Over the course of the last two years, I’ve been pursuing a new lifestyle for myself. A lifestyle in which I’m not tied to any one place for long periods of time, and I more or less work for myself.
It’s been a long, winding, bumpy road, pursuing location independence, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have it all figured out just yet. By my standards, I still have quite a long way to go, in fact, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t picked up a few important lessons along the way.
Here are some of the most important lessons I’ve learned while pursuing location independence.
Your plan will change over time. Let it.
When I first started out on this path, I had NO *$%&! IDEA what I was doing. I didn’t have a clear vision of how I was going to achieve location independence, I just started, well, doing stuff. The first step, in my case, was creating a blog. Ever so slowly, opportunities were born out of this first haphazard step, and they only continued to grow from there. I realized that the blog would not only help me get paid freelancing opportunities, but it could also be monetized in its own right down the road. I’m constantly learning new ways to diversify my income sources, and I’ve also realized that it’s important not to stick too steadfastly to ideas that simply aren’t working. Slight shifts and changes of direction are now welcome, and I know my business model will continue to evolve over time.
A supportive community is essential.
Going back to my first point, because I had no idea what steps to take beyond starting a blog, I realized pretty quickly that I would need to seek out a community of people trying to achieve the same lifestyle as me if I was ever going to make any headway. I needed guidance. I needed mentorship. As a travel blogger, a natural step was to find other travel bloggers whom I could exchange ideas with and ask for feedback and advice. Travel Blog Success* became that community for me, and to this day, they are the people I turn to at every step of this journey when I have questions or simply need a fresh perspective. I also joined Facebook groups specifically for digital nomads and people living and working abroad, and even just travel forums where I can get ideas and inspiration. The majority of people in your life will not understand your desire for location independence, and while they may be supportive of your endeavors, they won’t be able to offer you much more than that.
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Take yourself seriously from the beginning.
If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will. Wake up every day with clear objectives, and don’t call it a day until you’ve achieved them. Once I started treating my blog like a real job and not a hobby and respecting myself as my own “boss,” I gained the focus and willpower I’d been lacking before. I set deadlines for myself and have learned to say no to fun and socializing until what needs to be completed has been completed.
Without clear goals, you’ll just be spinning your wheels.
Allow me to use blogging as an example here. I used to actually believe that if I just started writing and kept diligently writing, my audience would grow and things would just start happening. WRONG. This may have been the case back in the golden days of blogging when the market was far less saturated than it is today, but in order to get noticed now in the vast sea of bloggers, you need a PLAN. You need FOCUS. You need to have a clear PURPOSE or no one will care what you have to say. Building and maintaining an audience is not as easy as writing and hitting publish 500 times. You must think about who the posts are written for, how you’re going to market them, and why people should care in the first place (among many other things). The same goes for any other type of business. Who is your audience? What problem can you solve for them? Why do you deserve their time, much less their hard-earned dollars?
It. Takes. Time.
There’s a persistent belief floating around that it takes a minimum of two years for a business to become profitable. While this certainly isn’t true 100% of the time, it’s probably not totally inaccurate, either. And if you start off with little or no plan like some of us did (ahem) then it might take even longer. There’s no silver bullet to success; it’s all about hard work, persistence, and time. Did I mention time? If you’re looking for short-term gains, do yourself a favor and turn back now, because this might not be the lifestyle for you.
Are you pursuing location independence? What important lessons have you learned along the way?
