Mind the Beginner

As promised yesterday I’m going to give you another great resource: a list of fears those aspiring to become location independent suffer from and a list of the fears the already independent suffer from.

There are a few recurring themes in these two lists that were composed using the recent Location Independent and Digital Nomad Survey.

Without to much beating around the bush I’m going to give you the results, broken down into a few categories. This post might be rather boring to the casual reader but I’m sure there are plenty of you who see this lost for what it is, a treasure, a wealth of information that you can use. So what exactly are the fears that live in our community?

Let’s look at the aspiring Location Independent first:

In the knowledge department:

• A lack of knowledge (how to’s)
• Failure (this one comes back dozens of times)
• That this doesn’t work out
• Worry that I will have given up everything for something that isn’t as great as I have built it up to be
• Being less well informed (currently working in a newsroom)

Travel:

• Encountering legal issues abroad
• Being so enamored with a foreign place that I won’t be disciplined enough to work
• What to do with all my stuff, I’m not a light packer
• Getting taken advantage of
• Loosing focus or loosing interest in my work in favor of travel
• I will have to reduce my wardrobe!
• Being stranded
• Safety in third world countries
• Political unrest

Regarding money and business:

• Not having/earning enough money (a common fear)
• Failing to maintain that income/long term income stability (another common fear)
• Not being able to handle state-side matters
• The business drying up
• Losing clients
• Having no nest-egg for retirement
• Procrastination
• Money management (don’t want to rely on relatives for that)
• Connections and communication
• Not being able to get on the Internet

Social and family issues:

• Not being home quick enough if a loved one is dying (This actually is my biggest fear)
• Being away from family
• Solitude/loneliness/home sick/being isolated and alone
• Never finding a partner/inability to form deep relationships
• No home base to come back to and relax
• Feelings of detachment
• Lack of face to face social interaction with colleagues
• Being away from my children
• That my wife will get tired of the travel
• That my spouse won’t be happy
• Leaving family behind
• Getting sick or getting into trouble and not having my family with me
• That my fiance will not truly believe we can achieve this life and that ultimately it will lead to the breakdown of our relationship
• Keeping in touch with friends and family
• Judgemental family
• People’s reactions

Other issues:

• Taking to long to get back to it (former LIP)
• Not getting to the point of LIP
• Health insurance
• Being your own safety net
• Work taking over
• Missing out on the fun things that I’m doing right now
• Being forced to return home against my will and search for depressing work in a depressed economy

So far the list of the aspiring location independent. There are a few recurring themes in this list don’t you think? A quick scan tells me it boils down to knowledge (and lack of), insecurity in travel and earnings, loneliness, being away from family and friends and the fear of being unplugged (no Internet).

Now let’s have a look at the fears the Location Independent suffer from. Yes, these people suffer from fear too, they live the life we dream of, is that life a nightmare? I think not, as we saw yesterday it’s hard work though but worth it. There are a few fears here as well that keep coming back. Here is the list, again in a few categories:

Money issues:

• The costs and not making enough income
• Not having the income anymore and having to stop traveling
• Making expensive mistakes
• The money tap will stop
• Not making enough money to fund our old age

The Business

• Being out of touch when a client needs me
• Lack of trust (and therefore business) from clients
• Others thinking I’m not working because I’m not “on site”
• Losing it

Technical dependency:

• Internet failures/hackers
• Forgetting a power cord – seriously
• The Internet dies
• Loss of equipment leading to loss of work information
• Laptop crashing

The downside of the location and travel:

• Large scale disasters and being stuck in a third world country
• Visas.
• Brisbane’s abysmal broadband service
• A plane crash
• Border control
• Health issues in developing countries
• The weather
• Visa issues: That I live abroad illegally and get deported
• That we’ll get bored with it, or that life will become nothing more than cheap thrills and excitements, but bring not lasting joy
• Getting comfortable and settling (yes it’s a fear)
• Finding myself unable to stop someday

Social and family issues:

