archive.chrisguillebeau.comThe Art of Non-Conformity

You don’t have to live your life the way others expect. Learn more Chris Guillebeau / I write books including Side Hustle & The $100 Startup I host the DAILY podcast Side Hustle School Every summer I host WDS in Portland, Oregon I visited every country in the world (193/193) through Travel Hacking Scroll down to read blog Follow me on Twitter , Instagram , and Facebook . More Info Reset Chris Guillebeau Blog About Books Contact Events StoreSearch Work Featured Article 8 Ways to Have More Time I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who needs only four or five hours of sleep a night. Unfortunately, I’m not—without a consistent minimum of 6-8 hours, and usually on the high side of that range, I don’t perform very well. I... Read More Life Featured Article Adventure Is Worthwhile In Itself "The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward. Advent... Read More Profiles Featured Article How One Family of Four Created Enough Passive Income to Travel Forever This is a traveler case study. (Read others or nominate yourself.) Sharon Gourlay didn’t want to stop traveling as her family grew—so she gathered up her two kids and husband, then figured out how to work less and have more time with the people ... Read More Profiles Featured Article My Car Is My Home, the Planet Is My Backyard”: On the Road with Bruno Caumette This is a traveler case study. (Read others or nominate yourself.) For almost two decades, Bruno Caumette has made his home in a Toyota Land Cruiser. He’s been around the world once and is currently working on his second voyage. His stories are to... Read More Life Featured Article A Simple Thing You Can Do To Improve Any Relationship What if there was one thing you could do to be a better friend, partner, or spouse? It’s actually pretty easy: to improve any relationship, honor the other person’s dreams. Figure out what they want to do, to become, or achieve, and then... Read More Work Featured Article To Be More Creative, Schedule Your Work at 80% Capacity I’m fortunate to work with great partners, including a wonderful design studio right in Southeast Portland called Jolby & Friends. I was recently with the Jolby crew on a site visit, and one of them mentioned something about how they delibera... Read More Travel Featured Article You Don’t Have to Be Uncomfortable to Have an Authentic Travel Experience When I went to Burma several years ago I stayed in a nice guest house for about $35 a night. The rate included free Wifi and a large banana pancake for breakfast. Mmmmmm. After I came home, I talked with someone who had also been there. "How m... Read More Travel Featured Article 11 Travel Hacking Tips, Stories, and Ideas Combined into One Post This post is a "greatest hits" mashup of travel hacking tips, travel stories and features. Take a look and see if anything might be helpful to you. Tips and Tricks Round-the-World Tickets, Revisited Round-the-World tickets are highl... Read More Work Featured Article Why I Became an Entrepreneur 16 Years Ago The best and most honest answer is that I wasn’t good at anything else. For better or worse, I learned that I was a terrible employee. I was unreliable and unskilled. I’ve written before about my last official job, lugging boxes onto FedEx tr... Read More Featured Article Featured Article To Write a Great Story, Start with a Real Struggle I appreciated this illustration on unconventional storytelling from Tom Gauld: When talking about adventures, I often relate the plot outlining of blockbuster movies and video games. What if the synopsis of a big summer movie was "So and s... Read More Life Featured Article 7 Alternative Ways to Evaluate Your Life Every Day As regular readers know, I’m all about setting goals and working toward big projects over time. When you have a big goal, especially one with a clear end point, it’s easy to know when you’ve achieved it. But most big goals take time, ... Read More Life Featured Article If Your Life Is a Movie and You’re the Director, Why Did You Add this Scene to It? Imagine your life as an epic, three-hour movie. In this saga there are numerous high points and low points, and both drama and comedy. There are coming-of-age moments and passages of growing older. There will likely be some real challenges, a... Read More Life Featured Article Lessons from the Journey: All You Have to Do Is Put One Foot in Front of the Other” From my own 193-country journey to the stories of many other people who were kindly willing to share, The Happiness of Pursuit attempts to extract and convey the lessons of modern-day quests. This series explores some of these lessons. Lesson:... Read More Travel Featured Article How Much Does It Cost to Visit Every Country in the World? I’ve mentioned a few times that going to every country in the world wasn’t as expensive as most people initially think. But how much did it really cost? The short answer is that I’m not 100% sure of the precise figure. I didn’t tally up ev... Read More Travel Featured Article Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse: London Heathrow Airport I love airline lounges and regularly spend four or more hours at a time working from them. This series explores some of my favorites from around the world. Way back in 2007, one of my very favorite lounges was Virgin Atlantic’s Clubhouse” a... Read More Life Work Travel Profiles Et Cetera 0 Comments Life contrarian , holidays , life , mental health , non-conformity Dreading the Holidays? It’s Not Just You. Do you find yourself dreading the holiday season, or just not excited about it? If so, I promise you’re not the only one. ?❌ One report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness suggests that 64% of people with mental health issues feel worse during the holidays. Whether you have a diagnosed mental illness or not, you might just be sad, depressed, or anxious during this time. This is ... normal. Read More 0 Comments Life contrarian , future , interesting , life , predictions 9 Predictions for the Year 2050 Highlights: in the year 2050, we still haven’t met the aliens, Zoom is like Myspace, and American football goes away. There’s much more in the post. Last year I read Remembrance of Earth’s Past , a science fiction trilogy by Chinese author Liu Cixin . The total length runs to more than 1,300 pages, but I loved it so much I would have kept reading if there was another book in the series. The story has several themes and takes place across tens of thousands of years. Repeatedly, scientists and political leaders living in one point of history are trying to plan for something that will occur hundreds of years later, long after they’ll be dead. It turns out that trying to predict the future is tough! Read More 0 Comments Life adventures , life , non-conformity , questions , risk Always Ask for What You Want: A Lesson in Asymmetrical Risk TLDR: An asymmetrical risk is one where the potential reward greatly outweighs the potential loss. Identify and take more of these risks. Every so often, a news article that offers "expert advice" on getting upgraded at the airport makes the rounds. Inevitably, the advice includes something about how you should "dress well and ask nicely." Real travel experts always roll their eyes at such advice. These days, almost all upgrades are handled through computer systems based on elite status, travel disruptions, and other automated factors. The travel experts then write their own articles explaining why the advice is dumb, and the process repeats a few months later. I’m with the real travel experts: the advice on asking for upgrades is just clickbait. Yet I can’t help but remember a time many years ago—way back in 2007, I think—when I was traveling from Copenhagen to Chicago. Read More 0 Comments Work 2022 , money , new economy , pandemic How to Pick Up Money Lying on...