So, 2012 is upon us, hey?

After jotting down my thoughts on 2011, I really wanted to spend some time looking ahead to this new year. In fact, I’ve been downright excited to write this post. So then, it figures that I start having problems with the site that I have to address before I can keep going.

First, the site went down… again. This was a fairly common occurrence this past year, and I don’t want to risk it happening again. So, I switched servers, which took most of last week. I figure there is no reason to slap together a new post and try to drive traffic to it if the site doesn’t work. So I waited.

Then, yesterday, I notice that MailChimp had screwed up my signup forms for The “I Can” Movement. After hassling with customer service, I decided to switch over to Aweber, which I am still in the process of doing.

So, after all of this, I am ready to start some serious writing, and the site and community should be happier for it (and if the signup form on the right side of this page looks bland, just be patient. I’ll get it jazzed up soon).

So, I find a great exercise is to sit down and figure out what you plan on doing this year. After discovering all the cool stuff I was able to accomplish last year, I was even more excited to put this list together. There’s a great mix of travel, professional, and personal stuff (much of it from my bucket list) on here that should make 2012 a rousing success. If you keep up with what I’m doing here or elsewhere, then here’s what you have to look forward to:

I’m going to totally dominate Europe this year.

This is the big one. In October, my wife and I are going to celebrate our two-year anniversary by flying into London and doing a giant figure-8 across the continent. We’ll be visiting my old college roommate in Scotland, as well as hitting up Germany, Ireland, England, Rome, Paris, and Austria. It’s going to be the trip of a lifetime.

After visiting Taiwan a few years ago, I’m doubly excited to hit another continent, as well as immerse myself in the cultures of the world – and the food!

Attend a Packer game while they’re good.

I’m from Wisconsin. That means I’m a Green Bay Packer fan. They only lost one game all season this year, and as of this writing, they are defending Super Bowl champions. In other words, they’re good. I plan on heading up to historic Lambeau Field to enjoy it in person next season.

Make $50,000/year.

This is the next income goal on my bucket list, and I think it’s very doable this year. It’s going to take a lot of effort on my part, but I look forward to the challenge. As I expand my business, this should become more and more of a possibility. I did not come close to this income level in 2011, but I am poised to make a run for it if I play my cards right in 2012.

Get 1,000 Twitter followers.

It’s not the be-all, end-all in terms of influence, but I do feel that having over 1K followers on Twitter will really give me the opportunity to spread the word about what I’m doing, as well as connect with more awesome people. One thousand is a completely arbitrary number, but it’s a big one for me. As of this writing, I’m sitting at just under 800.

Play guitar at a performance level.

I don’t have clear parameters on this yet. I’d like to record myself playing, or even hit up an Open Mic night somewhere. I love playing guitar, but I’m generally pretty bad at it because I don’t practice enough. This is the year I dedicate myself to the craft so that I can be at a level that I can be proud of for a change.

Attend a bloggers’ conference.

There are lots of these available, but I’m headed to Portland, Oregon in July of 2012 to attend the World Domination Summit. It’s much more than a bloggers’ conference, but it will give me the chance to connect with so many more like-minded individuals.

Take a train somewhere.

I’ve never really been on a train (Disney World doesn’t count). We’ll be taking it around Europe, so this should take care of that.

Run a half marathon.

Yep, last year I ran a 5K independently. Twice. Now, I’m taking it up a notch. I planned on working on this sometime later in the summer, but a friend of mine convinced me to sign up for one on May 5th. So I guess this one will be crossed off a lot sooner than I had originally planned!

Write more epic stuff.

One reason I really enjoyed the 2011 review is because I was able to write a much longer post. That’s the goal this year. I find that it will be better for me as a writer, and it will force me to come up with stuff that you guys will enjoy and be able to learn from. In my head, I’ve got this post from Corbett Barr over at Think Traffic stuck in my head.

Implement “No TV Tuesday”.

Last night, my wife and I had our first full-scale “No TV Tuesday”. We have struggled with leaving the TV on and watching “just one more” episode of something, effectively killing our desire and resolve to get stuff done. Instead of leaning on that, we are now actively not watching television on Tuesdays. The result? We got a lot done, and we spent time playing a board game instead, which was actually a lot of fun.

TV isn’t evil. As I’ve written in the past, I love TV. But it can control your life if you’re not careful. When I was hanging out with Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus when they were in town last month, Joshua said that he didn’t own a TV, but only because he knew he would watch it constantly.

It’s not as simple as saying something is “good” or “bad”. It’s about recognizing your own weaknesses and shortcomings, and taking steps to fight them. That’s what “No TV Tuesdays” are about for us.

Migrate from SEO writing into full-time direct mail copywriting.

