There are opportunities all around

Be Different












I can see that there are opportunities all around us. Unfortunately, I've missed quite a few this month.

June's opportunities

Working on English Camps, new experience, good rate of pay and different to my day to day job - missed

Entering a travel competition with a realistic chance of getting to next round. This one was also missed, mainly because I left it to the last minute. I'll see about other competitions as I think they are great motivators for improvement. I found myself looking at other entries, being inspired by their ideas and wondering how I could do things better.

On the positive side.

I didn't miss every chance. Last night I started a conversation on the bus home, purely to practice my Chinese. If I can make this a habit then I'll get a lot more practice of speaking Chinese. I've also started 'classes' with a friend that has been very useful too.

And I got my first article off to Matador Travel, which got refused because there was another article similar to it. Lesson to learn - use more keywords to found what they have on their database.

Why Travel?

Why eat? Because it’s essential to your body! So why travel, because it’s essential to living, to growing, to your mind. It can give you insights to the world, to other people as well as yourself that sitting in a cubicle or reading a book won’t give you.

If life is all about experiences then travel is the ultimate experience rich medium. Exotic locations, different people, continuously changing situations and challenges face you.

You learn, or is it, relearn to appreciate things. Simple things start giving you pleasure again; like eating a new fruit, seeing a waterfall, walking through a forest, hearing a foreign language and getting up for sunrise.

In truth you can have many of these pleasures at home but the business of life and time has the effect of closing ourselves and our senses to these things. When you travel many of these senses reawake. You feel alive, you start to be creative, you deal with problems and you get along with people, most of them anyway.

There are some experiences that you can’t have at home or are just simple better when you go traveling. These include exploring other cultures, learning a foreign language, studying meditation with an Indian guru (maybe in New York or London) and this is just the tip of one gigantic iceberg.

Some experiences I had so far whilst traveling.

• 17 day trek in Nepal – changed my view of trekking and reconnected me with my inner child that fantasized about climbing icy peaks and walking across the Antarctic.
• Disastrous climb of Adam’s peak – taught me many valuable lessons about getting prepared for trekking and big challenges.
• 2 day white water rafting in Nepal
• Teaching English in a Jungle Refugee camp in Thailand – an amazing experience that taught me how resilient people can be.
• Climbing Santa Maria, Guatemala, to witness a mini explosion of her side cone, which sent a plume of smoke about a kilometer into the air – simply awesome!
• Gate crashing a Halloween Party at an Intercontinental in Columbia, when we weren’t even suppose to be in the country
• Being freaked out in Burma (Myanmar) by the terrible political situation there.
• Two weeks of hedonistic indulgence in Goa

This is why I want to break free from work and go traveling again. This time with a view of making money to sustain it and to experiment with different styles of traveling.

A New Reality

I find myself in a brand new siutation. Last week I had the hours to build up my savings for travel. This week I don't. I've lost 8 teaching hours and have gone from being able to save a lot to just covering my costs.

When I heard the news, I felt depressed and panicky. I feared that I wouldn't make my saving targets and that either I would have to work longer to get there or I'll end up teaching English again after my travels.

Since then, I've reviewed the situation and am now happy that I have the extra time. I can still break even from teaching English and now I have more time to build up other sources of income. Despite having just 8 hours less, I figured that this reduction gives me an extra 12 hours per week (preparation time and gaps between classes). This is excellent.

I plan to use the extra time for;

Travel Writing - aim to do writing related work for two hours per day.
Photography - to increase my microstock portfolio and improve my images.
Photoshop - to see how I can use this to improve the performance of my photo stock.
Chinese - to do at least one listening exercise a day and be more outgoing with my Chinese.

I'm glad that I dealt with my fear and that my 'child' of an entrepreneur is growing up. Yes, there are problems in life but there are plenty more solutions to them. It's all part of growing.

How I gave up smoking for FREE

How I gave up smoking - a little at first, delaying the first cigarette of each day but this eventually lead to a great end result. I now haven't smoked a cigarette for over 10 years.

What brought this memory back was reading 'The Power of Less: Changing Behavior with Leo Babauta' on the 'Four Hour Working Week' blog.

This suggests concentrating on changing one habit at a time, over a period of a month. The article says changing more than one habit at a time is counter productive. It also said that starting small and gradually make the challenge bigger leads to more success as you get many more successes behind you this way.

This rang true with how I quit smoking

I was in Thailand, with about a month's money left before I needed to returned to the UK. I was smoking between 10 and 15 cigarettes a day, more if I went out drinking. It was my first time to spend many months travelling and I loved it very much. Which got me thinking, how to save the money to go traveling again? Quitting was a good option as cigarettes were about 5 pounds a packet back at home, ten times the price they were in Thailand. This made me feel that smoking was daylight robbery in the UK.

I guess that how I started, with a strong vision.... I'll go travelling again, something which I really wanted to do. I also felt passionate about it as I didn't want to give my money away to the UK government.

But despite this strong vision I didn't stop straight away

Here's how I did it;

• I created a powerful reason for giving up. Also that reason was an award.
• I smoked my first cigarette of the day at a later time each day. If I did this then the day was a success. The amount of time didn't matter, so as long as it was later.
• I also couldn't smoke any more cigarettes then the day before. Even if I smoked the same number of cigarettes as the day before but smoked the first cigarette later; the day was still a success.
• I did this over a period of about two to three weeks until I run out of time and 'number' of cigarettes to smoke.

I haven't smoked since.

I think the good thing about this approach is that I won in my battle against smoking everyday for 2-3 weeks before I actually stopped smoking. With this success behind me, I was able to continue despite being in a country where cigarettes were cheap and there were plenty of opportunities to go out and party. And I did.

By the time I got back to the UK, I had already stopped for more than 7 days and was able to resist starting again.

Here's the link to Leo's article on how to change habits.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/01/07/the-power-of-less-leo-babauta-zen-habits/

I'll have to use this method to change some other bad habits that I have and to start some good habits.

I would love to hear from you.

How did you give up? Or are you giving up or want to give up smoking?

The images are ones I took, if you're interested in using them, please leave a comment and a contact email.