Chris Guillebeau has taken an unconventional path to an exceptional career. Growing up with some unique travel experiences under his belt, including a move to the Philippines at six years old and volunteering in Sierra Leone as a young adult, helped open his mind to the world around him and deeply impacted his worldview.
After the tragedy of 9/11 Chris decided to volunteer in one of the most challenging areas in the world. He was having success in the conventional sense but felt that something was missing. Traveling to volunteer was an opportunity to find meaning and do something positive. This quest to add value to the lives of others and apply his travel experiences in a meaningful way, combined with his dissatisfaction of adhering to status quo career paths, his desire to work for himself and his need to always look forward culminated in him launching his blog The Art of Non-Conformity which grew from a small project documenting his travels to a movement of thousands of people creating unconventional lives.
Chris has since helped people everywhere succeed off the beaten path with his endeavors in entrepreneurship, including growing his blog, writing four books, and hosting the annual “World Domination Summit,” all while achieving his self-set side goal of visiting all 193 countries before his 35th birthday!
On this episode, we talk to Chris about what inspired him to travel and start his blog, how travel can change your worldview and vision, and the importance of knowing yourself and setting goals that you feel passionately about, as opposed to following someone else’s system because it worked for them.
Enjoy!
In this episode:
- Chris’s formative travel experiences, including his childhood, move to the Phillippines, traveling to Asia and his time volunteering in Sierra Leone as a young adult
- How travel changed Chris’s worldview and allowed him to unintentionally stumble upon a career path he thrived in
- The start of Chris’s travel journey being rooted in the need to do something good in the world after 9/11
- How four years in what was the poorest country in the world at the time, and traveling the surrounding area changed Chris’s worldview, and how it helped establish travel as a value that Chris continued to center his life around
- How starting his journey in a more challenging region of the world to travel prepared Chris to be able to better manage travel logistics to achieve his goal of visiting every country in the world before his 35th birthday
- The beauty of travel for travel’s sake: how traveling to experience travel and new things can be equally as rewarding as traveling with a set goal or quest, and how these goals can sometimes arise from the travel itself
- If you are going to set a travel goal or personal challenge for yourself, ensure it’s your own goal and speaks to you rather than follow someone else’s belief
- Chris’s thought process on deciding how to apply his collective travel experiences, and the decision to launch “The Art of Non-Conformity” during his time at grad school in Seattle
- Created the blog to create community and idea space for people who were interested in and valued nonconventional strategies for life, work and travel. The business portion of the blog came after this was established
- The importance of finding and pursuing what excites you as opposed to the traditional routes in your field, how this will make you unique and how your passion will show through and connect you to the right audience
- How Chris knew he wanted to integrate his work with travel to allow him to travel long term in a sustainable way, and how creating value for others through his blog allowed Chris to fulfill this dream and work for himself
- Advice to people who want to integrate travel with work and entrepreneurship long term, including enjoying your experiences, avoiding desperation, and starting on your passion project even if it’s not 100% perfect
- The feeling of reward you get when making a sale from a product or service you’ve created through your entrepreneurial endeavor, even in cases where it’s smaller than your paycheck
- Chris’s new daily podcast “Side Hustle School” and how he found his podcasting niche
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This episode is brought to you by Praxis. Praxis is the future of education, a 9-month program with a 6-month apprenticeship at a startup. It is education, without schooling. If you are 17 to 25 and ready to break free of the conventional path, go to discoverpraxis.com
Music Credits:
www.bensound.com
Connect with Chris on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or on LinkedIn. You can also visit the “Art of Non-Conformity” blog and Facebook page!
To learn more about Chris’s philosophy and what we discussed in the episode, check out the infographics below you can share to Pinterest!
Digital Nomad Life: Exploring Non-Conformity to Find your Passion: Chris Guillebeau and the Beauty of Travel
Welcome to the World Wanderers podcast, your source for travel stories, travel destinations, and travel philosophy. We are your hosts Ryan and Amanda, and we will be taking you on today’s adventure as we speak with this week’s guest.
In this week’s episode, we are chatting with Chris Guillebeau, a fellow digital nomad with an amazing life journey that he shares with the world.
Chris is an author and an entrepreneur who decided to dedicate his entire life to helping others while making the entire world his home.
His nomadic lifestyle has been very successful, and quite impressive considering the number of countries he has visited so far!
Since we had so much to talk about, to cover it all up we interviewed Chris about his passion for travel, where it all started, how he keeps pushing his mission, and what it takes to create the path of life on your own rather than following somebody else’s.
Chris is someone who we were inspired by when starting our journey, and we hope this interview will do the same to our audience as well!