SEO writing has gotten me out of the office job, and for that I am grateful. However, it’s not a very challenging or fulfilling occupation. With direct mail, I’ll be able to make a lot more money and work less, creating more freedom in my life while we pay down our debts. I’ve  igotten my foot in the door at several companies, but I have to make sure I perform to the highest level so that I can establish myself. Once that happens, I can ditch the SEO work. It’s a switch that I’ve been waiting to make for 6 years.

50 Guest Posts in 2012

According to Caleb Wojcik of Pocket Changed, I’ve got a little competition for this one. The only way I can grow the audience here and at HustleLife Magazine is by getting my name out there, which means I have to make guest posting a priority. That’s what this year is all about. So I’m hoping that I will be able to knock out 50 guest posts on various sites to really start gaining some traction!

Smarter consumption of information.

A lot of people feel that there is an information overload in today’s online world, and I would be inclined to agree. But I don’t think that we necessarily need to cut it all out. In fact, you can limit your information overload by having a better system of managing it. Some people will use different tools, but here is what I have:

• My Kindle + Readability. With my Kindle, I can read books anywhere – quickly and easily. This is great, but the real power of the Kindle comes from combining it with Readability. With the combination, I can find long-form content online and send it to my Kindle with one click for later reading. So instead of managing magazine subscriptions for my long-form content, I just keep my Kindle. One of my favorite places to find great content that I can read is LongForm.org, which allows me to click “Send to Kindle” and be done with it.
• Google Reader. I keep trying other tools, but Reader still can’t be beat for clean and simple feed reading. I manage a lot of feeds from Google Reader, but I don’t read everything within their interface. Sure, I will if I have the time, but if I want to batch my stuff and save it for later, I use…
• ifttt and Evernote. With these two tools, I can save links from Google Reader and Twitter that I want to review later, eliminating my need to constantly consume information. With ifttt, as I’ve written about before, I can star items in Google Reader that will go into my “Links to Review” notebook in Evernote. Then, when I see an interesting tweet or link on Twitter I want to look into, I just “favorite” the tweet and it is sent to the same notebook in Evernote. Then, I can just read them at my leisure on my…
• Netbook. With my new netbook (see the goofy picture above), I now have the laptop I’ve always wanted/needed. I can use it for quick access to links and content that I want to review, and I can use it for portable working (or blogging – which I’m doing on it now).

Having an organized system of digesting content allows me to read on my own time, where and when I am comfortable. Then, I am able to weed out the important stuff and keep my brain learning new interesting and valuable information without becoming overloaded. Oh, and the entire system uses free services, which is awesome.

Okay, what about you?

What do you want to do this year? Let’s chat in the comments section!

This post is part of an ongoing series this month called The Cool 30.

You know how, when you work for a company, you can set up your paycheck to be directly deposited into your bank account every payday? Well, when you work for yourself, you can’t really do that. All the deposits that I get from clients, along with the checks those who insist on paying me with checks, are all put into a separate checking account – for record keeping purposes.

So, every few days, or every week, I have found myself writing a check to myself and going to the bank to put it into our personal checking account. This is quite annoying, but direct transfers take days, and who wants to wait 3-4 business days to get their money?!?

When we opened a Chase checking account around the time we were married, I was very excited to learn that Chase ATMs outside the branches take check deposits, and they deposit them immediately into your account. This was great, because I at least didn’t have to get out of my car!

But once we upgraded to Android phones, we are able to enjoy Chase’s QuickDeposit feature, where I can write a check to myself, sign it, and take a picture of it to send to Chase through their mobile app. The check is deposited the same day, and I can shred the check afterwards. So now, I don’t even have to leave the house!

But wait, it gets better: my business account is hosted with Charles Schwab Checking, and also includes remote deposits through their mobile app. So now, when those stubborn clients send me paper checks in the mail, I don’t have to mail them in to the bank or transfer them from the Chase account. Instead, I can snap a picture of those checks and deposit them right away too!

Remote deposits save me time and gas, and they are incredibly convenient. That’s why I think they’re cool.

She then asked me what was my future plan. I told her that was my future plan. Her response made me think:

“So, what happens when you burn out? Like, when I burn out at work, I can still go in and do other things and still get paid. When you work for yourself, you won’t get paid if you don’t work.”

Now, my mother is not one to advocate going into a job and “doing it really half-assed” (which is “The American Way”, according to Homer Simpson). She has a valid point: most people who work can slow it down to recover from burnout and still get paid. What about me?

This was something I certainly had to keep in mind last week. See, this week, as you are reading this (if you’re reading it the week I posted it, anyway), my wife and I are gone celebrating our one-year anniversary in Orlando at Walt Disney World. I’m probably checking out “It’s A Small World” at the exact moment you are reading this.