• It’s extraordinarily difficult to feel as if you have established roots when you’re always uprooting yourself to seek new experience. Permanence is a foreign feeling. Maintaining personal relationships requires extra care and attention, particularly when it comes to love and romantic relationships. The lifestyle itself creates no fear – only anticipation of a fresh new day.
• Not being part of a community
• Stability of family life
• Losing friends who aren’t living the same way
• Losing contact with local community and friends
• Having to head home because of a family emergency
• My partner not being able to go somewhere with me
• Never stopping and being looked at like a weirdo by my peers back home
• Loosing the ability to maintain long-term relationships
• To estrange from family an friends
• Lack of community
• That we lose connection with any social network, and cause our son to be deprived of meaningful friendships with other kids (especially any who understand what we’re doing, and why)

Other issues

• A loss of motivation or burnout
• Losing important mail

Atually, if we look at this second list there are remarcabe similarities although I’ve used slightly different categories. Money problems, loosing the business or clients, computer/internet problems, the practical problems of travel and the lack of social interaction with the home front.

Compiling this list we end up with a shortlist of fears:

A lack of knowledge

Not making enough money/security of income

Being stuck or getting into trouble abroad

Not having an internet connection

Social interaction/family ties

I actually believe these five fears sum up all the issues the entire community suffers from in one way or the other. There are however enough LIP’s who claim not to have any fears at all.

There you have it, the list of 86 fears of the Location Independant and Digital Nomad community.

I have talked about mental mountains before, those peaks in success that we want to climb. For most these peaks are dreams, for some goals and for the happy few they are reality.

Twitter as you probably know is a social media tool that exploded onto the Internet a while ago and has been a great success. It’s almost unheard of to not an account there. If you watch CNN you can’t even get around twitter anymore because they use it as a source of information to see what’s trending at the moment.

Twitter has become mainstream and all over the world millions of people are following each other. Mostly just for the social chat but there is some serious business going on as well. Social media are an easy way to promote yourself or your business and to meet up with other people, twitter gives us the added bonus that we learn how to say just about anything in 140 characters or less. Great for productivity, not so great for people who want to share their life stories.

Twitter is a very powerful tool to climb your mountains with. To harness that power you need three things:

1. A twitter account
2. Socializing skills
3. A little spare time to tweet in

Let’s state the obvious first

Getting followers on you twitter account is slow at first. The first 100 people you follow are probably people you know directly through blogs, other sites and perhaps real life. Some follow you back. You have made a beginning and start to socialize. The more you tweet the more chance you have of being retweeted. Your name reaches people you don’t follow yet and who don’t follow you. Have your name pop up often enough and you’ll get more followers.

Getting a retweet does involve you actually adding something to the community. You do that by being interesting and helpful. If you keep that up more people will flock to your banner. Your name gets out there and the ball starts rolling faster and faster until you get dozens of new followers a day. People will recommend you through #followfriday and you’ll get even more followers. (And hints on who to follow yourself)

Being helpful

Being helpful to others is what climbing mountains is all about. Someone asks a question through twitter and you answer it. If you think you can answer a question and your answer will be helpful try to always answer. Again, this gets your name out there and gets you recognized as a helpful person who doesn’t use twitter solely to promote yourself.

The more you help people the more followers you get, got it?

The power of twitter: All you have to do is ask.

The power is with the followers

And now they key to all this. If you have 1000 followers and you have a question, even if just 1% of those people can help you, you end up with 100 answers to your question. Not every answer will be great but combined they will get you another step towards the top of your mountain.

Ask to be retweeted and you will be. (seriously!) Reaching even more people who haven’t heard of you yet. Given enough time and skill you’ll rise through the “ranks” of twitter and come up top somewhere with thousands of followers who want to help you whenever they can.

The wider the base of followers the higher you can get. Logically maybe one person in a thousand will be able to help you in such a way that you leap forward. Having thousands of followers means several leaps. Getting you up your mountain that much faster.

Try to be that one in a thousand person every time you help someone. When the time comes they will remember you and do whatever they can to return the favor.

More reading on mental mountains:

Is that a mountain?

Stand still please, the future will still be there tomorrow

The three essentials of an uphill struggle

The truth about positivity, stop dreaming!

If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d appreciate it. You might also want to subscribe to my RSS feed.