Chris’s formative travel experiences, including his childhood, move to the Phillippines, traveling to Asia and his time volunteering in Sierra Leone as a young adult
We start off as always, already curious to find out about the beginnings of his nomadic journey, more specifically his very first travels.
He first traveled at six years old, when he moved to the Philippines with his parents. He says this experience had a big impact on his journey later on, even without realizing that at the time.
“I think, first of all, it was forced on me when I was a kid and I was six years old. I was moved to the Philippines, by my mom and stepdad. And we were there for two years and, looking back, it was a good experience at the time. I don’t think I appreciated it fully because I was six, but I do think it was helpful.”
His nomadic nature carries on to show through his whole life, especially when he reached adulthood and decided to start volunteering in different countries.
“And then when I was a young adult, I was about 22 years old and I had spent a little time in Asia. Not a lot, not as much as you guys. And I had traveled maybe a bit in Europe, but around that time I committed to go and volunteer in west Africa. And so that experience was kind of like first full-on immersive cross-cultural, as an adult.”
He had already traveled to a bunch of destinations by the time he made this big decision, but this was the event that turned his whole life around. He covers that more in-depth later on in the interview, and shares what inspired him to do it.
“That kind of inspired a lot of stuff that came later in travel in life in entrepreneurship. So it was that decision that I think kind of was the starting point for everything that came.”
The start of Chris’s travel journey being rooted in the need to do something good in the world after 9/11
He touches on a subject, that is the turning point in his life, surrounding the 9/11 event that inspired him to start doing more good in this world. He says that this opened up his eyes and made him want to respond by making a difference.
So, his first step was doing research and finding out what is the poorest country in the world so he could start somewhere. He found out that it is Sierra Leone, and naturally, the next step led him to this exact place.
“You know, at the time, this is going back when 9/11 had just happened in the US, so I was kind of depressed, like a lot of Americans and other people around the world as well. So for me, it was like, what is an expression? What is the appropriate response? How can I do something positive to make a difference in the world? And so I googled the poorest country in the world, and that was Sierra Leone at the time.”-Chris.
He found it extreme to move there and volunteer for free, but the need to do something good and beneficial was stronger than anything, he says. He was motivated and driven, and luckily he made the decision to go there, which changed his life dramatically.
“If I’m going to volunteer, I want the most extreme thing. That’s kind of how my whole life has gone, you know, I always want the extremes. And so that was that, I’m so glad I did it because it changed my life for the better.” -Chris.
How traveling changed Chris’s worldview, and how it helped establish travel as a value that Chris continued to center his life around
Having gone to this place completely changed his outlook on life, and on the world generally, and he feels very fortunate that he was able to do it.
“I do feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to travel and somehow forge a career out of it. And it wasn’t necessarily an intentional thing for me. It wasn’t super strategic. Stumbled in on it.” -Chris.
The most interesting part of it is that it was never strategic, it’s like he stumbled upon it. And luckily for him, it was where he found his passion, which continued to develop into something much bigger – practically his entire life.
“Partly my worldview has changed and challenged and changed and evolved. But then also travel kind of became this huge thing for me and became this value that I centered around a lot of the rest of my life around…” -Chris.
The goal of visiting every country in the world before his 35th birthday
After experiencing travel in such a way, Chris realized how many other places and unknown destinations there are, that he has yet to experience. So, he decided to make a list of all the places he’s been to.
Having visited only thirty countries, he initially set a goal for himself to visit a hundred. And once he did that and started working on it, he saw how easy it actually is to move to a different place, if you really wish to do so.
“One day I made a list of my countries and I was like 30 countries.
That’s interesting. And then I set a goal of going to a hundred countries. So I started working on that and then I realized, it’s not that difficult to go to a lot of different places. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, I have to do it.” -Chris.
So, it became a big quest to hit the milestone of visiting every country in the world before his 35th birthday!
“I said, okay, I’m going to go to every country in the world. And at that point, I’d been to maybe 70 or 80 countries. I said, my deadline is on my 35th birthday, five years from now.” -Chris.
Chris’s thought process on deciding how to apply his collective travel experiences, and the decision to launch “The Art of Non-Conformity”
A bit further on his path, Chris realized what he was gaining through his intensive nomadic journeys, and naturally, the question of what to do with all this information and experience popped up in front of him.
“How do I take all these different experiences that I’ve been fortunate to have? You’ve been fortunate to have all these experiences. For me, when I was in that place, the question was, what do I do with it?” -Chris.
He wanted to be able to use all this knowledge and insight from his traveling and incorporate it and apply it to something useful. This is where the idea for his current blog was born!
