I received this question 3 times yesterday.
Maybe, one day… ;-3)
Full-Time Travel: The Gear
I’ve been traveling full-time for about 9 months now. I imagine many people I’ve hung out with along the way didn’t even know anything was different, because I’m living similarly to how I’ve lived for the last 4 years. However, instead of being grounded in Phoenix 1-2 weeks a month, I’ve replaced that time with “Other.”
While running my business and trying to do exciting and challenging work, I’ve also been couch surfing, short-term renting, and occasionally hotel-living. I probably should have written about all of this along the way, as there are many related topics to cover about the lifestyle.
A popular question for travelers is “what do you pack?” Different types of travel require different packing lists. For most, sites like my friend Alex’s UltimatePackingList.com are all you need.
But I do things differently. With full-time work-as-you-go travel, there’s a different set of needs. I essentially need to carry my entire home office with me at all times. Anything I need to run my business needs to be with me, or else I might as well not have it. This prevents me from being able to do anything crazy like going around the world with no bags, or trimming down to just 15 things. For me, it’s not about having as few things as possible; it’s about having everything I need, but only what I need, in as little space and weight as possible.
My home office turns out to be 2 bags, which allows me to travel without checking bags.
Bag 1: Home
21″ rolling luggage; fits in the overhead compartment
- About a week’s worth of clothing: 9 t-shirts, 3 jeans, and plenty of underwear and socks
- Toiletries: 75-100ml toothpaste, toothbrush, mustache wax, deodorant, electric shaver, fingernail trimmers, etc.
- Fitness: Running shoes and gym shorts
- Misc: Light but warm jacket, laundry bag, swimwear
Bag 2: Office
17″ laptop/messenger bag; fits under the seat in front of me
- Laptop: 15″ MacBook Pro with SSD
- Electric: International power adapter, power strip, phone/USB charger, laptop charger
- Productivity despite babies and (not in!) blenders: Noise-cancellation headphones
- USB External HDD, for large file storage, virtual machines, etc.
- Photo/Video: Sony NEX-3 18-55mm with microphone accessory
- Misc: Pocket umbrella, microfiber cloth, checkbook, receipt folder, envelopes, stamps, mini gorilla/tripod, sunglasses
On my person
Always in my pockets
- Carrier-unlocked GSM phone (Nexus S)
- Wallet, money clip, bottle-opener combo: Cash, coins, and cards
- Passport
- Notebook & pen
What else do you need?
One Year
Just over a year ago, the day before my birthday, I submitted the paperwork for my first business. As I made the transition into self-employment, many people who had known me for years were surprised. They said, “I thought you were already a freelancer!” Nope. I got to live the life by working from home for a company based in the Bay Area.
I don’t talk about my work very much, which leaves people to guess or assume based on what I do or say. Even now, while I should be promoting my business, I find it too self-promotional and pretentious to talk about my work.
There’s a fine line, I think, between sharing and bragging. Between informing and self-promoting. I haven’t always avoided that line as much as I do today.
To the time machine!
“Let me show you how awesome I am.”
Around 5 or 6 years ago, I gave a demo at Refresh Phoenix Demo Night of a site I built for Nike (as part of a very talented team, of course). I was about 20 years old at the time. Even though I kept my age under wraps—hoping to avoid the young hotshot stigma—it was pretty obvious I was young. I couldn’t help but wonder, was I demoing or bragging? Perhaps it was in the eyes of the beholder…
“Do you know who I am?”
It was around that time when I realized that having clients like Mazda, Nike, Ford (SVT), Boeing, Twix, (etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah brag brag brag) didn’t mean much. What it did mean was that I wouldn’t have trouble getting a job if I needed or wanted one. It also meant that people who knew of my work were likely to respect my capabilities, which is an immeasurable feeling for someone who invests so much time and energy into his work. However, in the bigger picture, there’s value in having name recognition within a broader community. I realized I could use my portfolio as back pocket credibility and independently get my name out within the technology community. I became the guinea pig of a series of online social experiments, starting with making random crap techies would find neat and plastering my name all over it. Well, the experiments were an unimaginable success and I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for those experiments. However, there were unintended negative consequences, including an outward-facing persona James Archer coined as “THE Brian Shaler.”
“So…. what do you do?” – People who have met me since, even after knowing me for 1-2 years
Some things have changed a bit since the early days in my career, and perhaps I’ve overcompensated.
I’m a data visualizationist. My forte has always been making stuff move with code, but I currently focus on data visualization and the many ways you can bring data to life. I’m not going to tell you I’m good at what I do, but I’m happy to show you my work and let you decide for yourself.
Distance
Over the last year or so, I’ve gone from being hyper-local—I attended and helped organize countless events in Phoenix—and hyper-connected—I was constantly reading and interacting with my local contacts online—to being global and disconnected. With technology, it’s very easy to stay in touch while being physically out of reach, but technology changes as quickly as people change the way they use it.
We have all this technology to stay connected, but nowadays, with everything we do sharable with a single click, the echo chamber has gotten too noisy. The technology we use is saying “share more!” (because more activity equates to more value for service providers) but we’re not given good ways of cutting through the noise and seeing what matters. This is something that bothers me, as a data-minded person. Some pieces of content matter more, and there are various ways of computing how much something matters.
Facebook does this to a degree. The news feed is listed by how much activity (comments/likes) is on a given item, with a “secret sauce” element of deciding which friends show up more often than others based on your previous interactions. But then again, Facebook sucks. And what about your friends who are not on Facebook? You can only connect with friends who want to hang out in the Walled Garden.
Ideally, we would have technology that aggregates content from where ever your friends are posting it and applying this type of computation on it.
All this is to say, I could use the excuse that I’ve been too busy to stay connected online while being away, but I’m blaming some of it on the current state of technology!
Spaghetti on the Wall
“Brian, I’ve known you long enough to know that if you stick with something, it’ll be awesome. The problem is you don’t.“
That came from someone who knows me fairly well. The quote may sound rather blunt, so I’ll explain why I feel it’s hitting the nail on the head.
First, let’s anonymize the first part, to get to the point that matters: “If you stick with something, it’ll be awesome.” Maybe it’s not true for everyone, but I feel like most people have the capacity to take an idea they’re passionate about, bring it to life, and make it awesome.
Take a hobby, an interest, or an idea you have, and make it your full-time focus for a week. Talk to at least a dozen people about it. Work on it all day and all night. At the end of that week, you’ll feel like a new person. Your passion for whatever it is will be ignited. I know this, because it happens to me from time to time.
That leads me to the second part of the original quote and the title of this article. I’m a tinkerer and an explorer. I come up with ideas and challenges, imagine how they’ll work, and then try to prove it to myself. I could very easily build 50 prototypes for 50 different ideas in one year. But that wouldn’t get me anywhere. In a way, it’s a weakness. Any talent would be squandered. Five years ago, I started making changes to how I tinkered.
Normally, the figure of speech, “throwing spaghetti on the wall,” means you throw the spaghetti and see if it sticks. I, on the other hand, usually don’t wait to see what sticks. It’s the act of throwing that excites me.
During high school and college, while I was teaching myself how to write software, I would spend hours working on experiments. If I got them to work, they would get tucked away in a directory on my computer. Squandered talent.
In 2006, I decided to turn the weekend projects into tech-world publicity. Still, I was just throwing spaghetti. At least I started doing it in public.
While my data visualization consulting scratches my spaghetti-throwing itch (no two projects are the same), what will I have in 5 to 10 years? Just a list of dozens of things I’ve made for other people. People like my friend Francine would probably agree that I should take at least a fraction of my time to work on projects for me. And more specifically, fewer projects taken much more seriously.
My plan? Two more months of client work, followed by X months working on my own project. I’m going to make it my full-time focus. I’m going to talk to hundreds of people about it. I’m going to work on it all day and all night. I’m going to ignite my passion for something that’s been kindling for several years.