How To Live An Awesome Life Abroad WITHOUT Having a Job

Written from a quaint little cafe in the heart of Chang Mai while stuffing my face with a tuna sandwich.

Read time: Approx 6 Mins / 3 Mins Highlighted Sections

While out in Bangkok I regularly get asked two questions whenever I meet someone and we get talking

1. Why are you not wearing pants?
2. How can you live out here but not have a job?

Two very important questions and I will look to answer them both within this article. Well, not so much the first question as that is simply personal preference – it is just more comfortable.

Why Read

This article basically outlines the three core philosophies that I live by currently and how these philosophies allow me to live an amazing life out in Thailand without having a job.

These philosophies have allowed me to retire from a hard 40-50 hour work week and move to working less than 90 minutes a day with a substantial increase in lifestyle quality. This is one of many posts to come exploring the new lifestyle I am fortunate enough to live and how it is done.

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I Have Been Lucky

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I am not going to say that it’s easy and anyone can do it because it is not the case, nor is it the case that it is the lifestyle for everyone. More over, it is not that I am somewhat more talented or clever than others which has allowed me to lead it. I have been very lucky in how my life has panned out which has resulted in my having this opportunity.

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However I do believe it is possible for most should they choose it.

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I would like to say that what I talk about below are not new ideas and that many people have, and do, used similar principles. I have simply just summarised the three main ones that I live by. Tim Ferris and his book “The Four Hour Workweek” really kicked things off for me and countless others and so I definitely recommend reading it.

Currently how I design my life is through a philosophy I coined “Light Touch Entrepreneurship” or “Light Touch Living”, the core principles of which I will explain in this post. Further posts will follow regarding more detail about Light Touch Living and also why everyone should at least give it a go in the future.

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The Light Touch Living Philosophy

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Light Touch Living focuses on creating streamlined revenue streams which give financial freedom, freedom of locality and freedom of time to the entrepreneur or owner of these streams, subsequently allowing them to focus on enjoying life and helping others.

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One of my good mates had another take of the philosophy which was “to sit on a beach all day and run an online business” but I have chosen to selectively ignore that comment as it is only half right. I also punched him in the arm for good measure.

Light Touch Entrepreneurship focuses on three core areas:

1. Leveraging the power of currency:
2. Harnessing the internet for global communication and outsourcing
3. Applying The Pareto principle to all aspects of life and business

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1. Leveraging the power of currency – How to make 300% interest on your money

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Core to financial freedom and subsequently the freedom of locality and the freedom of time, is the ability to live within your means, and thus, it is of utmost importance to streamline and reduce personal overheads as much as possible without limiting or reducing your quality of life.

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To do this Light Touch Entrepreneurship focuses on leveraging the power of currency, or in laymen’s terms, earning pounds but living on peso’s.

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Pounds or Dollars can be made to be worth 4-5 times the relative amount if living in a country where currency fluctuations are favorable. Light Touch Entrepreneurs therefore focuses on living in and using the currency of any country where the entrepreneur can gain maximum value from every pound and dollar they spend.

If I told you I could get you up to 500% interest on any money you may have, I guess you would be quick to point out that I was wrong. Your current investments may be earning you  5%, 10% or maybe even 15% interest and you are happy with it. Without more risk higher interests are not possible, right?

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I respectfully disagree, as 300% is easily achievable and I get it regularly on my savings.

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In Bangkok for example, my savings, even at todays vastly reduced rate are still worth around an average of 3-4 times what there are in England.   I have already got 4 times richer and live a lifestyle that reflects this, just by leaving the country.

The key to leveraging maximum value from currency differences is to ensure that you are earning or creating a stream of income of the more powerful currency but living on and spending the weaker currency.

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It’s amazing what one british pound will get you in Bangkok.