He shares the entire process that he went through while trying to figure it all out, which he admits is something he is currently still processing and figuring out as he goes along.
It is no surprise this has been successful for him so far, and he perfectly combined everything he wanted to incorporate into one amazing platform for people who want to learn and get inspired to start living his way of life – as the title of his blog explains, The Art Of Non-Conformity.
“Well, you know, how do I combine all that stuff? Or at least create the next level or the next iteration of whatever it is that I’m trying to accomplish. So it took a long time to figure out what it was. That’s why I said it was like a year and a half of thinking. And then even after I started the blog, I don’t think I knew. I think it took a lot of steps after that too.” -Chris.
The importance of finding and pursuing what excites you
Chris shares the importance of finding and pursuing your passions, and how this was one of the biggest lessons he learned through his nomadic life.
If you can find a middle ground between your passions and dreams, or what excites you most and other people’s benefits from that, you are on the right path to success!
“I think it’s all about finding the overlap between those things that you are the most excited about, motivated for, and then also what other people want to learn from or what they want to experience through you… I think whenever you max out that intersection, that’s when you’re going to be the most successful.” -Chris.
How Chris knew he wanted to integrate his work with travel to allow him to travel long term sustainably, and how creating value for others through his blog allowed Chris to fulfill this dream and work for himself
In addition to this, he follows up on his own realizations of how he figured out that travel and entrepreneurship were the two things he wanted to intertwine and build a life out of.
“So I kind of stumbled into working for myself the same way I stumbled into travel. It’s not like I said, I want to raise my hand and I want to be an entrepreneur when I grow up.” -Chris.
Similarly as with travel, finding his dream career which provides a sustainable life came completely unexpected but turned out to be the best thing ever. Things shifted naturally for Chris, by just simply doing what he loves, constantly exploring and traveling, with a strong drive to help and educate people.
“It’s not like I didn’t want to work. I enjoyed working. I just had to find something that I wanted to work on… So for me, I was more interested in finding an integrated way to do these things, as opposed to another model where people work for a while and then they go and travel for a while and then they come back and work. That’s good for some people, of course, but for me, I wanted something that was just completely integrated between the two things.” -Chris.
Advice to people who want to integrate travel with work and entrepreneurship long term
Toward the end of our discussion with Chris, we were eager to hear some of the advice he could give since he is someone a lot of people can learn from.
As a first, he advises everyone ready to start their digital nomad life, to appreciate every step of the way, and enjoy everything as much as they can. In creating such a lifestyle, it is important to find balance and satisfaction in the things that you are doing to maintain everything.
“I would say, first steps are, especially if you’re out there traveling, appreciate the experience. I mean, hold onto it because you will remember that later. And then, try to get yourself in a place where you’re not in desperation because that’s difficult.” -Chris.
It’s crucial to sit back and enjoy the ride for a while and learn how to be sustainable.
Patience is also important, but it would be nothing if we don’t pair it with the courage to reach a point where we are no longer afraid to take big steps and make these life-changing decisions toward building a digital nomad life.
“I would encourage that person to get to that point as soon as possible. Probably before they feel ready. And if they’re not making a full-time income or whatever, because that’s not usually how it works, still get to that point! And then from there, a lot of possibilities and opportunities tend to open up, and then you might be able to get more creative about what is that sustainable path for you.” -Chris.
Chris’s new daily podcast “Side Hustle School” and how he found his podcasting niche
And lastly, we open up the newest chapter in his book, which is his new podcast. We find out how that project came to life and the inspiration behind it.
“So I have learned from your example because you guys have been podcasting for far longer than me. I decided to catch up and started a podcast.” -Chris.
His recent book tour sparked the idea to develop this platform, where he talks about side hustles available for people with less flexible careers – like the many he saw on that tour.
The name of the podcast Side Hustle School is self-explanatory, and it’s definitely worth checking out.
“I had to figure out what was unique and different about mine. Last year on the book tour I would talk about side hustles for maybe two minutes or something, but then half the questions I got afterward, at least 50% were about side hustles. And I kind of saw that people responded to that… It was out of that experience that I created Side Hustle School, which is a daily podcast… “ -Chris.
Last Words
Travel is so much more than just seeing places, it’s about discovering what you truly love and what makes you feel alive. It’s a constant self-discovery.
Chris’s story and his four books, successful website, podcast, and startup are completely support that.
He has so many stories and things to share with the world, that it’s best to check it all out by yourself.
We hope that scratching the surface of Chris’ extraordinary story was enough inspiration for you to dive in even deeper and get motivated to start living your own nomadic journey. As cliche as it sounds, everything indeed starts with one single step!