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left Norway and began a slow journey home via the Pacific. I'm writing these notes from a Cathay Pacific flight to Tokyo, where I'll transfer on to Los Angeles after staying one night.
After the end of the world in Oslo, a lot of people have been asking:
How does it feel to visit every country in the world?
How does it feel? It feels good. I'm the same person as I was last week, and I haven't been equipped with magical powers or instant sagacity—but it's fun to know that it all worked out.
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Dear friends and readers,
Last week I made it to Norway, my final country after more than a decade of going everywhere.
Such an occasion deserved to be shared, so that's just what we did. First, a group of 16 friends, family members, and readers joined Jolie and me for a two-day tour from Oslo to Bergen.
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Greetings from LHR Terminal 5, where I'm getting ready to fly to my final country.
Yeah. I know.
I'll share more about that over the weekend on Twitter, and of course next week on the blog. I've heard there's a cake and a champagne toast in Oslo on Sunday night, and a lot of fun people coming along.
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Everything begins with a crazy idea, and this particular crazy idea comes to you in stages.
You don't decide to visit every country in the world when you haven't been out of your own neighborhood. First you go to a dozen countries in Africa, then a dozen more in Europe, and before you know it you've reached 50-country status.
That's when you start thinking about goals, and that's when you first decide to visit 100 countries before you die.
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Those of us who are self-employed, as well as anyone who performs intellectual work of some kind for a living, are continuously faced with a dilemma.
The dilemma can be stated in the form of a two-word question: What's next?
Many of us encounter this dilemma numerous times a day, whenever we first approach the machines that guide us through our work.
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Over the weekend I heard a talk and short performance piece by Stephen Kellogg, an independent musician who was speaking at the annual TEDxConcordiaUPortland event. Stephen talked about the joy of work. From a young age, he always wanted to be a touring musician, with fans, albums, and concerts. He loves what he does and feels fortunate to have the chance to reach audiences with his music.
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This post was written entirely in the air between Seattle and Anchorage the other day.
It was a bad travel hacking morning. For some reason I was assigned a middle seat in peasant class—the torture chamber of the modern traveler. Alas.
I squeezed into 6B and unloaded my stuff. MacBook, notebook, magazine, iPad, book manuscript, cinnamon twist. I tried to arrange things as best as possible, without sitting on the MacBook or the crucial cinnamon twist.
I felt sorry for myself for a moment. And then I realized the obvious: am I going to complain, or am I going to get to work?
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Greetings from the road to Anchorage, Alaska—or actually the sky, since it's a long drive to Anchorage for most of us.
Last week we had a real-time experiment where I invited readers to offer something for free. We received hundreds of submissions, many of them in the comments thread of the original post and many others through independent blog posts.
Today I'll share a few highlights from the original post, as well as a couple of observations on the process.
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“The waiting is the hardest part.”
-Tom Petty
Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but wait. You’re waiting on a phone call. You're waiting on a shift in your environment or for someone else to do something. You’re waiting on the world to change.
Waiting is uncomfortable and unpleasant. Even if there's a chance that the news you're waiting on could be bad, you'd much rather know for sure.
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Dear Readers and Amazing People,
Greetings from Austin, Texas. I had a fun time yesterday with many SXSW attendees and residents of this great city. Special thanks to BookPeople for hosting, to Betty Jean for coordinating a large amount of beer and cupcakes, and to everyone who showed up.
Life is good and I'll be going for some of Austin's famous breakfast tacos right after publishing this post.
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How can you help people?
What can you offer the world, or at least to someone you know?
Think about this. Think about something specific. Think about something that can actually happen soon.
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The problem is that you want a new life, or at least some kind of substantive change.
You look at what you have, what you do, or who you are, and you long for something else.
It may be a problem of the fortunate, in the sense that you don't have to worry about what you'll eat tomorrow, but nevertheless, it's a problem.
So that's where you're at. What do you do?
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On a day like last Saturday, you might find yourself wrapping up a whirlwind series of events in a fun East Asian country. You might be feeling the effects of little sleep and the need to be extroverted as you present yourself in various new and unfamiliar events. Hosting a talk show on Buddhist TV, for example, or perhaps being pelted by questions in the form of paper airplanes at a less formal event for readers. It will all have been wonderful, no doubt, but you'll also be in need of a change ...
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Someone wrote in to say he had earned more than 400,000 Frequent Flyer Miles from learning about travel hacking in the past few months.
"That's amazing!" I said. "Great work!"
He had a question on how to earn even more miles and points.
Well, we can talk about that, I told him. There are always new strategies to practice, new opportunities to pursue.
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Friends and readers, I hope you'll excuse a brief post today. I've been in Seoul, Korea for three jam-packed days, meeting thousands of people. Yeah, thousands ... it's been intense. So far we've done more than a dozen events and filming sessions, including one that ended yesterday at midnight.