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This principle does not just apply to personal living but is also used to drastically reduce the costs involved in creating and running the revenue generating assets and businesses of the entrepreneur. By streamlining and outsourcing as much of the work as possible to countries where it is possible to gain the most currency leverage or “bang for your buck” the entrepreneur can substantially lower the start up costs and increase the net profits of their ventures.

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It is easy to hire 10 guys for the price of one using websites like www.elance.com.

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For any of you who doubt the quality of the work, I can say from personal experience that it is second to none. In many aspects far surpassing the more expensive options in reliability and quality.

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2. Harnessing the internet for global communication and outsourcing – Hiring 10 guys for the price of 1.

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The internet has revolutionised our world and has change the dynamics of business practice, social interaction and the entertainment industry, to name but a few.

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Light Touch Entrepreneurship focuses on maximising its power as an information source, communication tool and outsourcing instrument.

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The world is now very small and with advances in technology individuals nowadays have access to a global market place and a global workforce, as well as access to almost limitless information. Light Touch Entrepreneurship focuses on capitalising on these advances and using them to create their streamlined and automated cash generating assets.

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The core idea for Light Touch Entrepreneurship is to create these assets, ensure they can control them from a laptop and then remove themselves from the equation as soon as possible.

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The main goal of any venture is to ensure the entrepreneur becomes the least important person in that business as soon as possible, hence having a light touch in the business. Being the most important person in an organisation is great but by it’s very nature all decisions ultimately then need to be made by you and this does not give you freedom of time or generally location either.

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Light Touch Entrepreneurship is not about building empires where the entrepreneur is the central figure but instead is quite the opposite, where many and various assets run automatically with minimal control from the owner.

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This is the key to achieving the freedom of locality and the freedom of time.

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3. Applying The Pareto principle to all aspects of life and business – Doing a small part of the baking and getting most of the cake.

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You should venture over to the “5 Killer Rules For Effective Working” blog for more on the Pareto Principle.

The Pareto 80/20 Principle states that all things being equal 80% of your results/sales/income will come from 20% of your efforts/staff/business. If 20% of your effort is obtaining 80% of your rewards then this also means that 80% of your effort must be spent obtaining the last 20% of the rewards. Light Touch Entrepreneurship focuses on the 20% of effort that creates 80% of the results and happily accepts that the final 20% is not worth the 80% effort.

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This principle is not just applied to business but to all aspect of the Light Touch Entrepreneur’s life, substantially reducing the time employed in any given activity while still yielding 80% of the results.

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This ensures that the entrepreneur achieves all that they want out of life while substantially increasing the amount of free time they have available to them. Throughout their ventures and life, processes are evaluated and streamlined constantly using the Pareto 80/20 rule to get the most rewards from the minimal amount of effort.

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Sir, Madam. Would You Like Some Real Life Proof?

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This is just a summary and I wish to go into more detail on different aspects of Light Touch Living in future posts but just in case you think that this is not possible or cannot see the advantage, let me just highlight a few changes in my own life in the last few months.

Before

• Worked a 40-50 hour week stressful Project Management job
• Had limited time for a social life and was usually very tired.
• Became housebound.
• Didn’t go out for entertainment that often because of expense.
• Had very little time and energy to pursuit my own ideas and projects.

Now

• Work less than 6 hours a week
• Spend my mornings working on my business, the blog, swimming and reading. Spend the afternoons in cafe’s writing my two new novels. Spend the evenings running and out with friends at bars, clubs and entertainments. Spend my weekends traveling, scuba diving, elephant trekking etc.
• Have almost complete freedom.
• Spend a fraction of what I did in England doing substantially more.

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It Can Be Done

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I have used the above example, not to gloat, but to prove that it can be done and it really does pay. I have many more post planned explaining how I quit my job, set up the businesses that support me etc but if there is anything in particular you would like to know please leave me a comment and I’ll try and address it.

If you are interested in finding out how things are going then keep coming back to the blog or subscribe to thelifething.com feed. It would be good to have you as a reader.

And finally…I do actually wear pants.