Editor’s note: Gosh, I hope not.

But we agreed this would be a “hard” vacation, which meant no work. Other trips I’ve taken this year have involved me taking my laptop along to get some work done in the mornings. This week, my laptop stays at home. No work.

So last week, I had to finish all the work that was due. In a normal situation, this would mean that I would do two weeks’ worth of work in one week. While not an attractive option, it’s doable, and it’s something I’ve done before. But because of bad timing on the part of some of my clients, my week was loaded: 120 pages of content for various clients and 4 white papers.

In other words, nearly TWO MONTHS’ worth of work in one week. Hellooooo, burnout.

I hit a wall around Wednesday, and Thursday was an incredible struggle. With a couple of very late nights, I was able to get all the work done, but I still had to do things to keep myself from jumping out of the window. Working 10+ hour days all week on very unfulfilling work can feel like a cement block tied to your neck.

But I also learned how to manage burnout, and how to keep it from overtaking me completely. Here’s how I got around it, and how you can manage to avoid burnout in your life (without having to go into your job and phone it in every day):

Take Daily Breaks

While so many people understand and recognize that an entrepreneur often works harder than most people do in an average day, some still don’t get it, and they like to throw it in my face that I’m “lazy”. Common ones include: asking me if I’m awake when they call at 10:00am, commenting on me working without pants on (which I don’t do that often), and criticizing my lunch breaks.

See, unless I am swamped, I take a 1 ½ hour lunch break every day. After working from around 8:00am until 11:30, I stop working and leave my office until 1:00pm. This is my only scheduled break for the day, and I take advantage of it. It allows me to get involved in a non-work activity (cooking), and it gives me brain a rest. I can watch something on Netflix with a fresh-cooked meal while sitting on the couch, and I cherish my lunch breaks.

Some view it as lazy, but I see it as priorities. I find it much harder to get back into the “swing” of the work day when I have to rush through my lunch, and hurry up to get back at my desk. A quality lunch break begats a productive afternoon – and yes, I said “begats”.

Maybe you can’t take long lunches every day, but find times to step away from your desk and give your brain a rest for a few minutes during the day – multiple times a day. Otherwise, you’ll go crazy.

Unwind at the End of the Day

I used to get irritated at my brother when we were both teenagers, because after he worked until 11:00pm at the supermarket, he would come home and watch TV instead of going to bed. Then, we’d struggle to get him going in the morning. But my mom said he needed to do that to unwind at the end of the day.

I never understood that until I started working late myself. When I waited tables a few years ago, I wouldn’t get home until 1:00am. But then, I would make a plate of pizza rolls and turn on the TV to unwind. My brain needed to transition out of work-mode. Even when I worked late last week, I had to surf a little bit on the internet after working to calm my brain down.

Unwinding lets your brain focus on something else, and this is where you start really recharging your batteries. You can’t go straight to bed every night and then get up hoping your brain will switch back on. It just doesn’t work that way. Give your brain some active rest.

Find Outlets

There are three “outlets” that I try to tap into every day: creative, intellectual, and physical. For creative, I have this site and HustleLife. For intellectual, I keep my Kindle by my bed. Currently, I’m reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and I will be following that up with Bram Stoker’s Dracula – both are free on my Kindle. For physical, my wife and I try to exercise on a regular basis, and we are in a bar volleyball league with some friends on Sunday evenings.

These are ways to “work” at something, but still keeping it pleasurable. I savor our Sunday evenings, where we get drenched with sweat and dive in the sand for a little bit. It’s fun. Reading something I like to read makes a big difference in keeping my brain strong, and writing on a regular basis keeps that other side of my brain in shape. If your brain only has work to “exercise” with, you are going to get pretty miserable pretty quickly. It’s like being in a gym with tons of things to do, but you are always forcing yourself to run on the treadmill that faces the wall. You’ll stay in better shape and have more motivation to do all of it if you can spread yourself around a little bit.

Take Long Breaks

We’re not awash in money, but we have spent the past year planning this week’s vacation. It literally began as our plane was taking off en route to Hawaii on our honeymoon. My wife turned to me and said, “For our one-year anniversary, we should go to Disney World.”

You can get anywhere if you plan and save accordingly. Sometimes it’s great to just unplug from work and forget about it for a week. It’s the ultimate battery charger, and it should be done at least once a year, if not more.

Yeah, you’re going to deal with burnout from time to time, but you can keep it at bay for longer if you follow these tips. What’s your favorite burnout buster? Share in the comments!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe the teacups are calling my name…

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. – Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

I can’t do the Chicago World’s Fair justice in this post. If you want to know the complete saga, go to the library or jump onto Amazon and buy Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (affiliate link). You’ll see the full story of the planning and execution of the fair, along with a gripping true-life serial killer story (in other words, something for everybody!).

