Category: Travel

The Best Self-Help Book I’ve Ever Read

Nik

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”

5:00 AM. The alarm rings. I pull the blinders forward with two fingers and peer outside. It’s there. I get up, stumble into the bathroom and throw some cold water into my face.

Then, I open the back door right in front of my room and step outside. The wind is freezing, but it’s worth it. Ahh, the sunrise. Across the parking lot, the sky is glowing. The clouds are deep red.

After gazing at it for a couple of minutes, I go inside again, right back to bed. I pull out my iPad and start to read.

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Digital Nomad Cover

Digital Settler: The Healthy Alternative to Being a Digital Nomad

Nik

“If you need to take a vacation, never come back.”

— Joel Salatin

It feels almost weird to acknowledge it: I make a full-time income using nothing but a laptop and an internet connection. I wasn’t born to be an entrepreneur, so growth’s been slow, but for the past four years, I’ve made a very livable amount of money for a single dude in his 20s.

I first learned about this new-rich, digital lifestyle in 2012. Back then, I painted the same picture in my daydreams that must decorate millions of desktop backgrounds around the globe: a chair on the beach, an ice-cold drink, and a laptop on my lap. But then, something interesting happened: I got the travel without the work.

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124 Startup Lessons From Staring Into a Fireplace Cover

124 Startup Lessons From Staring Into a Fireplace

Nik

On March 28th, 2018, I boarded a plane that would take me to a magical place. After we landed, our local host picked us up and another 2-hour drive down the rabbit hole of rural Romania later, we arrived at the cabin. The next 48 hours were dedicated to our first in-person retreat as a mastermind group.

Next to yours truly, there’s Franz Sauerstein who helps WooCommerce stores earn more and Ovi Negrean, who runs the social media automation startup SocialBee. Between exploring the local cuisine, tossing rocks into a lake — you know, just guy stuff — and learning about the country, we took turns brainstorming our most pressing business or career issues. We settled on one issue each and then broke it down in a 90-minute deep dive.

Whatever mountain you want to scale in your life, occasionally, you just need to stop, stand where you are and stare up the mountain. Reassess the chosen path. To think you need time, but you also need space. Sometimes, it helps if that space is in the middle of nowhere at the other end of the world.

The cabin, the woods, the lake, the food, it all sparked our creativity and got us into the right mindset. But the most fascinating element? The fireplace. Temperatures were still low, especially at night, so all of us were responsible for keeping the house warm and smoky around the clock. On the last night before we left, we sat around it, poured ourselves some wine, and stared quietly into the glimmer for some time. As the flames started dwindling, Ovi picked up the poker, turned one of the logs, and voilà, the fire rose again.

“Ha! Nothing like a good old pivot to shake things up. Just like a startup,” he exclaimed. “I guess,” I said, “and if you don’t keep adding logs, eventually it’ll die. Also like a startup.” Our faces lit up the way only those of buzzed creatives can. “100 things we learned about startups from a fire?” Franz opens his laptop in the background. “Let’s do it!”

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The Most Important Lesson From Stephen King Is Not One About Writing Cover

The Most Important Lesson From Stephen King Is Not One About Writing

Nik

In the early 70s, Stephen King had just graduated college with a teacher’s degree. He was recently married, had two kids, and no money. Unable to find a teaching job in small town Maine, he worked at New Franklin Laundry. In On Writing, part memoir, part writing advice, he shares what it was like:

“The greater part of what I loaded and pulled were motel sheets from Maine’s coastal towns and table linen from Maine’s coastal restaurants. The table linen was desperately nasty. When tourists go out to dinner in Maine, they usually want clams and lobster. Mostly lobster.

By the time the tablecloths upon which these delicacies had been served reached me, they stank to high heaven and were often boiling with maggots. The maggots would try to crawl up your arms as you loaded the washers; it was as if the little fuckers knew you were planning to cook them.

I thought I’d get used to them in time but I never did. The maggots were bad; the smell of decomposing clams and lobster-meat was even worse. Why are people such slobs? I would wonder, loading feverish linens from Testa’s of Bar Harbor into my machines. Why are people such fucking slobs?”

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A Plug & Play Life: How To Access Your Data From Anywhere Cover

A Plug & Play Life: How To Access Your Data From Anywhere

Nik

In Germany, there’s this running joke. If someone comes up to you holding a phone with a smashed screen — which looks like a web — you can make a smug face and ask: “Did you download the Spider-Man app?”

While a lot of screen-broken phones still work after their near-fatal fracture, some don’t, and the survivors won’t last long. Yet, people hang on to them, partly because repair and replacement costs suck, but mostly, because moving their life to a new device is a painful process. That’s right. Life.

Most of your identity is digital. Photos, videos, music, wallet, voice messages, chat history, social activity, it’s all on your phone and laptop. Same goes for your work. Whether you’re on one device as a freelancer or spread across multiple PCs in the office and at home, chances are you could get little done offline. Even a huge chunk of your leisure time takes place in 1s and 0s.

That’s mostly a good thing. It saves time, space, and energy to access most of what you need through one or two devices. What’s not so great is that it makes those devices so-called single points of failure.

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6 Unwritten Social Rules Everyone Should Know Cover

6 Unwritten Social Rules Everyone Should Know

Nik

When you drive into Area 51, past the sign that says “Restricted Area,” you know what rules you’re violating. You’re trespassing on secret government property, you can be searched, photos are forbidden and boy, you better not launch any drones.

But there’s also a set of unwritten rules of Area 51. Nobody knows exactly what they are, but they’re what leads to all the rumors and myths surrounding the place.

  • Will you never come back?
  • Will you come back, but not be the same?
  • Can you ever talk about what happened?

Every place on this earth is like Area 51. There are rules, written and unwritten, and they depend on the time, the people, the country, the culture, the politics, and a whole lot of other values.

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Battery Life Hacks: All You Need To Know Cover

Battery Life Hacks: All You Need To Know

Nik

I really didn’t want my phone to die, because if it did, so might I. At least it was a sunny day. I was standing atop Yellow Rock in the middle of nowhere, Utah, looking out at the vast, beautiful, savannah-like landscape and…totally lost.

The marvelous red, yellow and orange lines were so mesmerizing, I’d lost sight of my trail. Wriggling their way through the rock like snakes, I traced them all the way to the horizon. The sun was starting to set, my snacks and OJ were empty and my phone was running low.

“I wonder how much they charge for the rescue chopper…”

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