of students, counterculture dropouts, or the idle rich. In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics, like age, or ideology, or income, and everything to do with personal outlook.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Long-term travel isn't about being a college student, it's about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn't an act of rebellion against society, it's an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn't require a massive bundle of cash. It requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way. This deliberate way of walking through the world has always been intrinsic to a time-honored, quietly-available travel tradition known as vagabonding. Vagabonding involves taking an extended time out from your normal life—six weeks, four months, two years—to travel the world on your own terms. But beyond travel, vagabonding is an outlook on life. Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age

• 10:56Speaker 03

  to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions. Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and "normal life" within adventure. Vagabonding is an attitude, a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life, a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And as much as anything, vagabonding is about time, our only real commodity, and how we choose to use it. Sierra Club founder John Muir, an ir-vagabonder if there ever was one, used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite

• 11:38Speaker 03

  only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. Muir called these folks "the time-poor," people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn't spare time to truly experience the splendor of California's Sierra wilderness. One of Muir's Yosemite visitors in the summer of 1871 was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gushed upon seeing the sequoias. "It's a wonder we can see these trees and not wonder more." When Emerson scurried off a couple hours later, however, Muir speculated wryly about whether the famous transcendentalist had really seen those trees in the first place. Nearly a century later, naturalist Edwin Way Teal used Muir's example to lament the frenetic pace of modern society.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  "Freedom as John Muir knew it," he wrote in his 1956 book, "Autumn Across America," "with its wealth of time, its unregimented days, its latitude of choice, such freedom seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation." But Thiel's lament for the deterioration of personal freedom was just as hollow a generalization in 1956 as it is now. As John Muir was well aware, vagabonding has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has always been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging us to do otherwise. This is a book about living that choice.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Chapter 2: Earn Your Freedom There's a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about 1700 years ago. In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they'd made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to mock their temptations by regulating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, "We will leave in the winter." When the wintertime came, they said, "We will leave in the summer." They went on like this for over 50 years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows, but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending, as Thoreau put it, "the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it." "We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside," we tell ourselves, "but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place." Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other seemingly more appropriate time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate. Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  In this way, vagabonding is not merely a ritual of getting immunizations and packing suitcases; rather, it's the ongoing practice of looking and learning, of facing fears and altering habits, of cultivating a new fascination with people and places. This attitude is not something you can pick up at the airport counter with your boarding pass; it's a process that starts at home. It's a process by which you first test the waters that will pull you into wonderful new places. During this process, you may even find that you aren't up for the uncertainties and adaptations that vagabonding requires. Vagabonding, as Ed Byrne bluntly put it 40 years ago, is not for comfort hounds, sophomoric misanthropes, or poolside faint hearts whose thin convictions won't stand up to the problems that come along.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  In saying this, Byrne wasn't being a snob; after all, vagabonding involves sacrifices, and its particular sacrifices are not for everyone. Thus, it's important to keep in mind that you should never go vagabonding out of a vague sense of fashion or obligation. Vagabonding is not a social gesture, nor is it a moral high ground. It's not a seamless 12-step program of travel correctness or a political statement that demands the reinvention of society; rather, it's a personal act that demands only the realignment of self. If this personal realignment is not something you're willing to confront, or of course, if world travel isn't your idea of a good time, you have the perfect right to leave vagabonding to those who feel the calling.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Ironically, the best litmus test for testing your vagabond ingumption is not found in travel, but in the process of earning your freedom to travel. Earning your freedom, of course, involves work, and work is intrinsic to vagabonding for psychic reasons as much as financial ones. To see the psychic importance of work, one need to look no further than the people who travel the world on family money. Sometimes referred to as "trustafarians," these folks are among the most visible and least happy wanderers in the travel milieu. Draping themselves in local fashions, they flit from one exotic travel scene to another, compulsively volunteering in local political causes, experimenting with exotic intoxicants, and dabbling in every non-Western religion imaginable. Talk to them, and they'll tell you they're searching for something meaningful.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  What they're really looking for, though, is the reason why they started traveling in the first place. Because they never worked for their freedom, their travel experiences have no personal reference, no connection to the rest of their lives. They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spend enough of themselves to begin with. Thus, their experience of travel has a diminished sense of value. Thoreau touched on this same notion in Walden. "Which would be most advanced by the end of a month?" he posited. "The boy who had made his own jackknife, from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as possible, as would be necessary for this? Or the boy who had received a Rogers penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?"

