Hard to believe we’re nearly done with London and a quarter of the way through our whole Remote Year program… In keeping with my tradition from Prague and Belgrade I’ve put together a short video to give you a flavor for our living and work situation here:

One of the better networking events we’ve had so far was the opportunity to chat with Food Busker John Quilter – what an inspiring dude. This is a guy who quit a hugely successful restaurant business because he felt unfulfilled. He sold everything he owned and did a year of cooking meals for strangers on the street and allowing them to pay whatever price they felt it was worth. He became almost like the Gary Vaynerchuck of street food and has since parlayed it into a media property and a retail product for biodegradable Nespresso pods. Super inspiring.

The blonde lady sitting in front in the picture above is Heleri, our city manager here in London. In each locale we’re paired up with a local who is well-connected and knows the city. Heleri helped to organize events like the Community Connect with John but she also is there to help us with any local connections we need. I get periodic back issues when working prolonged hours hunched over my laptop and last week was just bananas. Heleri connected me with this 7′ Nordic osteopath named Dr. Marius who is like Zakk Wylde meets Mr. Miyage. He gave me a chiro adjustment, explained the root cause and then taught me a set of nine exercises I need to do to start strengthening my core. Shoutout to Heleri for hooking me up with this guy on a day’s notice when back pain was unbearable. I’ve been doing TRX weekly under Chris Peloquin‘s leadership but never realized how little emphasis I’ve devoted to strengthening core stabilizer muscles (which are so critical especially for us knowledge workers who spend long periods on a laptop). I’m now incorporating Marius’ exercises in my TRX routine and if they work for immunizing me against these recurrent back problems I’ll post a video and share how they work.

My friend Beth from Arizona arrived yesterday and is visiting for the next week. She just published this article on lessons from working remotely for Inc.com in which she interviewed me about the prep for Remote Year and how it’s been going. Thanks Beth for the opp. If you need a solid PR firm she runs Wired PR and the Success Lab podcast and clearly has pull with big publications like Inc.

So I had a crazy experience last week coming back from downtown London on the Central Line. We got to the stop just before Shepherd’s Bush and they said they needed to hold the train for a minute. I didn’t think anything of it. There has been a couple times they did this and it was just a matter of getting the schedule back in sync. This time however we proceeded to the Shepherd’s Bush station and they announced calmly that nobody would be allowed off and that we needed to take on evacuees from a fire. Holy crap. They opened the doors and a few people jumped on. Smoke was in the air and when we got up to the surface and regained cell reception I pulled up a search on Google news to see what had actually happened. We were directly under a massive structure fire and they were evacuating people down instead of up. Crazy.

Aline invited me to speak to the group this past week and I gave this talk at the Junction event. I think it resonated with many people as more than a few reached out and wanted to talk about it. My whole premise is that we’re operating as a tribe on this work arrangement so how can we become a better tribe? When you look at Remote Year through this tribal lens it’s interesting to think about the importance of tribal rituals like birthdays here as a bonding thing.  On Remote Year everyone will celebrate exactly one birthday. I always try to make it to every person’s b-day festivities thus far and have missed only a few. Birthdays prior to RY didn’t carry the same weight but here they are important- like the only opportunity we have together to celebrate a tribe member. At the risk of over-emphasizing the tribe thing, it really lends a different perspective on this experience when you view RY through that lens and I believe we’d all do well to entertain (if not embrace) that perspective more.

Aside from my work for Pagely I’ve been putting in some time to organize external speakers and workshops that I think will benefit our group as a whole. I’ll talk about them once they’re real but suffice it to say I’m assembling my dream lineup of speakers and workshops for our crew. The idea is “how do we not just sight-see while working abroad for a year? How do we take it up a notch and juice the marrow out of this experience by attracting and gaining access to people who are at the top of their game who would never talk with us otherwise?”

Gear I’m liking lately

Fashion-wise these aren’t going to win me any awards but I really dig these pants that become shorts with zippers around the knees. The weather (especially in London) is so fickle and it’s great to be somewhere and be able to have what amounts to a soft-top convertible for your legs.

Other things that I’ve found useful while on the Tubes (which mostly run underground and therefore are places with no connectivity for 20min at a time):

• Pocket App, free. get it- useful way to clip articles in a browser and have them immediately sync’d and stored on your phone for offline reading.
• Kindle – love the whispersync technology that sync’s all your devices. Again great for when you’re reading a book at home on your kindle but you’re stuck with nothing to do on the tube
• Memphis chess– if you play chess at all this is a fun app and it costs a whopping $.99. Someone took the chess notation for all the grandmaster championship games ever recorded and threw them in one app so you can play the ending moves against grandmasters. It’s fascinating – more like solving a puzzle than playing chess but a fun mental exercise. The “mate in 4 moves” ones are really challenging.

I’ll do one more post before we leave with all the various photos I’ve taken around London.  My photos are 3rd-rate relative to some of the brilliant photographers we have in our group. If you want to see some truly stunning photos, follow these people on Instagram Jason, Ben, Chris, Molly, Nancy, Cara, Angela, Maggie, Nick, Chase, Nicole and of course the Remote Year account itself. Lastly…

Music I’m feeling lately:

Hat tip to Chris Peloquin on the Spotify embed widget idea. Spotify didn’t have this song so I’m posting a youtube vid for it instead: