My brother and I grew up going to the Vineyard every summer as kids. This place hasn’t changed in the 18yrs since I’ve been here- it’s still a magical place. This is the cottage campground in Oak Bluffs in early morning. (at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts)
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ntPdDnNVY/?igshid=1skm5y7r9i0zk
Nearly a year ago I moved to Lisbon, Portugal and have been living there since. After having done nearly two years of constant nomadic travel it’s been nice to finally plant in one place for awhile. I had done a travel program called Remote Year which allowed me to work remotely and took me to a total of 18 countries over the course of a year. I’ve been
continuing my role for Pagely as Director of Sales working out of the RY workspace in Lisbon for the past nine months. This has allowed me to meet nine other Remote Year groups that have come through Lisbon and I’ve gotten to be a steward of Lisbon to those people.
The best analogy I can give is that previously I was in a stream of people flowing through a bunch of interesting places. Now I am the rock in the city of Lisbon with a stream of interesting people constantly flowing past me in the workspace. People who sell everything and commit to a year on the road are inherently interesting people to me and it’s
been a unique privilege to meet over 400 of these folks since February.
Over the holiday break last year I created the Nomad Prep eCourse with the goal of demystifying the transition to a nomadic lifestyle and thereby making it more accessible to others who want to make this leap. The course has to date served 90+ students and helped many people prepare to take their job on the road. I realized early this year though that I had committed a typical entrepreneurial mistake in building a product before I had built an audience. To solve that issue in April I launched
Nomad Podcast as a platform to interview nomads, founders and domain experts to both disseminate useful info while simultaneously creating a fountain of prospective students into the course.
The podcast has had a total of fourteen guests so far and I’m proud of the high-caliber content there. I paused the effort however last month because it requires a significant time investment and is not yet delivering the results in terms of paying students to justify that investment. I intend to “reboot” it eventually but with limited spare cycles I believe my time for the nomad stuff is better spent figuring out a different
way to drive enrollments. My last interview inadvertently sold me on a program for solo-preneurs as a methodology for “building the audience before building the product” and I’m currently taking that course and implementing ideas there towards building and serving the prospective nomad audience.
You might ask, “why spend so much of your spare time encouraging the nomadic lifestyle?” I have two motives:
Speaking of podcasts… I’ve rediscovered this medium in the course of building
my own and I’ve become a big fan of ingesting new ideas in this way. This is my OPML file of the shows I currently listen to. Podcasts are great as a medium (especially for runners) as they allows you to consume all kinds of current, interesting, themed content in audio form.
In October I did a 30-day plant-based challenge based on this interview on my podcast. Since then I’ve become what I would call a “fair-weathered pescatarian” having added fish and seafood back into the mix but keeping beef, poultry and pork out of the diet. That said, if you put a Christmas ham or Kobe beef serving in front of me, I have zero issues with taking that down ;-) Overall the decision to go pescatarian was largely a function of seeing this talk by the Dr. behind NutritionFacts.org. His talk, titled “How Not to Die,” presents compelling evidence-based arguments for switching to a completely
plant-based diet. I’ll report back after more track record. If you’re considering testing out this switch yourself I highly recommend the 30-day challenge from my podcast guest (linked in her interview above).
As far as my work for Pagely, I just finished writing up my annual “State of the Union” summary for our sales department recapping everything we’ve accomplished over the past year. In all it was a lukewarm year revenue growth-wise compared to last year but our team executed a number of important strategic projects which should set us up for success in 2019. I appeared as a guest on a few podcasts, did this talk in Lisbon and received some good press for the novel approach I developed and deployed applying the concept of “scaling personal attention” via interactive video. I’ve been with Pagely now for 3.5 years and intend to see us through an acquisition before transitioning to whatever is next.
On the topic of what’s next: I feel drawn to a project I had started and dabbled with called Charity Makeover. Our Remote Year group executed this event and it was one of the most satisfying things we did. After Pagely I foresee working at least part-time to turn that into a movement similar to Startup Weekend. I’m now reaching out to some people I believe could be linchpins in making that happen and putting a revenue model around it that would enable it to be a self-sustainable effort. More to follow but a small group of us are intending to finish what we started for Caraya.org and treat that as a pilot of this initiative.
Learning-wise I’m taking a few different eCourses as time permits. I’ve been doing this Udemy course to learn the music DAW Ableton that I see as enabling incredible possibilities for live improv. My hope there is to become proficient enough and to secure a resident monthly gig in Lisbon at one of the live music places for fun and to scratch the musical performance itch. I’ve done the Headspace Meditation program for nearly three years now and feel like I capped out in terms of
advancing my practice via that app. I trialed the Calm.com app for meditation but found the narrator to be too annoying and ultimately went in search of another program for guided meditation. I ultimately settled on this program after having listened to a bunch of his free guided
meditation podcasts. Jury is still out on whether this helps take that practice to the next level but so far so good. I’ve been devoting more time to developing my chess game. Chess.com has some pretty fantastic tutorials and gives you personalized analysis of your past games (pretty slick you load in the chess notation of your past games and it steps through your game and offers advice). I picked up this snazzy robotic chess board which allows me to play with physical pieces against the AI and then analyze my chess game after the fact to learn from mistakes (yea I’m a huge nerd). I also got one for my friend Benny for his 40th b-day which in theory allows us to play each other remotely over the internet although I’m now mobile for the next few months so that will have to wait until March.
In terms of recs for various books/music/gear:
In the relationship department I am still single having had a short-lived but intense relationship with one of the participants of the RY Kanyini program. The blessing and curse of this nomadic lifestyle is that while it exposes you to a bunch of amazing people, you’re perpetually saying goodbye to everyone and relationships are destined to be short-lived. I tried my first
“life coaching” session which yielded the assessment that love is the one “broken spoke on my life wheel.” Maybe so but I couldn’t bring myself to continuing the life coaching thing after the initial session because it just seems like the people who become life coaches are the ones who don’t know what to do themselves. For better or worse I have to feel someone is an authority on a topic before trusting their expertise. I may give it another shot at some point but for now I’m content to execute for Pagely and my own side business initiatives and do a bunch of kite surfing in the process.
Anyways, I head back to Phoenix, AZ tomorrow to hang out with my folks and friends there for the next two weeks around Christmas. I’ll then be continuing on to Mexico City for New Year’s, La Ventana for what I hope to be two full weeks of kite surfing, a wedding in Cabo, 2 weeks in Puerto Escondido, 2 weeks in Bucerias for kiting and then a quick reunion with some
folks from our RY group in Sayulita, MX before returning to Lisbon in March.
If you’re in Phoenix come join us at this happy hour next Friday and let’s catch up in person. And if you listen to podcasts I would be hugely appreciative if you take a sec to subscribe and review mine. Happy Holidays to you and your fam and I wish you a healthy and prosperous 2019.
PS. if you’re on Instagram and want to keep up with my travels on a more frequent basis I post about a photo per day of something interesting and unique from my travels here.
Below is a pic of a magical moment at sunset in Pipa Brazil last week.
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Howdy Drew,
You had requested my semi-annual update of what I’ve been up to and it’s that time to fill you in but before I do I have a quick favor to ask: I just last week launched this podcast with the goal of helping 100 people get “unstuck” by demystifying location-independent work and making it more accessible. It’s received great reviews thus far but I need your help: I’m trying to crack into the New & Noteworthy Travel section of iTunes because that jumpstarts listenership. I have one shot this week to make it and every download and subscription helps towards that cause. If you could take 30 seconds to subscribe & download my podcast via iTunes that would be massively appreciated. If you don’t use iTunes you can visit the link above and get it via any of the other major platforms like Spotify or Google Podcasts using the link in the header. I’ve poured most of my free cycles into this effort over the past few months and have been fortunate to get some really high quality guests for the show. Today’s guest is my friend Andrew Hyde, founder of Startup Weekend, cycler of a bicycle across the US, moderator of TEDx Boulder, wearer of a huge beard, traveler of 80 countries now banned permanently from Nepal (find out why) and all around teller of amazing stories. Check out his episode here and keep reading once you’ve subscribed. No seriously. Subscribe now. I’ll wait ;-) Scroll down for my update once you’ve done that… Oh and maybe tell just one friend who has talked about the idea of taking his/her job on the road about the podcast. This is a direct quote from a girl who heard it who just reached out to me: Hey Sean, I just listened to your latest video with Eddie. Just wanted to let you know I really enjoyed it! I think it’s valuable for current remotes, premotes, and definitely inspiring to people who haven’t yet taken the leap and deciding to do this crazy adventure (or something like it). I love the realness of it (and I also like that it’s not directly correlated with RY… it feels more believable this way and less sales-y) I’ll be sharing this around. Hope you get some traction man. You’re going to change so many lives out there!!
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Alright. Thanks for that. So now I’ll fill you in on what I’ve been up to since my last update in January:
– February 6th I moved to Lisbon, Portugal and have been living here since. This city captured me when I was here two years ago as a part of Remote Year and it has my heart. – March was cold and rainy. It rained for three weeks straight so not much exploring but I met some amazing people in the Remote Year Excelsior group that month who I’ve continued to remain in contact with. – April brought the Sisus of RY and they were my favorite group yet. It was sad to see them leave but likewise I’ve remained in contact and will undoubtedly regroup with these people at some point. – In May my folks visited Lisbon and I saw them for the first time since leaving the US. We had a blast while they were here. While they were in town on May 21st after 10mos of hoop-jumping I secured a residency permit which now allows me to live and work indefinitely here and I couldn’t be happier. – I lived in Barcelona Spain for the month of June with my friends Trevor and Trish (Trevor was actually my first guest on the podcast). Midway through June I skipped out to Mallorca to surprise one of my best friends for his 40th bday. We then had our 1 year reunion since completing Remote Year in Prague. It was amazing to see 30 of the 50 people who finished the year return to Prague to reunite. Like with any good friend it strangely seemed like no time had elapsed with our friendships. – I’ve begun burrowing into the local tech startup scene here in Lisbon and am now the newest mentor for Startup Lisboa and coach a handful of their startups on growth marketing and sales strategy. – I gave this keynote talk two weeks ago for the Canopy City entrepreneur demo night to share my experience of systematizing the sales process at Pagely. The 7-step framework I show in that talk is a universally-applicable methodology for any growth-stage business and I hope will help other entrepreneurs with a promising product through the challenge of bringing it to market in a more reliable way. – Nomad Podcast was a project I started after building and launching my Nomad Prep eCourseover Christmas & New Year’s break earlier this year. I realized after expending a ton of energy to develop the eCourse that I went in with no real strategy for gaining distribution outside of Remote Year. The podcast is a logical extension of that effort to reach a broader audience and embodies the advice of “create value first then harvest some small percentage of it.” I wrote up this blog post over the weekend to explain the motive and why I’m spending all my spare cycles pushing the nomad thing. The short answer is: I believe the “Lost Einstein” phenomenon proposed by a NYT piece is actually at work in adults as well and that an antidote that worked for me is the stimulation that came via this nomadic lifestyle change. – In July one of my good friends (who happens to also be the CEO of Pagely where I work) visited and we drove a really fast sports car from Lisbon to Madrid to see one of my favorite bands Pearl Jam. That was a bucket list experience for sure. – This past weekend I finally got back into the sport of kite surfing and purchased