But the basic plan is this: Chicago at the turn of the century is a dirty hole of a city. Human waste flows in the streets, and dead animals float in the rivers. Paris just held the World’s Fair and pretty much established themselves as being awesome (it was also the debut of the Eiffel Tower). So, because America is never going to settle for being second to France in anything, decides that they are going to hold a bigger World’s Fair: bigger buildings, stunning exhibits, and the first Ferris Wheel, which held over 2,000 people at one time (!).

In short, despite a ton of setbacks, terrible weather leading up to it, and people dying left and right (it WAS the turn of the century, ya know), the Chicago World’s Fair revolutionizes the world, establishes Chicago as a major city in the United States, and changes history.

But it happened because they were thinking big.

What’s the point of saying “me too”? Are you looking at your life’s plans and seeing that you are just going along with the usual plans? The typical approach to life is get married, get a job that makes you $50-75,000 a year while you sit at a desk, work your way up a few job titles, have a few kids, retire at 65, die.

Where’s the magic in that?

I don’t kid myself. I know that this world sucks at times. I know that life is not easy, and no matter what you do, you’re going to get knocked around a little bit. But who says that we can’t try to find a little magic while we’re here?

Amy Winehouse kicked it at 27. My great-grandmother was almost 90. Two of my grandparents were in their 70s. “The Macho Man” Randy Savage was 58. A series of strokes took my friend when he was 18.

We have absolutely no clue when we’re going to go. All we can do is plan. Some think that means being careless and doing whatever the heck you feel like. That’s fine. Me? I’m going to plan to be here for a very long time. If I go sooner, so be it. But I need to plan accordingly.

And if I’m going to be here another 90+ years, I better find some magic. I better do things that excite me. I better take the time to live a life that is worthy of living.

“Get busy living or get busy dying.” – Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption

I don’t want to just scrape by with my business – I want to build it into something that is going to fully take care of my family for years to come. I don’t want to just have children – I want to be the best damn father I can be, teaching my kids to be smart, responsible human beings. I don’t want to just watch the same crap on TV all the time – I want to be challenged and educated (and the same goes for books).

If I find myself stuck in any of those ruts, I need to get out of them. If I’m working in a job I hate, I’ve got to quit and go find something else. If I’m caught it an endless cycle of mindless television, I’m jumping on Netflix and watching a documentary that will make me think for a little bit.

Sure, I’ll take my lumps along the way. That’s cool. Challenges are just as much a part of life. That’s what makes them worth going after anyway.

I want to create a life worth living. I want to make plans that keep me up at night because I’m so excited. I want to plan things that make my legs bounce underneath my desk while I work on them.

Because as long as I’m here, I want magic. And magic isn’t just going to drop by some day – I need to go out there and get it. Don’t you want a life worth living?

I follow a lot of entrepreneurs and fellow bloggers on Twitter and in Google Reader. I love watching others build their businesses and I am continually inspired to keep working on mine. Sometimes, when you follow successful people, you start to get a little frustrated.

I started blogging in 2007 on a different type of blog. The Practical Nerd was started in 2008 and just celebrated its two-year anniversary. After two years of writing content for this site, putting out a couple of different ebooks, and various posts that gave me a little bit of attention, I still sit very humbly at about 50 unique visitors per day, and just over 150 email subscribers. I also have 62 people who subscribe to my RSS feed as of this writing.

I know for a fact that there are people who are on all three of these, and people who are on two of them together. But even if, for the sake of argument, all of these were different people, I still only have around 250 people who are following me on a regular basis. So let’s round down to 200.

Two hundred people. In the internet world, that’s a drop in the bucket. I haven’t made a dime off of The Practical Nerd, and I’ve spent hundreds – if not thousands – of dollars on it. Meanwhile, some people I have followed have built massive followings and are making serious money. These are the people that started at least a year after me and were able to do what I’m not doing, which is being successful.

But today is my 26th birthday, and as I sit back and reflect on where I’m at, I realize that I can be pretty darn thankful for my tiny following of 200 (or so) people:

It means what I’m saying matters to somebody.

When I first started The Practical Nerd, I had no real connections, and the bulk of my readership was family and friends. Today, that ratio has shifted a bit, and I notice myself getting into real conversations every week with appreciative readers who are commenting on my stuff and replying to me on Twitter.

What I’m saying matters. It may not matter to everybody (and it’s not supposed to), but the fact that I’m resonating with somebody other than people I went to church with means that I’m going somewhere.