• 18:08Speaker 03

  At a certain level, the idea that freedom is tied to labor might seem a bit depressing. It shouldn't be. For all the amazing experiences that await you in distant lands, the meaningful part of travel always starts at home, with a personal investment in the wonders to come. "I don't like work," says Marlowe in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "but I like what's in the work: the chance to find yourself." Marlowe wasn't referring to vagabonding, but the notion still applies. Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire; it's the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together. Work is a time to dream about travel and to write notes to yourself, but it's also time to tie up your loose ends.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Work is when you confront the problems that you might otherwise be tempted to run away from. Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts, so that your travels are not an escape from your real life, but a discovery of your real life.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  On a practical level, there are countless ways to earn your travels. On the road, I've met vagabonderers of all ages, from all backgrounds and walks of life. I've met secretaries, bankers, and policemen who quit their jobs and are taking a peripatetic pause before trying something new. I've met lawyers, stockbrokers, and social workers who've negotiated months off as they take their careers to new locations. I've met talented specialists—waiters, web designers, strippers—who find they can fund months of travel on a few weeks of work. I've met musicians, truck drivers, and employment counselors who are taking an extended time off between gigs. I've met semi-retired soldiers and engineers and businessmen who've reserved a year or two for travel before dabbling in something else.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Some of the most prolific vagabonderers I've met are seasonal workers—carpenters, park service workers, commercial fishermen—who winter every year in warm and exotic parts of the world. Other folks—teachers, doctors, bartenders, journalists—have opted to take their very careers on the road, alternating work and travel as they see fit. Many vagabonderers don't even maintain a steady job description, taking short-term work only as it serves to fund their travels and their passions. In Generation X, Douglas Copeland defined this kind of work as "an antisabbatical," a job approached with the sole intention of staying for a limited period of time—often one year—to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Before I got into writing, a whole slew of antisabbaticals—like landscaping, retail sales, and temp work—earned me my vagabonding time. Of all the antisabbaticals that funded my travels, though, no experience was quite as vivid as the two years I spent teaching English in Busan, South Korea. In addition to learning tons about Asian social customs through my work, I discovered that the simple act of walking to work was itself an exercise in possibility. On a given day in Korea, I was equally likely to be greeted by a Buddhist monk wearing Air Jordans as I was by a woman in a stewardess uniform handing out promotional toilet tissue. I eventually stopped noticing such details as children screaming hello, old men urinating

• 21:14Speaker 03

  in public, and vegetable truck loudspeakers blasting Edelweiss. After two years on the job, I actually found myself fighting boredom as I crooned "California Dreaming" with my salaryman tuties in a room full of miniskirted 17-year-old karaoke hostesses. And on top of all this, the pay was pretty good. However you choose to fund your travel freedom, keep in mind that your work is an active part of your travel attitude. Even if your anti-sabbatical job isn't your life's calling, approach your work with a spirit of faith, mindfulness, and thrift. In such a manner, Thoreau was able to meet all his living expenses at Walden Pond by working just six weeks a year. Since vagabonding is more involved than freelance philosophizing, however,

• 21:57Speaker 03

  you might have to invest a bit more time in scraping together your travel funds. Regardless of how long it takes to earn your freedom, remember that you are laboring for more than just a vacation. Vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Ultimately, then, the first step of vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests instead of the other way around. Believe it or not, this is a radical departure from how most people view work and leisure. A few years ago, a magazine editor named Joe Robinson spearheaded a petition campaign called "Work to Live." The goal of this movement was to pass a law that would increase American vacation time to three weeks after one year on the job and to four weeks after three years. The rationale was that Americans place too much emphasis on work, that all we have to look forward to from day to day is a long tunnel of 11 and 1/2 months of work every year. "The leading casualty of all this is our time," said Robinson, "that commodity we seem to have so much of back in 6th grade,

• 22:57Speaker 03

  when the clock on the wall never seemed to move." Robinson's campaign was a worthy one, and it found plenty of support at the grassroots level and a fair amount of antagonism in corporate circles. Amid all this publicity, however, I was amazed that nobody was subversive enough to point out the obvious. As citizens of a stable, prosperous democracy, any one of us has the power to create our own free time, outside the whims of federal laws and private sector policies. Indeed, if the clock appears to move faster than it did in the 6th grade, it's only because we haven't actualized our power as adults to set our own recess schedule. To actualize this power, we merely need to make strategic use, if only for a few weeks

