I saw this trailer a few weeks ago, and immediately watched it three times in a row.
The full film is out now, and it’s completely free to watch. Fair warning, though: some of you will watch this and make a decision that will affect up to five months of your life. Read More
This is a quest case study. (Read others or nominate yourself.)
Some people like a challenge. Some like a really big challenge. Leon Logothetis went for big when he decided to travel around the world, fueled only by the kindness of people he'd never met.I was born in London, where I worked as a broker. But I felt disconnected and uninspired with my pursuit of a traditional life. So I quit my job and moved to America. My quest was to travel from Los Angeles all the way around the world, returning to LA, on my vintage yellow motorbike named Kindness One. There was a twist: I had to make it around the globe without money. I had to ask for help from people I met along the way. The journey was not just about my traveling the world on the kindness of strangers. I also wanted to show that by truly committing to living our dreams, anything is possible.
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I’ve been attempting to find “true north” in a lot of things lately. This new series explores what I believe in different areas of work and life. Your answers may differ; the point is to find what’s true for you.
Today’s topic is writing books. Here are three things I know are true.
1. The basic process is easier than most people think.
As I’ve explained before, it’s not that hard to write a book. A book is composed of a number of chapters and words. If you break down the process in a logical manner, you can see approximately how many words are required on a daily or weekly basis to achieve the goal in whatever time period you set.
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Every year I earn well over one million Frequent Flyer miles and points. About 250,000 of them come through actual travel, and the rest come through travel hacking: the art of seeing the world on a budget.
One of the easiest ways to earn a lot of miles all at once is through credit card signup bonuses. This post contains the best current card offers as of Tuesday, May 5th. If getting every card from this post, you'd earn 215,000 points or miles. Happy travels! Read More
This is a traveler case study. (Read others or nominate yourself.)
A quester and traveler, Carole Rosenblat decided to take a deep dive into rarely explored territory: the art of unplanned travel. She runs a blog and lets her readers choose where she travels, giving herself only a few days to get from one place to another.
I write as I travel so readers - who I call my Virtual Travel Buddies - get to be on the road with me. I include readers in on my quirky observations and my challenges and mistakes along the way (I get lost a lot). While traveling, I find organizations or projects with which to volunteer and I profile them on my philanthropic site, Rebel With a Cause, to give them exposure to a wider audience.Read More
You’ve heard the conventional wisdom: never check email in the morning.
I loved this video from Smarter Every Day, where host Destin Sandlin learns to ride a bicycle that has been custom welded to reverse the handlebars.
It sounds easy—all you have to do is think left when you normally think right, and vice versa. Can’t be too hard, right? But it is hard... very hard.
After he learns to ride the reverse bicycle, he then has another big problem: how to switch back to an ordinary bicycle. It turns out that's really tough, too.
Lesson: “Once you have a rigid way of thinking in your head, sometimes you cannot change it, even if you want to." Read More
Every day for six weeks, we’re teaching people how to “Make Their Dream Trip a Reality.” You can watch each lesson for free on the day it’s broadcast, or you can purchase the whole course and have access anytime.
Greetings from Seattle! This morning we kicked off the live broadcast for "Make Your Dream Trip a Reality"... and a ton of you were watching!
Creative Live is rebroadcasting the session throughout the day, so tune in over here and you can still catch the whole thing. (If you’re reading this another day, we may be on to another session—but we have six weeks of them, so there's still plenty to go.) Read More
Hey everyone, just a quick reminder: tomorrow morning we kick off our new “Make Your Dream Trip a Reality” course on Creative Live. You can watch for free starting at 9am Pacific time.
Link: RSVP (It’s Free) and Join In Here Yesterday we went to the studio for a production meeting with the whole team. This is a big undertaking, and a bunch of people have been working on it for
Oh, and we even got a sneak-peek of our awesome set featuring a “travel hacking hot seat” with First Class seats borrowed from the Seattle Museum of Flight. We're so excited!
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Things I found on long walks in foreign cities, or perhaps when someone posted them on Twitter.
As I wrote in The Happiness of Pursuit, a quest need not be an athletic struggle or travel adventure. I loved this story of how this former medical resident wrote a haiku every day for a year.
I'm Yvonne Whitelaw. I was born in Britain, but raised in Nigeria and the United States. I’m a stay at home mom and former physician. I decided to tweet a haiku a day for 365 days, even though I barely knew what a haiku was and had never actually written one. Interestingly, the practice of daily haiku writing has helped my ADD. Haikus have trained me to focus and express myself succinctly.Read More
I recently stumbled upon an essay from Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who died earlier this year at the age of 37.
I read the whole thing several times and was struck by several passages, including this one:
"Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed."Read More
This is a traveler case study. (Read others or nominate yourself.)
Dreams can change, as was the case of Scott Bold's childhood dream. The younger Scott wanted a good job and decent salary, but his adult self wanted something else. So along with his girlfriend Michelle Eshleman, they set out on a different course.
"After I achieved everything I had dreamed of as a child - a nice car, high-paying job, good friends, fancy meals, and gadgets - I still wasn’t happy. I looked at everyone higher up than me at my job and didn’t see my happiness reflected there (not to mention they didn’t seem happy, either). So I questioned what made me happy, and realized what I wanted was freedom, new experiences, and exploration."
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Things I found on long walks in foreign cities, or perhaps when someone posted them on Twitter.