The Top 10 Audio Books That Every Entrepreneur Must Listen To

By Joel on August 31, 2012

With a million and one things on an entrepreneur’s agenda, it is almost next to impossible to find the time to read a book from front to back. Well what if we told you that you don’t have to push hours aside and that you can even soak in all the knowledge of a wonderful read while you walk the dog, go for a jog or drive to work?

Well now you can with thesedownloadable audio books that come highly recommend for any entrepreneur looking at expanding their knowledge and taking their life and business to that next level.

The Top 10 Entrepreneur Audio Books

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries explains the best practices of how to discover customers for your ideas, how to plan/test/release your products to market and when to pivot.

A must read for every startuporganization.

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

The Willpower Instinct

One of the best Audio books to cover the topic of willpower. As much as I would love to listen to this book for the entire 8 and a half hours, there is just way too much to take in. This audio book has a lot of facts and scientific evidence which has already personally helped me strengthen my will power techniques.

This book is a must for any and everyone.

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

Rich Dad Poor Dad

Within the first few minutes of listening to this book you will realise why this is the #1 best selling financial book of all time with over 26 million copies sold. The knowledge from this masterpiece is too good to sleep on.

This audio book will change the way you make MONEY.

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

Derek Siver’s ‘Anything You Want’ is a manifesto about living life, appreciating enough, and doing what matters.

This book will help you reinforce a clearer intention about what you have planned for your future so that you can experience not only success but happiness for an overall well-rounded life.

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

Richard Branson: Losing My Virginity

Richard Bransons’s ‘Losing My Virginity’ is a great audio book that carries great entertainment and a fistful of knowledge. Branson is quite ambitious and this book shows how he lives his life the way he wants to while still creating a very successful empire.

This book is highly recommended for any entrepreneur who is interested in learning how to live the type of life Richard Branson has.

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

The 4-Hour Work Week

This audio book will show you how to successfully escape the 9-5, live anywhere and join the new rich.The author Tim Ferriss is an all out warrior when it comes to finding out the best way for you to achieve anything.

This book will change the way you live your life by showing you the most efficient ways to be successful yet relaxed in a demanding world.

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

Gary Vaynerchuk: Crush It!

Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love.

The electric & high energy persona of ‘Gary Vaynerchuk‘ will inspire you to take action NOW!

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

Do More Faster

The authors of this book run a well-respected program for high tech entrepreneurs, but even if you’re a not a software person, the tips in this book about starting, running, and planning a business are extremely valuable.

This book is rich with information, everything an entrepreneur needs to know to venture on.

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

Street Smarts

This audio book is an all purpose tool kit for entrepreneurs, packed with the authors 20 years of entrepreneurial experience.

If knowledge is power then this book is Super Charged!!

Click here to hear a preview or order this audio book

Business Card Etiquette (Around The World)

Self-moving gel lets material ‘talk to itself

U. PITTSBURGH (US) — Scientists have discovered a synthetic material that can rebuild itself through chemical communication.

"This study demonstrates the ability of a synthetic material to actually 'talk to itself' and follow out a given action or command, similar to such biological species as amoeba and termites," says researcher Anna Balazs. View larger. (Credit: U. Pittsburgh)

In a paper published in the January 8 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team demonstrates that a synthetic system can reconfigure itself through a combination of chemical communication and interaction with light.

Straight from the Source

Read the original study

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1213432110

Anna Balazs, principal investigator of the study and professor of chemical and petroleum engineering in the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, has long studied the properties of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) gel, a material first fabricated in the late 1990s and shown to pulsate in the absence of any external stimuli.

In a previous study, the team noticed that long pieces of gel attached to a surface by one end “bent” toward one another, almost as if they were trying to communicate by sending signals. This hint that “chatter” might be taking place led the team to detach the fixed ends of the gels and allow them to move freely.

Balazs and her team developed a 3D gel model to test the effects of the chemical signaling and light on the material. They found that when the gel pieces were moved far apart, they would automatically come back together, exhibiting autochemotaxis—the ability to both emit and sense a chemical, and move in response to that signal.