• 23:37Speaker 03

  or months, of a time-honored personal freedom technique popularly known as quitting. And despite its pejorative implication, quitting need not be as reckless as it sounds. Many people are able to create vagabonding time through constructive quitting, that is, negotiating with their employers for special sabbaticals and long-term leaves of absence. Even leaving your job in a more permanent manner need not be a negative act, especially in an age when work is likely to be defined by job specialization and the fragmentation of tasks. Whereas working a job with the intention of quitting it might have been an act of recklessness 100 years ago, it is more and more often becoming an act of common sense in an age of portable skills and diversified employment options. Keeping this in mind, don't worry that your extended travels might leave you with a gap

• 24:22Speaker 03

  on your resume. Rather, you should enthusiastically and unapologetically include your vagabonding experience on your resume when you return. List the job skills travel has taught you: independence, flexibility, negotiation, planning, boldness, self-sufficiency, improvisation. Speak frankly and confidently about your travel experiences. Odds are your next employer will be interested and impressed and a wee bit envious. As Pico Iyer pointed out, "The act of quitting means not giving up but moving on, changing direction not because something doesn't agree with you, but because you don't agree with something." It's not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one's journey but a step in a better direction.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Quitting, whether a job or a habit, means taking a turn so as to be sure you're still moving in the direction of your dreams. In this way, quitting a job to go vagabonding should never be seen as the end of something grudging and unpleasant. Rather, it's a vital step in beginning something new and wonderful. Vagabonding Profile: Walt Whitman Should vagabonding have a patron saint, it would be the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman, if for no other reason than "Song of the Open Road," his infectiously joyous ode to the spirit of travel. Born in 1819 to a working-class family in New York, Whitman entered the working world as an office boy at age 11.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  It was here, and at his later employment as a printer's apprentice, that he developed a passion for self-education, as well as an eye for finding uncommon beauty in the common activity of daily life. Whitman eventually moved on to work as a journalist, but his real-life work was "Leaves of Grass," a collection of free-spirited verse that grew to more than 300 poems by the time of his death in 1892. As a youth, Whitman was particularly inspired by his daily ferry trips from Brooklyn to Manhattan, which instilled in him a lasting appreciation for the uncommon joys and vivid details of travel. And while his later travels took him to budding American outposts such as New Orleans and Denver, it is this celebration of simple movement and possibility that gives Song

• 26:28Speaker 03

  of the Open Road its visceral and inclusive energy. "To see nothing anywhere but that you may reach it and pass it; to conceive no time, however distant, but you may reach it and pass it; to look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you; to know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls." Vagabonding Voices. The following testimonies are from real vagabonders who've traveled the road themselves.

• 26:57Tim Ferriss?

  This is Tim Ferriss, a 36-year-old author in San Francisco, California. For all the most important things in life, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job, to have that kid, to take a dream trip. Sadly, the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday," in quotation marks, "someday I'll do this, someday I'll do that," is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists, one of my previous favorites, are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it eventually, just do it and correct course along the way. Fortune favors the bold.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  This is Jen Miller, a 39-year-old freelance writer from Canada. "Your freedom matters more than anything, and you win that freedom the moment you make the decision to hit the road. When you commit 100% to your dream and you begin doing the work necessary to free yourself and move into the new reality of traveling, you're already on the road."

• 28:03Speaker 05

  This is Cassidy Amick, a 29-year-old advertising account executive from Arizona. My younger brother asked me what I feared more, leaving my stable job of two years in a terrible economy, or backpacking through India, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam on my own. That exact moment, my heart skipped a beat. Even though embarking on a new travel adventure across Southeast Asia seemed impossible at the time, it also gave me butterflies, the kind that makes you decide to take the leap of faith. I knew what I had to do. I submitted my two-weeks notice shortly after, because I knew it would all work itself out in the end.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  This is Ann Van Loon, a 43-year-old teacher from Seattle, Washington. When we first told our family and close friends that we were planning on taking our kids out of school for a year of travel in the world, we received more than our share of sideways looks and skeptical questions. We persevered, though, and soon, most of our friends were won over by our positive focus and enthusiasm. Don't let yourself get talked out of your travel dream. Leaving actually turned out to be much harder than the travel experience. Just go.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Quotes for Chapter 2. First is from Henry David Thoreau in Walden. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary. New, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. The Supreme Teaching of the Upanishads. And they say in truth that a man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his faith. As his faith is, so are his works. As his works are, so he becomes.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Ed Buran, Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Wanting to travel reflects a positive attitude. You want to see, to grow and experience, and presumably to become more whole as a human being. Vagabonding takes this a step further. It promotes the chances of sustaining and strengthening this positive attitude. As a vagabond, you begin to face your fears now and then instead of continuously sidestepping them in the name of convenience. You build an attitude that makes life more rewarding, which in turn makes it easier to keep doing it. It's called positive feedback, and it works.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope. Without it, the life of the cities would drive all men into crime, or drugs, or psychoanalysis.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Tim Cahill from Hold the Enlightenment. A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens. These ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea. Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know with a sudden, jarring clarity that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it, and we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Thomas Merton, from the Asian Journal of Thomas Merton.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  And so I stand among you as one that offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Tip Sheet, Chapter 2. Please visit vagabonding.net/resources for resources related to: sabbaticals, unpaid leave and quitting your job, finding jobs and careers overseas, international employment references, and overseas dangers.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Before we jump to the next chapter, I'd like to add a few comments about overseas dangers. One of the big issues these days among potential vagabonder is whether or not it's safe to travel overseas anymore. The short answer to this concern is that traveling around the world is statistically no more dangerous than traveling across your hometown. Indeed, as with home, most dangers and annoyances on the road revolve around sickness, theft, and accidents, things all discussed in Chapter 7, not political violence or terrorism. Should political violence or terrorism capture headlines, however, the secret to avoiding it is not to cancel your travel plans, but simply to keep yourself informed. Just because the evening news shows unrest in a southern Lebanon refugee camp, for instance,

