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Waking Up at Night with Big Ideas


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Long ago, right before I started this blog and began the full-time quest to "go everywhere," I went through a six-month period of thinking about it. When I say I was thinking about it, I mean it occupied my mental world approximately 80% of the time. I was still working and going to grad school during the day, but my attention lay elsewhere.

Then, at night, I'd go to bed with a notebook on my nightstand. I kept it there because almost every night, I'd wake up feeling excited. I'd have another idea or something new to add to the outline.

I loved this story of Benny Hsu making $100,000 from his t-shirt designs—a huge entrepreneurial success on his own, no doubt. But I also related to how the project took over his life and became all he thought about.

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Et Cetera

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6 Discoveries from Near and Far: Volume XLV

kashmirhouseboat8 I. Around the World

Things I found on long walks in foreign cities, or perhaps when someone posted them on Twitter.

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Travel

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Starwood Card Makes It Easier to Earn 25,000 Point Bonus

Link: Starwood Preferred Guest (Personal)
Link: Starwood Preferred Guest (Business)

Years before I became a full-time traveler and learned to use travel hacking to pay my way around the world, I had only a couple of credit cards. One of those cards was the Starwood Preferred Guest by American Express, and I used it religiously. Years later, I have many other cards, but I continue to use this one every day.

The card just made a big update to make it easier for people to earn the initial signup bonus of 25,000 points. You used to earn some of the points upon signup and the rest after completing a minimum spend. Now, you'll earn the entire bonus upon spending $3,000 in the first three months of having the card.

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Travel

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“Make Your Dream Trip a Reality”: Week 5 Recap (Upgrade Your Dream Trip)

Week5.070 copy 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.

This was our fifth week (already?!) with the in-studio audience and the thousands of people who participated online. We've come so far! And we’ll be back again after the weekend for our last week where we'll bring it all together.

For the five daily lessons this week, we focused on helping people strategically use the miles they earned. Here's what we covered:

  • The Best Hidden Redemptions
  • The Secret World of Airline Lounges
  • Airline Status and Upgrades
  • On the Ground
  • More Ways to Use Your Points and Miles

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Et Cetera

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What Remains in the Quest for Literary Permanence


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From Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher:

I am always taken aback when students confide in me that beneath their desire to write lies a quest for permanence. It’s odd but touching, I think, that even during this disposable age, while consigning great mountains of refuse to landfills and to atolls of plastic in the Pacific, these young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.

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Profiles

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“I am capable of more than I imagined”: On the Road with Elizabeth Glanzer

After experiencing many travel misadventures around the world, I love hearing other people's "silver linings" stories. This one (and other stories, too) comes from Elizabeth Glanzer in Los Angeles.

I'm a therapist and work with teens and young adults who feel misunderstood and out of place. I study psychoanalysis and neuroscience every chance I get.

Traveling is one of my favorite things to do. For me, it pulls everything together and shatters blind spots. People, culture, art, and "normal" is all relative when I go abroad, and I appreciate the ability to see how someone else lives and thinks.
Liz3

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Et Cetera

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The Habit of Giving

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Today I made a small donation to a cause that inspired me. It wasn't really because of the holiday, it didn’t cost me much, and I won’t miss the money. Yet, I still felt good after I pushed the button that finalized the commitment.

Notice how selfish this sounds: It felt good to give! I was the one with the benefit.

But this is how it works. The more you give, the better you feel.

Give it a try.

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Travel

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“Make Your Dream Trip a Reality”: Week 4 Recap (Book Your Hotel)

Week4.029 copy 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.

This was our fourth week with the in-studio audience and the thousands of people who participated online.

Everyone made lots of progress, and we’ll be back again after the weekend with much more.

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Life

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Three Things I Know Are True: Taking Risks

I’ve been attempting to find “true north” in a lot of things lately. This series explores what I’ve found to be true in my own life. Your answers will probably differ; the point is to find what’s true for you.

Taking-Risks

Today’s topic is taking risks. Here are three things I know are true.

1. Most risk is perceived.

For example, it’s not any riskier to work for yourself than it is to work for a company, and it may actually be less risky. Why would you trust someone else with your well-being? Self-employment is actually a very safe and conservative choice for many of us.

Therefore, it’s very important to rethink the role of risk in your life.

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Travel

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Homeward: Notes from TG 910, Bangkok-London

Greetings from the skies over Helsinki, on-board a well-aged Thai Airways 747 that has two hours remaining in its eleven-hour flight. Last night was Singapore, then a quick hop to Bangkok, and then this uneventful long-haul as I’m nearing London’s Heathrow airport.

I’ve felt strange for much of the trip. It’s been a lot of fun, no doubt, and I’m really glad I went. A trip like this, with four major cities in a week, all separated by 8-13 hours of flying time to each city, reinforces the benefits and challenges of the peripatetic nature of my life. There’s always something coming and going. There’s always a project wrapping and another one (or five) to tackle next.

What's the goal of life? Maybe it’s this: to live the life we’ve been given, to be kind to others, to do things that make us happy, and to give back (or whatever it’s called) as much as possible.

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Profiles

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Writing 150 Musical Compositions Before Turning 50: Stephen P. Brown’s Quest

Rejection didn't dampen Stephen P. Brown's inner fire. Instead, being turned down from achieving something he wanted flamed his desire to grow and change. Here's his quest.

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As a conductor of orchestras, bands, choirs and musicals, it has been my privilege to see thousands of people laugh, cry and directly connect with live music, whatever language they speak. My life journey has taken me from a small village in the English countryside to the sunny shores of Florida via Europe, Africa, South America, and much of the USA and Canada.

Through all my travels I occasionally needed to compose music specifically for the ensembles I worked with, and I dabbled in some formal composition training here and there, but I never considered myself a 'composer.'

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Profiles

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“I’m not running away, I’m running toward”: On the Road with Luke Armstrong

When we talked to Luke, he told us, “At the age of sixteen I wrote in my journal: 'Tonight, when I was driving home, I had the desire to point The Bronco in one direction and just keep going and going and going.'”

Many travelers will relate to his stories.


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After I ditched my return ticket in Chile and took out a student loan to finance hitchhiking from South America to Alaska, people said, “You’re crazy!” I replied, “So was Columbus!” They insisted, “This is so financially unsound!” I cried, “So were The Pyramids!”

I joke sometimes that eight years ago I went to South America and I never came back. Really, it means I performed some paperwork magic to graduate early and created a path that was there for me to take or not.

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Life

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Going to the Movies by Yourself

I’m a big fan of doing things alone. I eat in restaurants alone, I go to faraway places for my birthday alone, and I generally work alone more often than not.

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That’s why I’m naturally predisposed to like new research that shows that when you’re by yourself, you shouldn’t just stay at home and avoid activities that you might normally only do with someone else.

"People decide to not do things all the time just because they're alone," said Rebecca Ratner, a professor of marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, who has spent almost half a decade studying why people are so reluctant to have fun on their own and how it may lead to, well, less fun overall. "But the thing is, they would probably be happier going out and doing something.”

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