Remember: these are human beings.

If you had come up to me on my 21st birthday and said, “Hey, in five years, you are going to be presenting to a group of 200 people every week”, I would have told you that you were crazy, and then gotten really nervous.

Imagine 200 people in a room, all together waiting to hear what you have to say. That’s pretty powerful stuff, and it’s encouraging. The playing field has changed, and 200 people is not a great indicator of success. But those are just numbers.

………………..

………………..

………………..

………………..

………………..

………………..

………………..

………………..

………………..

………………..

See all those up there? That’s 200 dots. When you line them all up, they look pretty insignificant. Unfortunately, too many people online today judge their success by how many dots they can line up. But each of those dots represents a human being that will be potentially reading what I have to say today. These people aren’t just numbers.

Instead, I prefer to think about the several people that recently told me they subscribed to HustleLife purely based on the fact that I wrote it and they were looking forward to reading more stuff from me. I think about the teenage boy from India who emailed me last year for advice on how to deal with his girlfriend breaking up with him (true story).

This is more influence and power than I’ve ever had in my life. Does it mean that I’m making money? No. Does that mean I’m unsuccessful? Not necessarily. If you care about what you are doing more than about how much money you’re making at it, then you’re doing all right.

I’ve got plenty of room for improvement.

The fact that I’ve been doing this for 2+ years and only have a following of 200 or so means that I haven’t been working on the most effective strategies for spreading my influence around, and I can do better. The great part about being so small right now is that I can do better, and I have the ability to make changes at will.

I was on the phone last week with Colin Wright, who runs Exile Lifestyle (among other projects), for an interview for the June 2011 issue of HustleLife (second mention of HustleLife now – find out what it’s about here). We were chatting about the survey I sent out after the debut issue of HustleLife went out to my beautiful 35 subscribers and some of the feedback I was getting. He said that it’s great when you’re small because you can make changes and the readers know that they play a part in those changes happening.

By contrast, think of Facebook – with its kerbillion members, the smallest changes are giant PR disasters every time. They tweak the home page layout, and half their users go ballistic. I’ve done an overhaul of the design and layout of this page 4 different times, and I continue to tweak and improve. I have the ability to experiment.

When you can experiment, you can improve. You are able to take chances. You are able to make changes and implement them quickly. That’s the beauty of being small.

Do I wish to grow? Yup. I’m working on it, too. In the past few months, I’ve started putting out guest posts (see the right side of the page), joined a new Mastermind group, and established a pretty regular posting schedule. I do want to build my influence.

But you’re not going to catch me thinking that I’m failing at this because “only” 200 people are reading what I have to say. The publishing platform today gives me the ability to reach far more, but I know plenty of those in the offline world who would kill to have 20 people pay attention to them, much less 200.

So thank you to each and every one of you for sticking around and making this whole thing worthwhile.

Last week, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Sean Ogle for his new course, Location Rebel, which will be launching in June. Sean is a very smart and influential guy, and I was thrilled to do it. He knows a lot of influential people, and was even a case study in a chapter of The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau. So I jumped at the chance.

The reason I was interviewed is because of my current paying gig as an SEO copywriter. Being an SEO writer pays very well if you are good at it, and it has the added bonus of being “location independent”, which is a fancy way of saying that I could do it anywhere.

Sean’s course is geared towards people who are looking to build location independent businesses so that they can quit their jobs, break the chains associated with them, pack up, and live anywhere they want. For a certain type of person, this will be exactly what they need.

I could work anywhere in the world, but I don’t.

Make no mistake: I appreciate being location independent. My wife and I intend to do a little bit of traveling over the next couple years, and it will be nice to not have to ask off of work or anything and manage the business from the road.

But, mainly, I sit in the same office every day. It’s just a second bedroom in our apartment. I’m not moving from Milwaukee, and we have no intention of doing so.

I’m the anti-blogger.

I blog about making certain changes to your lifestyle to promote growth and happiness. But the vast majority of people who have built their followings on this topic are traveling through Asia, where the cost of living is much lower, and thrilling readers with tales of international intrigue and rich, beautiful scenery. And the good ones are very interesting and fun to read about. One of my favorites is Colin Wright, who has readers vote on where he should live every 4 months.

These bloggers usually center around two philosophies: minimalism (or the art of living with as few possessions as possible) and travel hacking, where you can take advantage of the travel system to get discount airfare and fly/live wherever you want. It seems that these are the keys to happiness in today’s world.

But I don’t “travel hack” and we have way too many possessions. So what?

People dream of having the chance and ability to sell off most of what they own and freeing up their lives to go travel the world and experience different cultures. I have that opportunity sitting in my lap. It’s up to me to take it, and yet I don’t.