“This study demonstrates the ability of a synthetic material to actually ‘talk to itself’ and follow out a given action or command, similar to such biological species as amoeba and termites,” says Balazs.

“Imagine a Lego set that could by itself unsnap its parts and then put itself back together again in different shapes but also allow you to control those shapes through chemical reaction and light.”

“We find this system to be extremely exciting and important because it provides a unique opportunity to study autochemotaxis in synthetic systems,” says Olga Kuksenok, a member of the research team and research associate professor in the department of chemical engineering.

The National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported the research.

Source: University of Pittsburgh

A Showcase of Workstations that’ll Make You Jealous

Posted by Henry Jones

Whether you’re a designer, developer, animator, or blogger, your workstation plays a major role in how you get things done. Some of us like a neat, clean, and inspiring workspace, while others require a crazy over-the-top hardware configuration.

In this article, we’ve compiled a showcase of photos that will give you workstation envy. The thing about workstations is that even if you have a nice one, seeing another awesome setup can make you a bit jealous.

The Entrepreneur vs. The Strategy Consultant

The Entrepreneur is very different from the typical McKinsey-esque strategy consultant. Both are extremely smart, driven, persistent, creative, and determined. But I have found that there are some major differences.
    
First, entrepreneurs tend to take more ownership
of their jobs. My definition of an entrepreneur is someone who steals office supplies from homeand brings them to work.
 
Second, most entrepreneurs I know tend to be B students in college. The entrepreneur never got straight A's because either:
(a) She didn't care a lot about her grades, or
(b) She was too busy doing other things to worry about her grades.

I say "she" in this example, because most entrepreneurs are women. Far more than 50% of new businesses started in the U.S. are started by women. 

Entrepreneurs tend to be street-smarter than strategy consultants. Entrepreneurs are more practical, more focused on the bottom line, and more attuned to real-world contingencies.
 
A typical strategy consultant job interview might go something like this: 
 
"I toss a coin. Heads you win $10,000. Tails you lose $6,000. Do you play this game? Why?"

And a typical strategy consultant answer would go something like this:

50% chance I win, 50% chance I lose. So my decision calculation goes something like:

Winnings: (0.5) * $10,000 =  $5,000

Loses:    (0.5) * $6,000  =  $3,000

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My net value of this game is $2,000

Therefore, even if I am very risk averse, I'll still play this game, because I can afford to lose $6K when the payoff is so much higher.
 
A typical entrepreneur would look at this game totally differently and would ask a series of questions:  

* How do I know the coin is fair? Maybe tails is much more likely to come up. Can I test the coin by flipping it 500 times to see if it is consistent? Do I really want to waste my time performing and recording 500 coin tosses?

* How do taxes affect my wins and losses? Is Uncle Sam going to take a huge chunk of my winnings but not recognize my losses? Can I only apply my losses to gambling gains? How are state and city taxes affected?

* Do I have to pay in cash if I lose and do I get cash if I win? If that is the case, are we going to show up at the location with all the money? Will I be secure? Can I pay by credit card to get frequent flyer miles?

* How can I be sure I will collect from you? Are we going to hold the money in a third-party escrow? How much will that cost?

As you see, the entrepreneur lives much more in the rough-and-tumble real world where spreadsheet models don't always happen.
 
Let's take another interview question as an example - this one straight from a major strategy consulting firm:   

"You're flying from London to New York and you are sitting in first class (because we only fly first class, of course). You happen to be sitting next to the CEO of the largest paper-clip company in Britain who is traveling to the U.S. to give a speech. He needs to know how many paper-clips are sold in the United States ever year. What is your answer?"

