“I think I’d get restless and go back to work.”
“I was under the impression that you weren’t working and taking some time off?”
“If you took time off to travel, why are you working?”
“How do you deal with the mindset that this isn’t a vacation that will end and then you’ll have to go right back to work?
These are all questions/statements I’ve gotten in the last couple of days, so I think this is a good time to clear things up and be explicit about my goals.
“When will you go back to work?”
I suppose I’ll start with what my goals are not. I have no intention of going back to corporate America. When I quit my job, I quit a lifestyle that I never wanted. I quit to pursue the lifestyle that was 8 years in the making; everything I’ve done since I was 19 was with the mentality that someday I would travel full time. I’ve known my goal and have stuck to it.
My goal, in case it wasn’t crystal clear before, is to visit every country.
To do this, I need time, I need money, and I need my health. I have all three right now, but I won’t forever, and that’s where the urgency of my decision comes from.
The ultimate goals lie under the ‘every country’ umbrella. There’s so much behind it, but the three under arching goals are:
- I will lay roads for other people to travel who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity.
- I will create a home for people who are traveling against their desires.
- I will generate a passive income through multiple avenues. This will be enough to both live on, save money, and be generous.
What I’ll Do Instead
So when people ask me if I’m working, I’m absolutely working toward these things. I believe that I wasn’t put on this earth to be employed but to be deployed.
I get to spend my days writing and having conversations with influential people and doing things that make my heart happy. I think of it in a Sonecutters Credo context:
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Stonecutters Credo
In other words, every day I get to live in a way that is a drop of water, knowing that the ripples tomorrow will be waves in the future.
Life is either a great adventure or nothing at all; this adventure is a vacation, or possibly nothing at all. And hey, it takes a little work.