Why not?

I’ve set my own priorities in life. If this were a few years ago, then yeah, I might be tempted to pull the trigger on this. But my story is of an average Joe, whose dream in life is to hunker down in a house that I own with my wife and have a few kids. I want to take them to soccer/softball/football games, see them in plays and dance recitals, and throw the ball around in the backyard with them.

This is looked at as a somewhat “establishment”-type mentality. It’s the traditional path of life for those who are growing up. The only thing I ask for is that my job has flexibility and the freedom to work around those experiences. In other words, I want to be able to drop everything and go see my kid run a race or something, instead of missing out on that stuff because I was at work.

My dream is a slightly-modified version of what is generally accepted as the norm. And I’m fine with that.

When the “anti-establishment” is not unique:

In some ways, I view the “travel hacking” trends and minimalism fads to be a form of elitism. While this is not true of a good handful of bloggers out there, I fear that many who dream of it are just those who do it because they think they should, because they like to be different. In their efforts to be “independent”, they just let somebody else tell them what to do.

It’s like being in high school or college: there are the popular kids who follow all the mainstream stuff, and those who wear stuff that is deliberately unfashionable, or dye their hair, or get tattoos. They look down on the mainstream kids, and they feel sorry for the life paths they are choosing. They all think they are being unique, but they are just lumping themselves in with a different crowd. They’re still sheep, but just a different kind of sheep.

Some who travel to “discover themselves” are wasting their time.

You can go to Thailand or Iceland or South Africa and learn about the culture. That’s great. But you don’t have to go to those places to learn so much about yourself. And you can also entertain the idea that, while you’re having fun, you might not be contributing a whole lot to the world.

I think finding yourself starts from within – you have to do it before you start on these adventures. Find your values and set your own priorities first, and then you can start figuring out what to do with your life. Once you do that, you can easily find a way to make it happen. That’s the power of the resources we have now.

My ideal work life was simple: no office politics, and no boss looking over my shoulder. I was tired of working a 9-5 desk job. Now, I don’t have one anymore.

What is your ideal life?

Do you want to work in a big corporate job and move your way up the ladder? Awesome. Do you want to live in an apartment forever? Great. Buy a big freaking house? Knock yourself out. Own ten luxury cars? Nothing wrong with that.

You don’t have to have big grand plans all the time. Your potential might be to do some great things and contribute to improving your own community. But just because it seems like the cool kids think it’s dumb to stay in one spot doesn’t mean you would do the world a service by bouncing around from town to town, or from country to country, with no purpose or reason.

Many travel hackers have great intentions.

They’re trying to help you recognize that the world has less limitations on it than ever before. They want to inspire you to chase your dreams, whatever they are. What I loved about my interview with Sean is that he was fully supportive of the fact that I made an active choice to stay put with my “location independent” business. It’s about possibilities and freedom.

So instead of letting others tell you what to do, and traveling just for the sake of traveling because you think it’s more noble than the “traditional” lifestyle, carve your own dream. Discover your own path. Figure out what you want out of life, and what would make you happy. If you decide that having a location independent job will get you closer to that dream, then sign up for Location Rebel when it comes out, by all means!

Your life’s dream shouldn’t be about sticking it to someone else’s lifestyle. It should be about finding your ideal path. Go get it.

Where is this road going?

I quit my customer service job to focus on my writing, and I get easily frustrated with The Nerd at times, because I feel like I’m not doing enough with it yet. But I’ve been going at this thing for over a year and a half, so it feels like it should be bigger. In the meantime, I’ve wanted to be a big-time freelancer, and I’m still sitting around with little odd jobs that, while they pay well, are not what I want to be doing with my life.

Two days ago, I stumbled upon this post that was being tweeted around by my new friend Jacob Sokol. It details 48 people who have turned what most people simply call “blogging” into a lifestyle that helps other people, inspires other people, and supports themselves. In short: they’re doing what I’ve always wanted to do. And some of them have only started months ago. What do these people have that I don’t?

Nothing.

They’re normal people. I’ve connected with a few of them, and they are pretty down-to-earth, regular people. I bet they even put their pants on one leg at a time. So why are they successful when I’m not? They committed. They’ve put everything they have into that one thing, that one focus. They pushed themselves to be amazing at what they do, and they help people along the way. I haven’t done that.

I’ve kinda putzed around, writing when I kinda feel like it, drifting along in a sea of unfocused garbledy-gook (write that word down). And the result? The feeling of being lost. My personal life is outstanding, but my professional life is just… kinda there. I’m still working for a paycheck (albeit from a home office, which is still ten times better). My wife came into the bedroom, where I was laying with my laptop reviewing these 48 amazing stories, and she asked me what was wrong. I looked her dead in the eye and said, “I’m unhappy.”

