“Your startup disk is almost full.”
This popped up while I was working a few weeks ago, and I knew it was time to start deleting old files. I discovered a large group of folders from my previous computer - the one I had while I was traveling as a digital nomad. I was so surprised by what I found!
Read on to discover my story on how my dream to help people successfully move abroad has actually been brewing since at least the year 2012.
Life speaks to you in whispers
Oprah Winfrey says that life is always speaking to you in whispers.
Call it your inner voice, or your intuition; some people call it your inner knowing. Everyone has this, but we don’t listen to it. In fact, we don’t even hear it, and when we do hear it, we tend to disregard it if the messages we hear are not in alignment with popular opinion or the way others say that life should be.
I have no actual data, but I’d guess that anywhere between 80-95% of people don’t honor this voice over the outside voices of society telling us how to live our lives within the current system.
What I thought my calling was
That’s me in Chile in 2013, 3+years after living on the road.
Until recently, I always thought that my calling was to travel and live abroad. After all, I moved abroad for the first time at 19 years old and loved it so much that I ended up living abroad for nearly 15 years straight after that. I lived in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Germany and England from 1999-2010, and then traveled as a nomad for four years from 2010-2014.
I was definitely following a call to adventure, but it was only the preamble to my true life’s work.
That did come until when, in 2014, my life on the road came to an abrupt and unexpected end. I wasn’t quite sure where I fit in the world. I moved back ‘home’ to Chicago, became VP of Content Strategy at a travel tech startup, met my future wife, moved to Brooklyn, worked as a digital content strategist and then a director of tourism and hospitality for one of the most popular areas of Manhattan.
One day, I had lunch with a PR Director of a hotel in my district, and she told me that she was moving to Austria with her Austrian boyfriend and they were getting married. She was moving in three weeks, and did I have any advice?
Advice? About living abroad successfully? Me?
Um… YES.
I talked her ear off for an hour, and then started writing her an email on the subway home that day. Then I moved that email into my notes app because it had gotten really long.It got so long over the next three weeks that by the time her goodbye party came along, I had a going away ebook to give her.
Weird gift, right?
Um… YES.
But I describe it like this: the book literally fell out of me. I couldn’t help it.
And I ended up turning that into my first standalone book: How To Move Abroad And Why It’s The Best Thing You’ll Do.
I started coaching expats, working on consulting projects and I launched the Adventure Calls podcast. This year, I published the first of an annual Global Relocation Guide, to connect expats to relocation experts to ease the transition so you can be a successful expat abroad.
A successful expat…
I’ve been dreaming of this since 2012
I wrote that line about a ‘successful expat’ in some marketing copy for the guide and realized - no, I REMEMBERED - something that I hadn’t thought of in the years where I was trying to figure out my next steps in life.
In 2012, I launched a website called The Successful Expat or thesuccessfulexpat.com. It’s no longer working, but all the content that I now talk about was written for the site back then. I remembered this and went back into my old documents and I found all the files and folders, created in 2012. At the time, I didn’t have the bandwidth to launch it right, and I didn’t have the business sense to know what to do with the idea.
I had a long conversation with someone who I thought was an older mentor type, and he talked me out of it over tea and Tom Kha soup in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
I didn’t have the confidence to pursue it once someone ten years my senior with ‘corporate experience’ told me it wasn’t going to make me any money. I had ‘only’ been a teacher, gotten a masters degree in Media + Culture Studies, worked in travel PR and then launched and monetized a travel blog in 2010. He had worked in the ‘corporate world’ and for me, at the time, that somehow meant that he knew more than me.
I also launched a podcast in 2011 while traveling through Argentina, Chile and then Europe. It was called Break Free and it was all about women who traveled full time while running a business.I quit after one season, because podcasts were hard to produce and I felt ‘silly’ pursuing something that took up so much time when I should be ‘crushing it’ with my ‘online business’ as a ‘digital nomad.’
This was a time when Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek had taken over the world that I paid attention to, and between that book and Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income, I let go of my area of interest in exchange for ‘crushing it’ with my travel blog at the time. I ended up surrendering the business to my ex during our 2014 breakup.
In 2016, I was determined to create a side hustle to set myself free of the ‘corporate job’ I found myself trapped in back home in the United States. I launched The Postnomadic Project, and the Postnomadic Podcast, where I talked to... you guessed it… Nomads who were successfully running businesses while living as nomads or abroad, or re-pats who had returned home, but could attribute their success directly to the experience gained while living abroad.
(My podcast evolution: first, Break Free in 2011; then, the Postnomadic Podcast in 2017; finally, the Adventure Calls podcast 2020-current)
I had about 7 full interviews go live, and was so proud of the concept, the website and branding! It was the first time I worked with a real designer and a real web developer to create a real project. I stayed up late, work up early, and tried to get something off the ground.
But this was also the year that my dad tragically passed away and Trump was elected within the same month, and my company hired a new president who felt, quite honestly, like a small version of Trump, too. I was flattened and crushed.
Six months later, as I built out the project slowly but unsurely, my now-wife proposed, we planned our wedding for the same year, and I got a new corporate job that felt like a new lease on life.
I launched a newsletter for a while called Extra/Ordinary, about ordinary people doing extraordinary work abroad.
Then, one year later, that friend told me about her move, a book fell out of me, and there was nothing I could do but follow the whisper that has been speaking to me now for almost a decade.
I heard the whisper that had been there all along
I could have ignored these urges, ignored the side hustles, slept in, counted my attempts at building a business as failure after failure. But instead, I kept listening, I kept trying, no matter what. Only now, in hindsight, do I see the thread that ties all of this together. Along the way, I had to just keep running, even though I couldn’t see the road in front of me.
I now know that my whisper wasn’t just about me traveling and living abroad. I didn’t work as a teacher AND get a Master’s in Media and Culture Studies AND live abroad AND live as a nomad AND try time and time again to launch businesses because it was all about me.
My mission is to help 1,000,000 Americans go international by 2030.
I followed my call to adventure not just around the world, but into a world of entrepreneurship, one of big, hairy, audacious goals.
I am already on my way to accomplish this by:
Writing books and guides that remove the barriers that keep people stuck,
Growing the Adventure Calls podcast so that reaches the ears of thousands - and one day, millions - of future expats,
Maintaining a safe space for queer expats with my Facebook group (Queer Expats),
Personally coaching hundreds of expats
Growing a consulting business that helps companies create safe spaces so that their employees can be successful expats.
I’m still on my way, but that’s because I never gave up. It’s all a work in progress.
So whatever you do, don’t dull your shine. Keep pushing.
