As far as an update on the professional front, I’m still with Pagely having just celebrated four years with the company. It’s been a great experience starting a fairly early-stage (employee #8) helping grow it to a 42-person company. My role has morphed considerably from what it was when I first started. I’ve been lucky to extricate myself entirely from the day-to-day operational sales role into primarily a strategic one nowadays. My
trajectory with the company has gone from their sole sales/marketing person -> sales director -> growth hacker marketing commando and I’m now transitioning into a fourth phase as content producer having produced a bunch of different stuff. I’ve begun doing educational webinars, booting up a podcast and conducting video case studies with our customers. Historically the our biggest deals have come not from advertising nor marketing but via well-established relationships and the thinking here is that these endeavors will be a way to advance that cause at scale. I will let you know next update how that bet
plays out.  

In terms of my side hustles, I’ve just minutes ago interviewed my 30th guest(s) for Nomad Podcast and have amassed a solid repository of advice and experience for people seeking to take their lives abroad. The weekly podcast is designed to work in conjunction with the course I developed which supports the same goal of facilitating the transition to a location-independent existence. The root motive of the project is two-fold: 1) to develop a source of passive-recurring revenue that covers my living expenses while simultaneously 2) working in alignment my Simon Sinek Why of helping others to beat gravity so they can be free to do what they’re born to do.  The Nomad properties are an important project to me. This post explains why if you’re interested.  

I hit a key milestone in episode 22 of successfully outsourcing all the production work involved in delivering the show (about 5hrs per episode). I now have a guy in Macedonia who does all the grunt labor for $12/hr. That process of extricating myself from the operational grind and delegating that work should pay dividends once it comes time to implement the same for Pagely. Gaining leverage via delegation and automation has become a recurring theme. Mastering this skill and then teaching it to others I believe is part of my path.   

Personal-growth-wise the achievements I’m most proud of this past six months are improving my skills significantly in the sport of kite surfing, notching up the quality of the podcast in all respects and adhering fairly consistently to a morning routine. Being on Europe hours gives me the mornings free and my full routine at this point consists of a gratitude journal, doing the Sam Harris Waking Up meditation, Wim Hof method, alternating between TRX & minimalist running, cold showers and intermittent fasting. I’ve found this combo of activities gives me an optimal state to be at peak output most days. You can find discussion of this routine in a recent interview I did for The Maverick Show here.  
   
We did a Charity Makeover back in May after the last Nomad Cruise and built out some useful digital assets to support a couple local causes. In thinking about what’s next once Pagely runs its course I’m intending to channel my energy into turning Charity Makeover into a global movement similar to Startup Weekend. If I’m successful in lobbying Pagely to sponsor me in that regard it may happen sooner than later but ultimately I believe this is where I can create the greatest impact and contribution to society.   

Per the subject line of the email I’m currently in Martha’s Vineyard on my last day of vacation with my parents celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. I was lucky to sit down with them just now and interview them jointly as my 30th guest(s) for the podcast. If you’re interested in hearing about their 50-year journey together be sure to subscribe. They will be episode number 30 airing Sept 9th and you can subscribe via any platform using the header link of this page.  We talk about how they met in the Peace Corps in
Venezuela, building the law firm in the early days of Phoenix, AZ, their respective professional careers and the immigration issue facing the US.

With each of my guests I always end the podcast by asking a series of standard questions. I’ll now start a tradition of answering these below myself and plan to incorporate this practice in my semi-annual updates going forward. The scope with me is obviously constrained to the past six months instead of the lifetime frame that I ask of my guests:   

Most influential book: Super Thinking & Sapiens. Super Thinking is along the same lines as Charlie Munger’s “Seeking Wisdom”
and teaches 600+ mental models for improved thinking and decision making. Sapiens is history of humankind delivered in an engaging format and should IMO be the text book for history in high school. Super Thinking was powerful but a lot to digest – I’m now in process of converting the 650 mental models into spaced repetition cards via this app.  

Gadgets: ZoomH6 and Zhiyun Smooth 4. The Zoom is compact device I use to capture high-quality audio for the podcast interviews and is excellent at what it does. The Zhiyun Smooth 4 is a stabilized selfie-stick I started using to shoot the video trailers with podcast guests starting at episode 24.   

Movies: Winter on Fire. I haven’t watched many movies lately but this was a powerful documentary on the revolution in Kiev Ukraine back in Winter of 2014.  

Music: Wookiefoot & this 90’s playlist. Wookiefoot was a discovery that came via my Spotify Discover Weekly list. Try this
song first and if it resonates just put them on shuffle and listen to all their music because it’s all excellent. I don’t know how to classify their style but they remind me of Phish meets Flobots meets a bluegrass band using sitars, tablas and other ethnic instruments. They have some really thoughtful lyrics that grow on you over time. For the 90’s music I went down a rabbit hole one day constructing a playlist of a bunch of 90’s songs and 235 songs and hours later I created arguably the most exhaustive song list of tunes capturing the music from my college years.  

As amazing as Lisbon has been as a place to live I have yet to establish deep roots community-wise there so there is no telling where I will be for the next
update but I will keep you apprised of my unfolding journey and plan to email you again in early 2020 (BTW how the heck are we more than halfway through 2019??). At any rate thanks for your continued interest in my weird life. If I can help with anything you’re doing don’t hesitate to reach out (and/or just to say hello). If you do subscribe to the podcast any rating or review you can leave greatly helps grow the audience for that and thereby supports the goal of that project.
cheers

-Sean