Why You Should Quit Your Job and Travel around the World

As for the wife and dog, I'm of no help. :) It sounds as though your travel is work-related, though, so maybe there's some added stress by association.

Every trip abroad has one week of suck at the beginning and one week of suck at the end. You need to acclimate & buy toothbrushes when you get there, and you need to stress a bit about the real world before you come back. That's a given.

So given that, if all you ever do is little 2-3 week trips then pretty much all your time abroad is smack in the middle of that suck zone.

Imagine, however, that you went away for 9 months. Now that little bit of suck that you describe is relegated to a noise at the ends. In the middle lies the good part. And it really is that good.

Sounds like you've never actually committed, so you've never reaped the rewards. Give it a try sometime and report back!

How much you learn is dependent on how willing you are to put yourself out there, even if only for a brief period of time. While I prefer to travel for longer periods of time, I certainly will not knock a two week trip through Europe. You can learn and experience a lot with the right attitude and outlook.

To attempt an analogy fitting for this forum, saying that it "does not teach you anything you couldn't have learned from a brochure" is like saying there is no sense in starting your own company when you could simply work for one that already exists. Creating a company is much different than working for a company. Much like being in a place is a lot different that reading a brochure about it. All the things that make creating a company a valuable experience are the same things that make traveling a valuable experience: all the little details, the hurdles, the hassles, taking a leap, getting there.

I also recommend the following essay by Pico Iyer: http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-stories/why-we-trave...

And I'd agree mtts that you don't "learn" much about just visiting a country. Sure, you may "see" what a town or city is like, but you're just reading the cover, not the book.

I moved to New Zealand just for the heck of it with my family, and lived there for almost 3 years. Everyone that visits there gives the same 'ol schpiel... "Oh, it's so beautiful there. It's where the Lord of the Rings was filmed! It's the greenest place I've ever been, and is so environmentally friendly". Everytime I heard that, I could only let out a hugh sigh. They visited and didn't "learn" anything. New Zealand dust crops their entire countryside with poison (1080, which is illegal in the US) quite often, and is "not" very environmentally progressive. Their marketing department, however, is quite progressive!

Sorry, That's not right. It's funny that you say it, specially when you have no stories to support. Perhaps, you confuse travel with being a tourist. Travelling is a different ball game than being a tourist - going by the brochures, paying the entry fee to the biggest shoe in the world and then hitting the bar in the evening and catching the flight back home. Travelling is not going to Disney-world. Travelling is even living at a place for an unplanned amount of time.

context- i met many 'travellers' in the past week - during a visit to a remote part of china. me and wife didn't go to the touristy parts of the area. Infact spent a day just sitting and listening to nature. Among them, I met this european couple (with kids) who are living there to save enough money to make to the next goal - RVing across Americas. I met this couple who travelled all around and found their funds depleted in Malaysia and so they have been working there to save money..until the next step. There was this one guy from Norway who worked super hard last year to just travel 6 months (mostly by land). Travellers don't go by brochure, they go by recommendations by other travellers. And mostly all 'travellers' try to avoid flights to the extreme (even taking a van across the Gobi desert)

I actually asked blunt questions(with prior permission) about their learning/philosophy/future plans..etc(even their kids)..too long to post here. But I will say this - they do learn - actually continuous learning, learning from cultures, respecting people, not being judgemental(do you the see the homeless man and the bentley salesman in the same way, talk the same way?)..many more things.

Apologies, but I am surprised that many people 'agree' with you without your giving your 'proofs'.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757407

Compared to, say, sitting in a cubicle for the same amount of time? I'd put my money on Travel.

Being on the road accelerates your life. Things happen faster, and more things happen. You'll need half an hour to explain to somebody what you did yesterday. When I'm living in the 'states, saving up for the next trip, I can often sum up an entire month in about 5 minutes.

It's just night and day. I'd suggest you try spending a year on the road & let us know if you learn anything.

By planting seeds that you have no other way of getting into your brain. You can reap the (currently unknown) harvest later.

Volunteers spend a long time in their host country, and really get to see things in depth (not just the tourist view).

Volunteers also get a chance to "change the world". Usually not in a particularly grand way, but a little education and inspiration can have a lot of ripple effects.

Of course, being based overseas, and having a fair amount of vacation time, volunteers also have opportunities to visit other interesting places and countries near their host sites.

Getting a reasonable living allowance and government-sponsored benefits sweetens the deal, but of course it doesn't offer nearly as much freedom as simply quitting your job and hopping on a plane.

I guess it's that you experience new cultures. You talk to people, you learn. You see how and why stuff is done differently, you learn. You also learn from your mistakes, you learn to adopt to current conditions with whatever resources you have for your disposal, you discover new tricks, etc.

That right there is the way to find useful experiences. It sounds like your thing isn't "Go see the Grand Canyon" or "Go to the Eiffel Tower". Instead, you're the kind of person who would "Go to Chaos Communication Congress" or "Go to Hacking at Random".

Traveling doesn't just mean going to see touristy places. Try contacting a few people in the industry you like, see if you can arrange for them to show you around their business, and just show up there.