The typical strategy consultant would use the basic plug-and-chug algorithm that every other smart interviewee would answer:

"Well ... there are 300 million people in the U.S. and they each buy on average one box of paper clips per year ... and they each get six legal documents per year ... but now less paper is being used than last year because of electronic mail and all of us consultants saving paper by writing everything landscape ... so therefore there are 2.79 gazillion
paper clips sold each year ..."

The entrepreneur responds much differently:

* What about those plastic triangle clips? Binder clips? Do they count?

* Mr. CEO -- can I ask you how many paper clips are sold in Britain? Why would Americans use more paper clips per capita than Brits? UK has about 60 million people, the U.S. has about 300 million - that means we are about 5x bigger than you. So take the number of paper clips sold in Britain and multiply it by 5 and voila!!

* This guy is an idiot ... He's in the paper clip business and he doesn't even know the number of paper clips sold in the U.S.! Is he just playing golf all day?? I hope he goes to the bathroom soon so I can call log-on to my E*TRADE account and short this guy's stock. No time to waste ... 

Top 5 funding mistakes by entrepreneurs

ANGEL INVESTOR | ENTREPRENEURS | FUNDING | STARTUPS

– Adam Hoeksema is the founder and CEO of startup consultancy firm ExecutivePlan. This article appeared onUnder30CEO. The views expressed are his own. –

For most entrepreneurs these days, funding is nearly impossible to come by.

According to the report titled, “Important Things for Entrepreneurs to Know about Angel Investors” and distributed by the Angel Capital Education Foundation, only 1 to 4 percent of applicants successfully raise angel investment capital. So before you ruin your chance at securing investors, make sure you have not committed any of the following deadly mistakes.

1. Wait until you need it. So many entrepreneurs make the mistake of waiting until they need the capital “tomorrow” to begin the process of seeking funding. Make no mistake about it, the process of raising capital can take months and months. Even a simple loan will require enough paperwork to kill a small tree. Ironically bankers and investors are more likely to provide you with additional capital when you don’t need it. So don’t wait until you have an immediate need to begin the funding process.

2. Submit a full business plan. Another great way to get your funding application thrown in the trash is to submit an unsolicited, full business plan. An investor or banker is not going to waste two hours to read through an entire business plan with your initial funding request. Submit a short executive summary, then if you are asked to submit a full business plan – great. Just don’t start with your business plan.

3. Claim “conservative” projections. It can be a major turn off to some investors and bankers when you call your financial projections “conservative.” Of course you think your projections are conservative, but the fact of the matter is that many, if not most, businesses fail within a few years of launch. If every entrepreneur’s projections were truly conservative, then why are so many small businesses unsuccessful at reaching their projections? Don’t let yourself sound ignorant. Simply state your projections and let the bankers or investors make their own judgment.

4. No next step. Maybe you get a chance to submit an executive summary to a potential investor or even recite an elevator pitch to an interested banker. This is a golden opportunity that can be worthless if you fail to outline a clear next step. For instance, in your executive summary you should request a meeting or a phone call as a clear next step. If you simply end your elevator pitch without a clear next step, your audience will quickly forget your funding needs.

5. No follow up. Don’t just assume that a potential investor will follow up with you if they are interested. They may want to gauge your commitment by waiting for you to follow up. Give the investor a couple of days to review your executive summary, but make sure to follow up before you fall of their radar screen.

Keep these potential deal breakers in the forefront of your mind as you begin the funding process for your small business.

SLAVE WAGES

What is a wage slave?

What is a wage slave?

So what exactly IS a wage slave, anyway? It's doubtful that you'd be exploring this web site if you didn't have some idea at least, but for the sake of ease, we'll clarify further.

Here are some brief and incomplete definitions from CLAWS members:

"Wage slavery is the state where you are unable to perceive choices and create courses of action different from the grind of the job."

"Wage slave: A wage earner whose livelihood is completely dependent on the wages earned."