I don’t want to waste any more time – I want to bring razor-sharp focus to this place and to my life. I want to help people. This isn’t a New Year’s Resolution; this is a December 14th Resolution. I promise to do the following:

• Stop writing pointless drivel on this site and write something that really matters.
• Bring a laser focus to what I want to accomplish professionally.
• Find the things – beyond money – that I want to do with The Practical Nerd.
• Help you become amazing at something and even, dare I say it, a little happier with life.
• Create more.
• Get together with fellow up and coming “bloggers” and help more people than I ever have before.
• Make my success happen.

What kind of “resolution” can you make? What is the one part of your life that you just want to grab by the you-know-whats and absolutely dominate? Now’s the time to resolve to do it. Not tomorrow, not January 1st. Right freaking now. Stop spinning your wheels and get going.

Peter Schneider with Roy E. Disney

I’m a Disney nut. I’ve admitted it before, and I will continue to admit it. I think Disney is a fantastically-run company, their movies are classics (most of them), and Walt Disney was a hard-working entrepreneur that inspires me all the time. And if you get the chance, read a biography of his. I’m reading one right now, and it is phenomenal. On a Disney World podcast I listen to (my wife and I will be visiting there next October), the podcaster frequently mentioned a documentary called, Waking Sleeping Beauty, which was filmed by some of the cartoonists that worked with Disney during the “Renaissance” of Disney animation in the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s – The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. All classic movies of my childhood, and since I’m a sucker for a good documentary, I wanted to see it badly!

But the documentary was only showing at private screenings in select theaters throughout the country. And like most private screenings, Milwaukee was left out of the bunch. Then it was announced that it would be released on DVD, so I jumped onto Netflix and reserved my chance to watch it. It came a few days ago, and I was able to sit down and watch it the other night. It was fascinating, but that’s not the point of this article. Let me set the stage for a quote that I immediately wrote down after hearing.

In the mid-’80s, Disney animated movies were not doing very well at the box office. The project they were working on was The Black Cauldron, which was a very dark cartoon that wound up going way over budget and costing the company millions (with little returns). It is considered to be a giant failure in Disney lore. After that, Roy E. Disney brought in new executives Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to run the company, and they brought in Jeffrey Katzenberg to head up Disney animation. Disney animation was thought to be on its way out, and nobody respected the division.

Animation was improved with the help of Katzenberg, and the insistence of Roy Disney to keep producing animated movies. To work on The Little Mermaid, the company brought in director Peter Schneider, who was nervous to walk into the company and try to perform under intense pressure. But he had a very interesting quote in this documentary (which he helped make):

“I thought, I can’t do worse than The Black Cauldron. You can’t fall off the first floor.”

I paused the DVD the second I heard that quote, ran into my office, and wrote it down.

Think about that last part of the quote: “You can’t fall off the first floor”. Are you worried about assuming some risk in your life? How miserable are you? Some people struggle constantly with creating a life that they want, but they never do anything about it. But they fail to realize that, often, it can’t really get much worse.

Most of risk in the adult world revolves around money – what happens if you go broke, etc.? But if you are trying to launch your career and are held back by a paycheck, there is something to be said for the idea that you are stuck on the first floor. You are nowhere where you want to be, so who cares if you fall down a little bit? You don’t have very far to go!

When I jumped at the chance to quit my customer service job and go back to writing full time, I worried a little about the risks involved. But, regardless of what it says on the news, there are always jobs to get. They may not be envious, but they’re jobs. If you’re working for a paycheck, you can always go out and get another paycheck. I can bartend, I can wait tables, I can deliver pizzas. Some worry about the seniority I gave up, but what good is seniority in a career I don’t want?

In my mind, I was on the first floor – in the wrong building. Now, a few weeks later, I may not be in the penthouse yet, but at least I’m in the elevator staring at the buttons. When you feel stuck, think about how far down you really could go if you made a drastic change. Often, it’s not nearly as drastic as you think.

If Peter Schneider had failed and The Little Mermaid bombed, what would he have lost? He would have had the experience of trying and failing, and that’s about it. The Disney Company didn’t really have much to lose either. Fortunately, by taking the risk and producing another animated feature film, Disney wound up putting together a string of classics that made the company billions of dollars, transformed pop culture at the time, advanced the careers of countless actors, musicians, and animators, and inspired billions of people who watched these movies.

Not bad for taking on a little risk. Compare the best and worst case scenarios of the change you want to make. Then get into the right building, or you’ll never make it off the first floor.

Rest assured: that’s not the behavior I’m referring to in the title.