It seems hyperbolic, but go to any practically and hostel in a developed city worldwide and you'll find a group of Americans doing just that (not to mention other debaucheries).

Traveling actively is basically the exact opposite of that. It takes research, bravery, spontaneity, social skill, and a boat load of curiosity. When you travel like this though you can paint yourself into entirely new environments and see the ways you expand, you can look back into the ways you live normally and then pick and choose the parts you like the most. In this way you can actively change your own world and certainly put yourself in a better place to continue making positive changes.

Most immediately: you'll soften your bias and become aware of the biases of others, you'll understand the traditions of your culture and be better able to interpret their necessity or value, you'll become experienced in some other culture able to interpret things through a slightly different point of view. Together these things can be used to vastly improve your home or can become skills to help you change the world.

Of course, if you want to travel and at that very moment do some active changing, you may want to try something like Peace Corps, Doctors/Engineers Without Borders, or other world health initiatives. You should be careful though because if you don't have the experience which can let you isolate your own cultural biases a little then you may get connected with some group which will inhibit your ability to learn. In my opinion, this is the trap which things like mission trips fall into and, as an effect, they may become some kind of mixture of harm and benefit.

Flexibility, adaptability, and dealing with uncertainty - Things never go as planned when long-term traveling to the point that sometimes it is better not to have a plan, but rather pick a general direction and adapt. Same goes for your business plan, especially when developing new technologies in unproven markets. You don’t know enough to be able to plan out the details. A lot of times the random unplanned things end up being the best. Run with random even if you don’t understand it.

Dealing with the highs and the lows – One day you’re on top of the world feeling accomplished after you hike up a mountain. I’m queen of world! The next day it is raining, your feet are covered in blisters, you’re feeling run down, you have a cold coming on, your tent has a leak, and you are alone in the middle of nowhere eating yet another granola bar. But eventually the sun while shine again, your cold will go away, and you’ll be on your next exciting adventure. Kind of like – One day you are full of enthusiasm for your new feature that is going to change the world! The next day (make that weeks) you are dealing with bugs, angry customers, anxious investors, getting no sleep and living in a dump eating yet another bowl of beans and rice. Fortunately something good will happen eventually to balance it out if you can ride out the storm. Life is cyclical.

*Going solo is crazy hard at times...you need to build a team that compliments and balances – I solo road tripped and camped most of the time. I totally recommend solo travel because it will stretch you way beyond your limits and you’ll experience tremendous amounts of personal growth because it is crazy hard at times. But eventually you’ll get sick of going it alone - worn out from shouldering all the work and having no one to celebrate with except some strangers you just met. You need a team (travel companions or founders/partners/employees) that compliments each other. My typical group travel adventure goes something like this - I’ll lead a kayak expedition in the Everglades, get everyone there and paddling through the mangroves with alligators, but I’ll forget to pack lunch. As cool as it would be to have another rockstar kayaker along what I really need is someone who can make sandwiches. And not just the crappy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I would throw together. Like fancy sandwiches with Dijon mustard made by a rockstar sandwich maker.

Those are just a few things I learned (or at least reinforced) through traveling around the country that can be applied to entrepreneurship. I could write more but that is all I have time for right now and all the talk of Dijon mustard sandwiches is making me hungry for lunch.

FYI, my monthly expenses while living in a city outside Shanghai was about $400 per month. I think $300 would be pushing it in a lot of places. I would budget $500 just to be safe and to not have to restrict your lifestyle that much.

If you live like a college student for just a few years after leaving college (keep the shit car, live in a cheap studio, don't buy stuff you can't afford) you'll soon find you've got $50,000 sitting in the bank. I mean look at it, they're giving you $5,000 every week now to work at this job, when they used to be charging you money to go to school. If you can't find the willpower to save a few pennies at that point, there's something seriously amiss.

Anyway, you'll find that your tolerance for a crap job goes way down when you have $50k sitting around and no car payments or mortgage. Spending $10k of it hitching across Africa for a year starts to seem like a good idea.

So yes, by reshuffling our fiscal priorities, we can definitely make travel more doable. I know this because I've done it.

Of course it helps if you don't have a family to support.

In Africa, Southeast Asia, or Central America, you can live on $5-$20/day depending on where you go. Hitching through Malawi will run you $3/day tops. Assuming you've ditched your rent/car payments/etc. back home, you're going to be living an order of magnitude cheaper than you would if you simply stayed in the USA.

For short trips, your flight will be the dominant cost. For long trips, you're just not going to spend that much.

If you can put away a measly ten grand, you can stay gone for a long time. How much did you make this year? More to the point, why didn't you manage to save at least $10k of it?

60% of the people the world alone would kill just to have your passport.

That's awesome your friend is doing that, I traveled through India myself. Money is easy.

I used to worry about my career a lot and I ended up burning out easily. Traveling for me was a good way to take a break and get a new perspective on things.

I take a few months off to travel every 2-3 years and then I get re-energized and ready to get back to work.

Yes, when you travel, your career will be interrupted. But what is the trade off? For me, it was experiencing other cultures. Being in unfamiliar places took me out of my element and I believe has made me tougher. Adjusting to different social environments is not easy.