some gear to be able to do this the rest of the summer season here on the beaches south of Lisbon. This was one of the items on the 10-year plan I made shortly after New Year’s and I’m super stoked to finally be making that a reality. – I’m now packing for a 10-day working trip in Hossegor, France with one of my oldest friends and his family. My role at Pagely has evolved nicely and I’ve been able to extricate myself from much of the day-to-day grind and move into a more play-maker role of planning and executing projects that support our sales team in achieving their revenue goals. – I have half a dozen interviews I’ve recorded for the podcast now which I’ll be producing and releasing as time permits over the next few weeks. It’s a bit surreal to film an interview from Barcelona with someone in Bolivia and find yourself later on a plane over Lisbon sculpting the content that then gets released from a surf town in France and eventually winds up in ear buds of someone I may never meet in who-knows-where… It’s both completely normal now but mind-blowing at the same time. – I believe crypto currency has turned the corner in its 6mo correction and we’ll see it making a rally from here. It may falter for another month but I suspect we’ll see another massive tidal wave of interest as Wall St and institutional money pours into the space. If your investment portfolio currently has no crypto in it I encourage you to first watch this video by the one and only Andreas Antonopoulos so you understand why censorship-resistant money and blockchain is so important and then carve out even just 5% of your savings and investment portfolio and allocate it to a handful of the top cryptos. Gemini and Coinbase are the two exchanges I recommend (Gemini is unfortunately not available in Arizona nor Portugal). – As far as plans for the rest of summer, I’ll be in Lisbon likely until November at which point my current plan is to migrate to warmer temperatures maybe at a beach town in Mexico. I’m hoping to spend Thanksgiving and/or Christmas with my folks and potentially my brother’s family in San Francisco. Other than that no plans to return to the US at this time. I should be in La Ventana, Mexico for two weeks in January then back to Lisbon next year. If you are ever out this way please drop me a line and let me show you around this wonderful city that has completely captured my heart. If you’ve read this far, thanks as always for taking an interest in my weird life. I hope you and your family are doing well. Send me an update on what you’ve been up to when you have time and live epicly. -Sean PS. if you’re on Instagram and want to keep up with my travels on a more frequent basis I post about a photo per day of something interesting and unique from my travels here. Below is a pic from this past weekend kite surfing with local friends in Fonte da Telha, Portugal. |
Today I’m unveiling a project I’ve been working on for the past few months: a new podcast designed to demystify nomadic, location-independent work and make it more accessible. My goal is to help 100 people get “unstuck” by helping them make this transformative lifestyle change. You only get one chance with a podcast launch and I would love to break into the iTunes “New & Noteworthy” section for Places & Travel. Every single download & review helps towards this cause. If you support what I’m doing please take 30 sec now and download and subscribe to my podcast on iTunes. You can find video episodes and other goodies on NomadPodcast.com.
This effort began in December 2017 when I read an editorial piece on the New York times that talked about The Lost Einsteins. That article proposed that society today is deprived of an unknowable number of life-changing inventions by would-have-been Einsteins. They theorize that these young future potential contributors grow up without access to the environment and opportunities that would have been the catalyst for them to flourish due to living in poor socioeconomic status households.
This article resonated with me but for a different reason. While I agree with the author’s premise and suspect that indeed this is true and happening I hypothesize that the same phenomenon is at work within adults of all walks regardless of socioeconomic status. I believe there are a non-trivial number of privileged adults with all the trappings that came with a graduate education who went through a plinko board of choices in the education system and wound up winnowed into a career that doesn’t allow for the optimal expression of their talents. It’s debatable to what degree this is happening but unarguably this is true for some percentage of adults and it gets only more difficult over time to extract yourself from this rut. We find ourselves in veritable doldrums at points in our lives and while revamping the current education system to address the root cause and get more of the right people in the right roles out of the gate is a longer-arc massive undertaking, I believe there is a simple, immediate antidote for this issue and I want to try and make this more accessible to people in this situation.
Nomadic working travel has been instrumental in awakening me from this adult slumber. I won’t go into my personal story (if you want to read details Remote Year covered it well in this piece) but basically RY was a defibrillator that shocked me back to life, served as a gateway drug to nomadic working travel and ejected me from a personal and professional rut.