• 32:45Speaker 03

  doesn't mean it's dangerous to visit Beirut or Galilee, or for that matter, other parts of southern Lebanon. By that same token, the evening news might habitually ignore the political situation in West Africa, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's safe to visit Sierra Leone or Liberia. Obviously, then, planning and monitoring your destinations will require that you look past the evening news. Online resources, such as US State Department travel warnings and a website called World Travel Watch, make good starting points for assessing the current safety situation in any given part of the world. Even if you accidentally find yourself in a dangerous area as you travel, the key to keeping safe is knowing and talking to the locals, who can tell you where specific dangers

• 33:27Speaker 03

  lurk, patronizing mom-and-pop businesses, which are never targeted in political attacks, avoiding a loud or flashy appearance—this includes dogmatic debates of religion and politics—and traveling outside of predictable tourist patterns, which are easier to target by troublemakers. In short, the engaged and humbled attitude of vagabonding will naturally lend to a safer journey. Should the security situation seem especially tense in a region, go a step further and avoid hangouts that cater exclusively to foreigners—expat bars, hard rock cafes, and the like; stay away from public demonstrations in crowds—this includes small bands of drunks and rabble-rousers; and don't share your travel plans or lodging arrangements with strangers.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  On a final note, keep in mind that most people in the world see you not as a political entity or an appendage of the great Satan, but as a guest to their country. Even if they vehemently disagree with your country's policies and practices, they will invariably honor your individuality and regard you with hospitality and respect. You'd never guess this by watching the evening news, of course, but travel allows you to experience the nuances of the world in a way that mass media never will. Remember for these resources, go to vagabonding.net/resources.

• 34:44Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, guys, this is Tim Ferriss again. I hope you enjoyed those essays. Again, you can get the entire book at audible.com/timsbooks. You can also see a handful of my favorite books that are also on that page. So if you want to see what I read, what I listen to, you'll get my basically top six list right there. So audible.com/timsbooks. And sponsors, Vimeo. Okay. You want to wind down, you want to get something exciting, you want to have your brain split wide open and exposed to new information, I don't know why I said that, but it sounds kind of funky, then you should go to fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo. That's all spelled out, F-O-U-R, fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo, where you can see Tomorrowland,

• 35:29Tim Ferriss?

  the crazy, crazy 16-minute sci-fi masterpiece that I mentioned, which is also hilarious. You can find The Act of Killing, which is the most intense movie I have probably ever seen in my life, and just incredibly, incredibly innovative. I've never seen anything quite like it. Waking Up by Sam Harris, and then The Mystery Movie Number Four, which you can check out, which made me want to go travel the entire world itself. So that's Four Hour Work Week, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/vimeo. And then Exo Protein Bars. You must be getting hungry after all this listening, and I don't blame you. And I know what you're hankering for, and that is crickets. You might think, oh, my God, I don't have legs

• 36:10Tim Ferriss?

  stuck in between my teeth like little pieces of spinach after biting into a bug bar, but don't worry about it. You won't even recognize that there's Any insect in this. There's coconut, there are all sorts of flavors. It's designed by one of the top R and D chefs in the world. And you can get two free bars. You just have to pay a couple of bucks for shipping and handling while supplies last. So go to exoprotein.com/tim. That's E X O protein.com/tim. And that is it for now. Thank you for listening.