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Mini City Guides On the Way—Want to Help?

Greetings, everyone. I hope you’ve been enjoying the all-new blog! In addition to the other new features we’ve already debuted—interviews with your fellow travelers, giveaways, and airline lounge tours, we’ll be publishing a number of “mini city guides” featuring photos and short narratives from readers. Many people in our community are active travelers, and many…

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A Box in the Mail Every Once in a While

Have you ever said to yourself, “I wish @chrisguillebeau would send me a box of surprises in the mail?” Of course you have. Is your life incomplete without paper airplane books and whiskey stones? Of course it is. Thanks to advances in technology and a new service in California, you can now solve both of…

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The Filmography of Aircraft

After attending our inaugural Pioneer Nation event, Cathryn painstakingly crafted an amazing print illustrating one-hundred years of aviation in film. Watch the Kickstarter video (now fully funded) to learn more about her journey from Belfast to Brooklyn:   My favorite part of Cathryn’s work is the incredible attention to detail. Where possible, she even researched…

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A Few Things In the Mix

For a long time I’ve been troubled by the fact that there are many, many amazing people who are part of this community in addition to doing other awesome things—yet we don't do a good job of telling their stories. Just as we're actually making Unconventional Guides now instead of just saying that we should, I'm finally working on addressing this problem.

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Happy Thanksgiving from AONC

Back from Australia and in Portland for the U.S. holiday, I faced a tough choice today: pecan pie or bread pudding. I chose the bread pudding … but then I experienced an onset of buyer’s remorse as I thought about the pie. Was I right? Was I wrong? Honestly, I wasn’t sure. They both had…

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Welcome, New Readers! (And old readers too …)

We've had a lot of new readers join recently, so I wanted to say hello (hi, everyone!) and explain more of what it's about.

This blog (AONC) started in 2008 along with my goal to visit every country in the world by my 35th birthday earlier this year.

Throughout the past five years it's grown to much more than a travelogue. Our core mission is to support and encourage non-conformity or unconventional thinking, as defined by this mission statement:

You don't have to live your life the way others expect. You can do good things for yourself and for others.

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Quarterly: A Box of Surprises In the Mail

Want to receive fun surprises in the mail ... four times a year? I thought so. Quarterly is a new subscription service that offers a surprise package each quarter from interesting people. I'm not sure why they thought I was an interesting person, but I liked the idea of sharing some of my favorite things with you—so a few months ago, we sent out a package to an initial group of recipients.

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First Videos from #WDS2013

The focus of WDS is on creating a strong in-person experience, so we don’t do any live-streaming. However, we also realize that many people who aren’t able to attend in Portland are interested in seeing what it’s about. With that in mind, we recently released the first two speaker videos from this year’s extravaganza. Darren…

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WDS 2013: A Partial (and Impartial) Recap

We did it! Ten days ago, nearly 3,000 people descended on Portland for the third annual World Domination Summit. Everyone asks what WDS is, and here’s what I usually say as a brief answer: WDS is an annual gathering of creative, unconventional people from all over the world. This brief answer doesn’t tell the whole…

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WDS 2013: Still Working On It

I had hoped to write up my comments on last week’s adventure with 2,800 people, but I’m still in recovery. There’s just too much to process, at least for me as the host. I hope to do so more next week in some fashion. In the meantime, here are a few posts that are making…

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World Domination: Achievement Unlocked

Over the past few days I’ve had very little sleep at night and an amazing time from 5am to midnight. Working with an incredible team, we welcomed 2,800 people to the Rose City for an adventure like no other. Several hundred initial photos are now available on our Flickr stream. I’ll be back on Thursday…

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Spring Cleaning (In Late June)

It’s been a jam-packed week here at World Domination HQ. We have thousands of people coming to town in just a few days, a sentence that sounds odd even as I type it here in the WordPress interface where this blog is published. Nevertheless, it’s true! Next week we’re also attempting to set a WORLD…

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End-of-Year Giveaway (Plus! New books from Seth and Dan)

Greetings from the Pacific Ocean! Happy New Year's to everyone in advance. I'm currently flying over the water and will miss New Year's Eve (all of it) due to crossing the international date line today. Don't feel bad for me, though—I'm en route to my penultimate country. If all goes well, tomorrow I'll be on Tuvalu and only one country away from ... all of them. (Also: I like the word penultimate. I think it means “almost there.”)

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