I spent three months living and working in Mexico, City last winter and had the opportunity to get to know a bunch of the admissions team for Remote Year. I was sitting within earshot and overheard numerous calls with aspiring digital nomads and while I only heard one side of the conversation, I got a high-concentration dose of Customer Discovery insights into the concerns and objections of aspirational nomads who wanted to do this type of working travel program.
I decided over Christmas break to develop a simple eCourse that would package up everything I had learned from my 1.5yrs of location-independent work at that point and give people a resource to help them more confidently make the leap. That project mushroomed into a significant undertaking. The deeper I got into developing the curriculum for that effort the more I wanted to apply what I knew of automation and software to turn it into a personalized coaching system that would not just be a static brochure but a living, interactive preparation tool. I spent most of my Christmas break developing content, gamification, an interactive checklist and automations to create the resource I wished I had going into Remote Year. I launched Nomad Prep a few weeks later with little fanfare and promptly realized I had committed the age-old entrepreneurial mistake of building a product before building an audience. That course continues to receive a trickle of students each week but I realized there needs to be a better way of reaching more aspiring nomads.
Nomad Bloggers (at the time RemoteYearBlogs.com but now changed due to trademark) was a project I had started in our first month of Remote Year originally intended to be a way of aggregating the blog posts from the bloggers in our group. I had modified it to support syndicating posts from other groups and it was growing in traffic. I rebranded it with the Nomad label, sold RemoteYearBlogs.com to Remote Year and used that cash to hire a developer from Upwork to add “Reddit-like” voting functionality and make the blog aggregator more sticky. While this seemed like a promising potential source of aspiring nomads it didn’t move the needle traffic-wise for Nomad Prep.
Shortly after I did a few interviews with prospective clients for Remote Year (they call them “Premotes”) and while the sessions were super-helpful, that approach unfortunately doesn’t scale. It led me to realize though that face-to-face video interaction captured and shared provide a rich way to ask and answer questions. I got the idea in my head that there’s room to do a podcast wherein I interview successful nomads, founders of travel programs and domain experts on subjects that could help educate folks on how to be better at working and living abroad. As with everything, it ended up taking 3x as long as expected working nights to cobble this together but I’m proud today to launch what I believe is the missing piece of the distribution puzzle here. I present to you NomadPodcast.com, the first platform of its kind for sharing stories that can help current and aspiring Nomads.
I’ll spare you the gory details of everything it does but it showcases interviews in HD video via YouTube, is mobile-friendly, has audio-only versions syndicated across all major podcast platforms and each episode includes a bunch of supporting elements like transcript, photos, links, show notes and the ability to ask the guest questions via text comments as well as recording a video via your webcam. I’m hopeful that this will become a resource that helps current nomads be more excellent and helps prospective nomads confidently take the leap to trying this lifestyle and in so doing will have the same transformative, awakening effect that nomadic travel has had on me. If it helps even one or two people have an adventure abroad they otherwise wouldn’t have had that revitalizes them or even awakens the next slumbering adult Einstein then I would find that hugely rewarding.
I have interviews at varying stages of the production cycle now with a number of stellar guests. If you’re onboard with this cause there’s nothing to buy here nor donations to make, just subscribe to the podcast via your favorite platform using the links below and tell a friend who could benefit from it. Thanks for your support.
