Starting My Journey

Earlier this year I quit my job of two years at a startup in San Francisco. It was a pretty decent job with great pay, but I felt I was growing increasingly alienated from the things I actually wanted to be doing with my life. I think some people have better safety valves than I do, and it lets them tolerate that feeling better than I can. In my case, it was legitimately starting to affect my health in a really negative way. My anxiety, which has been a constant “companion” my whole life started to shoot through the roof. I began to have serious bouts with insomnia, to the point that I had to take a leave of absence from work in order to participate in a sleep study to determine what was wrong with my sleep.

Ultimately it turned out to be caused by anxiety, which should have been no surprise to me. Upon quitting my job, my body let out a huge sigh of relief and I started to sleep very soundly again.

After I quit my job, I started freelancing and thinking about my next moves. I then read about Pieter Levels, who started 12 startups in 12 months, all the while travelling the world. I had been somewhat obsessed with this idea since I was a freshman in college, having read the 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. But I always had the idea that it wasn’t actually possible to travel, work, and basically stay above the water, money-wise. But here was someone who was doing it and doing it really well. After reading the article, and a few of Pieter’s blog posts, I decided to take the plunge.

I bought tickets to Prague with a return date 3 months later — by far the longest trip I’d ever taken — with the intent of freelancing and working on my own startups. I had no idea if it would work (and I suppose I still don’t know, being in the early legs of my trip, though it seems to be going fairly well) but I had finally made up my mind — there’s only so much life to live, and I’d better be living it, god damn it.

So, the first week and a half was… rough. I got a bit out of hand and had myself a bit of a bender, and definitely paid for it in terms of productivity and focus. Before I left, I had a very good routine of working out almost every day, eating really healthy, and getting a lot of focused work in, which I was pretty happy with. Naturally, upon landing in a foreign country, all of that went out of the window. Slowly, I am picking myself up and starting to rebuild my routines.

As far as routines go, for me it’s pretty simple. I want to get at least 3 solid hours of work in a day. That’s enough for me to live very comfortably in the Czech Republic, and most of the other places I’ll be traveling. It is also vital for me to exercise every day, and meditate as well. If I can nail these 3 things down, I consider myself very much on the right track.

However, the thing with travel is that you’d like to keep yourself open to spontaneity and new experiences, so sometimes these routines impede you a little bit. That’s the thing that I’m trying to focus on right now — how to balance work and exploration. Keeping my routine keeps me sane, and is vital to my survival, as it gives me something to anchor to while I travel and put myself in totally new experiences. Without that anchor, it can get kind of crazy. So that’s what I’m trying to work on now.

As an aside, Prague is a beautiful city. I had heard great things, but it’s one thing to hear them and another entirely to see them firsthand.

For now, na shledanou (goodbye in Czech).

Much Love,

Sean