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Life

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Strategy, Tactics, and the Plan for the Next 97 Days

Have you heard the news about the death of publishing? Books are going extinct! Paper will cease to exist! Buy stock in digital ink.

Seth Godin, a mentor to me and the rest of the internet, recently announced his retirement from traditional publishing. Seth is perpetually ahead of the curve, so as usual, most people completely missed the point in responding to the news. When I read his interview, I thought “Wow, I need to catch up.” If I had twelve bestselling books, I'd say farewell to traditional publishing too. So everyone else in publishing, traditional or otherwise, who doesn't have twelve bestselling books needs to get to work.

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Travel

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How to Use Frequent Flyer Miles for Low-Cost, High-Value Trips

As regular readers know, I use Frequent Flyer miles to go all over the world several times a year. I've written before about how to earn miles without flying, and how you can become your own travel ninja through mass mileage accrual. Once you earn miles, however, you need to make a plan for using them. One of the saddest facts in the Frequent Flyer world is that every year, millions of miles go to waste. Help stamp out mileage expiration! Use your miles ... but use them wisely. Here's how.

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Work

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On Hustling

Sometimes people ask what hustling is. This great poster by Joey Roth provides one answer:

hustling

This “hustler” image is what I try to do every day: lots of work, lots of messaging. The messaging isn't always directly related to the work at hand—sometimes I'm supporting other people with their own hustling. But on a good day, there's plenty of work and and plenty of messaging.

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Work

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I Have a Book! (And I Need Some Help)

The day before leaving on my final international trip of the year, the FedEx guy showed up at my door. Unfortunately, he did not have a package with my passport from Washington, D.C., which led to my just-barely-made-it excursion to Algeria. Too bad—but it all worked out in the end, as it usually does. Instead of a passport, I received a small package from Penguin Books. I get review books all the time, so I assumed that's what this one was. But then I opened up the package and saw my name. At first I thought it was an impostor, but no impostor would choose the name Guillebeau to write a book. (He would probably choose a name like Godin or Grisham instead.)

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Travel

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Visit to Tiger Kingdom

Thanks to some fun travel hacking that led to a better-than-free side trip to Thailand, I took a couple days off at the end of my Belarus-to-Algeria adventure.

I've been to Thailand a dozen times, but never to Chiang Mai, the mountainous city in the north, far away from the hustle of Bangkok. The highlight of the excursion was a day trip to Tiger Kingdom, a cat reserve twenty minutes out of the city where tourists can play a fun game of “pet the tigers while the staff watches warily with sticks.”

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Life

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Generous People Have More To Give

A few weeks ago in Miami I only had a $5 bill when it came time to get out of the airport shuttle.

I'd love to tell you I gave the driver five bucks instead of the usual $1-2, but I kept it in my pocket and just said "Thanks." Generosity fail.

When it comes to generosity, the general rule with me is: Win some, lose some. It's funny how I don't often regret being generous, but when I choose to be stingy, it comes back to me later.

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Travel

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Destination Unknown

By the time I got to the check-in counter at PDX airport this morning, I knew I'd go through with the plan. PDX-DEN-FRA to start with... but then what? I wasn't sure.

“Will you be traveling on from Frankfurt?” the United agent asked.

This is a polite way of saying, “When will you be leaving the European Union?” – to ensure I don't decide to take up residence in Germany.

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