As I watched the end of The Aviator on my honeymoon – an excellent portrayal by Leonardo DiCaprio – I noticed something else about Howard: his drive. After flying his giant plane in front of the media, despite years of speculation and skepticism, Howard Hughes should have been basking in the glory. He should have been doing interviews and press junkets talking about how he proved everyone wrong and everyone should apologize to him and give him lots of money. But he didn’t. When he got off that plane, he immediately went to his advisors and started discussing the possibility of jet engines in plane travel. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to enjoy his success.

Enjoying success is great, but it gets you in trouble. There are numerous washed-up celebrities that had a good thing going and then… nothing. Think of all the one-hit wonders in the music industry. Many of them rode the wave of success from their big hit, but then had nothing on the other end when it ran its course. They wound up broke, miserable, addicted to whatever and, worse, dead.

When you get a promotion at work, does that mean you stop trying to be better at your job? For many, yeah, it does. Or even when you get that big job, you don’t try to better yourself and climb the ladder. You celebrate your success too long. The last time I went full-time with my freelance business, I scored a big client that paid the bills and I rode the wave well into the ground. Next thing you know, I’m stuck behind a desk working second shift in customer service. I celebrated my victory too long and paid the price.

If you have a child in school and they get an “A” on a paper or exam, it’s a great success. But do you then give the child more slack to do crappy on subsequent tests? No. You hold them accountable for that “A” and you help them to keep improving their knowledge. So why do we not hold ourselves to the same standards?

Strive to be better. Push yourself. Look for ways to make your home a better place to be, to make your family a more cohesive and loving unit, to strengthen your friendships, and to love more deeply. Work hard to improve every aspect of your life. Celebrating is fine, but it is temporary. Living in this world is a lot of work – there’s no dancing around it – and the party will eventually end. End it yourself and roll up your sleeves again before it’s too late. Howard Hughes had some mental problems, but he knew how to innovate and how to push himself to be better. We should all do the same, every day.

What follows is a very interesting tale of a guy who saw the Samurai as savages, but watched them work and take care of their families. He observed the honor that they live with, and in the end, he winds up fighting his own soldiers on the side of the Samurai.

We’ll come back to that, but let’s switch gears for a second: on our honeymoon, my wife and I came across people whose sole forms of income were tourist-y type activities. There was a simple crew that existed only to take tourists like us onto big boats, drive us out into the middle of the ocean, and let us snorkel for a while. They fed us sandwiches and soda. We were charged over $75 apiece for this trip. During the hour-long boat ride to our first snorkel destination, I remarked to my wife that it looks like it would be a fun and lucrative gig – all you need to do is really pay for the upkeep of the boat, and the rest is profit. Plus, you get to be laid-back and enjoy the Hawaiian sun and the ocean every single day. What could be better? Our captain seemed to really enjoy his job and his life.

But in retrospect, I feel like that would be one of those “be careful what you wish for” moments. Back to the movie: Tom Cruise observed that the Samurai’s daily life was full of work. They cleaned, they cooked, they farmed, and they trained for battle. Everything they did went towards their survival. They worked tirelessly, and did so with a smile on their face. I don’t think they felt that it was fun, but they felt the immense sense of honor that comes with working like that.

So what are we? We go to an office and “work” 8 hours a day, which really consists of about 3-4 hours of actual work on a good day, and the rest filled by bathroom breaks, chatting with coworkers, pointless meetings, and busywork. We come home, whining and complaining about having to work that long, and then we pull out a “meal” of pre-processed crap that we have to put in the oven for 20 minutes, and we complain because we’re a little hungry.

Now, I’m not recommending that you stop going to the supermarket, and I’m not recommending that you quit your meaningless job. That would be a stupid risk if you didn’t have anything else lined up. But not even 100 years ago, daily life was full of work that was not done for a paycheck at the end of the week, but for the survival of your family. It was for the care and feeding of your loved ones. It was for protection against your enemies. It was life.

Let’s pull it all together. That guy that captained our boat seemed happy, but in retrospect, he must not find a whole lot of fulfillment from his job. He gets to relax and help people get some memories from their vacations, but is that all? I could be completely wrong – he could be very fulfilled by it. Or, he may do things in his spare time that give him some honor. I have no idea. But for me, I’d need more.

Instead of floating through life doing miserable work that you get nothing out of and you complain about every day, start taking ownership of your life. Figure out what would be the most fulfilling for you to do with your time, and then start Googling around. Look at some blogs for ideas. There are ways to start doing them on the side, and yes, you have time. Instead of putzing around, leading a fairly meaningless existence in this world, pull yourself and your family together and take charge. Live with honor and respect for yourself, and you will see how happiness follows. Then work won’t feel so much like work anymore.