Travelpreneurs and Embracing Uncertainty

Cool kids may have another name for it today, but at the time when I was somewhat cooler and kinda-still-a-kid, we called it being a "digital nomad."

The idea was to live a life optimized for travel and new experiences and to find acceptable compromises that allowed us to do so. Wearing a five-day wardrobe in quick rotation for months sounded like a good compromise, and so did making business calls from a loud beach bar with questionable coffee and subpar wifi. What wouldn't have been a good compromise was to work a 9-to-5 office job and only travel in the limited vacation time allotted.

There are many benefits to the digital nomad lifestyle. For shy people like myself who have a hard time networking, the ticking clock can be enough motivation to leave the couch and try to make friends. And it's easy to meet other travelers, because the community welcomes newcomers, plus it's always easy to find something to chat about, too. If all else fails, there's the "prison talk": "How long are you here for?", "When did you arrive?" and "Who else do you know?"

Sometimes, life-changing experiences can be pinpointed to a single event in time. It can be as little as a good conversation or a book recommendation. One such lead domino for me was my usual trip to a bookshop in 2008, at the time when I was juggling my own business with attending two universities. The business book aisle featured Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Work Week, and as someone who most definitely overcommitted on responsibilities, this book proved to be the final push to take a step back and rethink the 9-to-5.

Managing opportunities

Maybe counterintuitively, constraints can help people come up with more and better ideas than they would have had they been allowed to ideate freely. When writer's block hits and we're staring at a blank sheet of paper for too long, even arbitrary limitations can help kickstart the creative process. As an example: instead of a broad instruction such as "write anything", a well defined "write a poem", or even better, "write a haiku about your relationship with your favorite parent" may get the ideas started rolling in.

Travel introduces many such constraints. Leaving a comfortable environment and a supporting community takes some getting used to, even if the new place is better than the old one in every single way, let alone if the destination comes with a language barrier, subpar infrastructure, visa requirements and other types of bureaucracy, or simply: fear. Overcoming these hurdles is a confidence-building exercise, and as travelers often say, people learn about the world while staying at home and discover themselves while traveling the world.

Digital nomads are typically attracted to the idea of experiencing new cultures, listening to diverse opinions, and exploring different ways of life. This sense of adventure fuels their desire to travel and seek out compromises that allow them to continue being on the road. These compromises often make digital nomads "unhireable" for regular jobs, so many of them turn to entrepreneurship—and so the "travelpreneur" is born.

Calculated risks

"Regular" entrepreneurship is hard enough, but it's even harder to build a business that has to be unrestricted to a specific location. Contrary to popular belief however, founders don't usually seek out risk, rather, they are looking for ways to minimize it.

For example, popular destinations in Southeast Asia offer natural beauty, amazing food, culture, and entertainment, and are pretty safe for travelers. Because a dollar in, say, Thailand goes much further than a dollar in the U.S., it allows for a longer discovery phase. Lover living costs mean that the same seed money stretches a lot longer, ultimately making the new enterprise less risky to start.

Travelpreneurs are free to take off when staying becomes the more risky option. While it's cheaper to vacation in third-world countries, running a business can turn out to be less beneficial. Health care, schools, taxes, and bureaucracy can quickly become a problem, and it's easy to forget how spoiled we are in the West. When my laptop broke in Berlin, I simply went into a shop and replaced it the same day—hard to pull off the same feat in a surfing village in Bali.

Taking it away

Digital nomads often have to rely on resourcefulness to succeed in foreign countries. They need to find creative solutions to logistical challenges, navigate bureaucratic hurdles, or bootstrap a business with limited resources.

Most, if not all, of these learnings are highly transferable. Almost everything you learn while traveling as a digital nomad only makes you more resilient and all your future businesses stronger.

Cross-Cultural Psychology Essential Reads

Living and Loving in a Diverse Society

Documenting Cultural Lineages

Successful travelpreneurs are highly adaptable because they've learned to quickly adjust to new environments. The respect one gains for different cultures can only help build strong relationships with local communities, and being able to build trust, collaborate, and communicate effectively across cultural boundaries is a must-have in any business.