The point here, of course, is that we don't have a single agreed-upon definition of wage slavery. Many of us prefer to focus on wage slavery as a state of mind, while others prefer to focus on the external aspects of wage slavery such as the wage economy. But overall, we seem to sense something rotten at the core of what we've been taught about "making a living", and that's the place to begin our questioning.
Have you ever noticed how many of us seem to live "lives of quiet desperation", as Henry David Thoreau puts it? We feel trapped by forces beyond our control, trapped in a mindless job, for the sake of money, status or recognition. We complain that we never seem to have the time for what's really important to us, because our jobs take so much energy and focus that we hardly have anything left over. We plod along day to day; sometimes we even dread getting out of bed in the morning.
We see the futility of the standard, socially approved path in America. It goes something like this: Go to school, get good grades, so you can get a "good" job, make lots of money, get a mortgage and a car and a spouse, keep up with the Joneses, and be "successful". We know it's not the path for us; we want to define success for ourselves. But we don't know how to forge a new path for ourselves, because, well, what would we do for money if we quit? How would we support ourselves? Sometimes there's a glazed look in our eyes; it's as if some part of us has died. We are just doing time, working hard and hoping for the next promotion, waiting for the day when we can throw off our shackles, quit our dull jobs, and finally live life. Everything gets put on hold until we have more time, or more money. Meanwhile, life is passing us by.
Perhaps you are one of these people. If so, CLAWS was created for your benefit. We have news for you: You do not have to live your life that way. CLAWS is here to inspire you to greater fulfillment, and to help you figure out how to get out of the endless cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and feeling chained to a job you don't care about.
We have other news, too: It won't necessarily be the easiest thing you've ever done. You have a choice, but you may have to re-examine your way of thinking very thoroughly. The pull of the socially accepted way of doing things is amazingly strong, and trips up the best of us despite our good intentions. It takes a certain kind of independent thinker to be "job-free". We use that term rather than "unemployed", in an effort to convey to people that we're proud, not ashamed, of not having regular jobs. We also make an important distinction between jobs and work. All of us do some kind of work, though not necessarily for monetary compensation.
Another thing you'll need if you decide to rethink your beliefs about jobs and money is the willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. It will take perseverence, and a commitment to throw out the limiting beliefs you may have unwittingly adopted. This is not the path for everyone. If your priority is comfort or social approval, or if you're the sort of person who doesn't rock the boat, CLAWS probably won't meet your needs.
If you embark on this path, it's important to know what it will ask of you. It may require you to disassemble, dissect, and tear apart your old beliefs, let go of some mighty persistent and tempting illusions, and build a new foundation for your thinking, sometimes from scratch. Are you prepared to do this? If so, you're in the right place.
Even if you have seen through the false sense of "security" a normal job offers you, and already questioned that approach to life, you may not really believe you can do it. You may still have questions about how to bridge the gap from the old way of life to a new one that you envision. That's where we can help, dear reader. CLAWS would like to see you devote yourself to the life you've dreamed of, the life your heart desires. We don't want to see you waste your precious days any longer. Life is short, and the time to pursue your dreams is NOW.


In the words of Norman Cousins: 

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

"The debt and work cycle is an ingenious tool of subjugation. Make people think they need all these things, then they must have a job, and they give up control of their lives. It's as simple as that. We live in one of the most free countries in the world, but we fix it so we are not free at all. "
- Larry Roth

"Capitalism only supports certain kinds of groups, the nuclear family for example, or 'the people I know at my job', because such groups are already self-alienated & hooked into the Work/Consume/Die structure."
- Hakim Bey

"Supposing we suddenly imagine a world in which nearly everybody is doing what they want. Then we don't need to be paid in order to work and the whole issue of how money circulates, how we get things done, suddenly alters."
- Robert Theobald

"When survival or mere subsistence is at stake, a society can focus only on the overwhelming needs of the moment, and questions of meaningful work and leisure are considered purely academic. But we believe that the world has enough wealth to move all of humanity above survival and subsistence."
- Alfonso Montuori & Isabella Conti, From Power to Partnership: Creating the Future of Love, Work, and Community