Website
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
Overcast
Anchor
Pocketcasts
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Sean,
I’m 30,000 feet above the Rockies en route to Sioux City, South Dakota on a brief stopover in the US and figured now is as good a time as any to write you a quick update email. I had originally intended to send these updates quarterly but semi-annual seems to be the frequency they want ;-)
The Remote Year program I joined back in May of 2016 concluded in May of 2017 in Buenos Aires. I never returned to AZ after it ended but instead chose to continue traveling working my way up South Remote Year just last week did this piece on me and it’s a great summary of all I’ve been up to since that program concluded if you want more details. One of the Remote Year groups that followed ours was named “Ikigai” which is a Japanese word that roughly translates to “the intersection of one’s purpose/mission/talents with what the world needs.” Late last year I took a hard look at all the experience I’ve acquired over the past two years in sales, travel, marketing automation, teaching, WordPress, writing and through this lens of Ikigai decided I was uniquely positioned to deliver an online course that would help others to make the leap and do what I had been fortunate to be able to do in taking my job on the road. I started formulating an idea for an eCourse in October |
^ that’s a solid 30min overview of what’s been involved in making this travel/working arrangement effective over this past year.
In each city I’ve been diligent about doing a blog post, photo album, narrated walking video and music playlist to capture the local flavor. Here is the recap of all the places I’ve been since Christmas:
Bogota in January: we flew from Mexico City on New Year’s eve and celebrated that night in Bogota, Colombia. I then did two weeks of travel all around the coast and jungle of Colombia with a friend (great pics at that link above). The latter half of the month I spent heads-down on work stuff. Elevation of Bogota is 8,500′ – was great for high-altitude training on the runs there.
Medellin in February: was one of my favorite cities. We stayed in an area called
“Poblado” with a bunch of great little parks and restaurants. Contrary to the long-running Pablo Escobar stigma from the various films portraying Medellin as an unsafe drug capital, it was extremely safe and welcoming. Medellin is a place I could comfortably live at this point.
Lima in March: Lima had amazing seafood and our workspace there was probably the best of anywhere we’ve been. Unfortunately they had terrible floods while we were there that displaced some 20,000 people in the outlying areas. The highlight of the month for sure was hiking the Inca Trail and getting to walk around Machu
Picchu and Huayna Picchu. I left Lima early to come back for a handful of things that were happening in AZ.
Cordoba in April: I did a 48hr travel “day” to Cordoba Argentina the 2nd week of April. Cordoba was a nice “rest stop” before Buenos Aires and after Lima in the same way that Valencia, Spain had served that same role between Rabat and CDMX. The highlight in Cordoba was the work we did via the Charity Makeover effort I started to help a local monkey sanctuary. I remain actively involved in that effort today helping transition the project amongst Remote Year groups that are still flowing
through that city each month.
Buenos Aires in May: up there with Lisbon, CDMX and Medellin as one of my favorite cities Buenos Aires was our final month in the program. The last month was a whirlwind with a side trip to Iguazu Falls (incredible) and all the goodbyes and farewell parties. Argentina just yesterday announced a promising plan to put it on par with Chile in terms of making it friendlier for Entrepreneurs to start businesses. I have my eye on BA as a potential place to return if/when I start the next thing following the successful exit of Pagely.
After Buenos Aires I did a trip with a friend to the wine country of Mendoza, Argentina en route to Santiago, Chile where I spent the last three weeks. I arrived in Costa Rica three days ago and enrolled in a week-long surf camp here. Unfortunately yesterday I broke my toe which will likely put a damper on my surfing lessons. Fortunately I was able to get up on the board twice before the toe incident. I’m intending to move north to Nicaragua in a week and then meet one of my oldest friends in Dominican Republic for kite surfing all of July. Our old drummer for Cold Turkey is getting married in Seattle in early August so I’ll be back
briefly in the States for that then (provided I’m not exhausted) bounce to Europe for summer and ultimately plant in Mexico City around October.
If you want to read the massive recap I did this is the single best summary of everything. I always enjoy hearing from people especially when on the road and isolated from friends. Drop me a line when you have time and let me know what’s new with you. I’ll part with this photo I took last night on the beach of Playa Grande at sunset. It’s beautiful here
right now. I hope you are keeping cool this summer and look forward to hearing from you.
-Sean
PS. if you’re on Instagram and want to keep up with my travels on a more frequent basis I post about a photo per day of something interesting and unique from my travels here.
