Later this summer I am releasing a book about education. It tells the story of how 12 months traveling was a better education than four years of college. And a lot more fun at the same time. The book will go through 10 subjects and point out the differences between the real world education you create traveling and the academic education you receive in college.

Instead of keeping this book hidden until it comes out as a finished product. I will be publishing it here chapter by chapter over the next two weeks.

Without a hard deadline writing a book can take ages. I first came up with the idea for this book in March of 2015. I created a map of the story I wanted to tell, and wrote the majority of a first draft in April 2015. Then…. I stopped. It got pushed to the side as some other responsibilities flared up in my life.

Half a year later, in January 2016, I returned to the book. I edited the chapters that I had, and later in the spring I finished off the first draft with a conclusion. There I was, with a full first draft done, and once again I stopped.

The book felt disjointed. I had a lot of resistance to editing, and I let the resistance stop me. I kept putting off editing until one day I forgot about it for a month.

And now here we are, more than a year after I started, and I’m finally going to finish this thing.

Each day for the next two weeks a new part of the book will come out. They’ll be adapted to be readable on their own, as a blog post, and they will be in a different order than when they come out in a book.

The most important part of writing a book in the open is the chance to get feedback from you, the reader. Please write your thoughts into the comments, or send me an email.

Let’s start today with your introduction to a travel education.

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Travel University

This book isn’t for everyone.

If you want to follow in your parents’ footsteps and make them proud, this probably isn’t the book you’re looking for.

If you want to climb the corporate ladder, get a decent house in suburbia, come home every night, crack a beer and watch TV until you go to bed then rinse and repeat for a few decades, then this isn’t the book for you.

If that’s you, you should go to college. You should go rack up tens of thousands of dollars of debt, “specialize” in a subject you don’t even know if you like, and continue to put your dreams on hold.

If that’s not you, this might be your book.

If you look at your parent’s life and have the nagging thought “there has got to be something more to life than this”, you might be in the right place.

Over the next ten chapters of this book I’m going to show you how traveling the world can teach you a method to succeed in this “real world” you keep hearing about. The version of success that we will talk about is a different version of success to the one they teach in college. This type of success isn’t about status, being an executive, or driving a more expensive car than your neighbors. This success is about living a good life. It is about being happy, enjoying the journey of life, finding meaning in your work and trying to do something big with your life. On your terms, not theirs.

You won’t be learning the old rules about sucking up to your boss, jumping through hoops, “doing what you’ve got to do”, and putting life off until you are 65 and retiring. Instead, you will be learning the new rules of our rapidly changing world. You’ll learn to appreciate what you have because you never know what will happen, you’ll learn to be adaptable to any situation you face, and how to focus on what you want. Not what your parents, your friends, your boss, or your community wants from you.

You will learn these new rules for a tiny fraction of the cost of a degree. Some doors may close for you; working some professions in our over-regulated world require a rubber stamp. Other doors will open, but once you make the decision to forgo the path all your friends are taking to the nearest college town and take off for a vagabonding trip around the world, the course of your life will change forever.

You might try to go back to university, or a regular job, but it just won’t fit. Something about it will seem unbearable. Trying to make office small talk will leave you feeling like you’re pretending to be someone that you are not. You will look around at co-workers and be terribly confused about how they manage to do this day after day for years when you can barely make it past a couple of months before wanting to escape.

Travelers know this feeling well. They have felt what it’s like to be free. To travel to wherever they want to go. To be entirely responsible for their lives and in control of what they do with their time. To go back to working for the weekend, being a paper-pushing zombie for five days a week and 50 weeks a year seems physically impossible.

I spent six months traveling after graduating university at 21. I came back after my trip around the world and tried to go back to starting a career. For two years I forced myself to get up in the morning and work a job that I didn’t like doing. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of escape in the future. The dream of traveling again.

I was missing something after my first trip. There was a lesson that I hadn’t learned. I missed the finishing touches of Travel University, the ones that teach you that travel isn’t a period of relaxation to balance out the stress of everyday life. It is not an extended vacation where the enjoyment comes from being free of responsibility. The lesson was that for people like us, people who feel drawn to adventure and have a longing for something more, the way you live traveling could become the way you live daily life, even when you’re not traveling.

If you’re ready, make the commitment. Say yes to traveling, to learning, and to the life you want to lead. If you’re not sure, let’s continue. You might find yourself changing your mind.

EDUC 101: Education vs. Stamp of Approval

Why do people go to university?

Is it for an education? Or do they go to get a degree?

Are they not the same thing?

University is often called higher education. Not just because of the many young students who discover cannabis once they move away from home, but because you are apparently becoming a more intelligent, and generally better human being.

Education and university are still almost synonymous. But universities have been a lot more like degree factories for quite some time. You take five courses a semester, for eight semesters of school, collecting your stamps of approval along the way until you get to the end and get a piece of paper.

Originally, the point of education was actually about learning things, and the degree would have represented your learning. Grades and degrees are abstractions so you can prove that you probably learned something.  But along the way, the degree became the thing everyone was after. People got lost chasing the abstraction. That is why you don’t pick your courses based on of what you want to learn about, and you instead select your courses on what you think will be the easiest A.

College is not about getting an education; it is about collecting a stamp of approval in the hopes that someone will recognize that stamp at a later date. A real education is about learning things that you can use in your life now, and later on.

And so succeeding in college has become an exercise in memorization. You memorize facts, figures, formulas, and other people’s ideas then you regurgitate them on tests and papers. Having a functional knowledge is not rewarded, and having ideas of your own is not particularly appreciated. You memorize then forget for two semesters a year for four years, and then you get your piece of paper. A piece of paper that you probably won’t ever actually have to prove you have. You just write that you have it, and almost everyone believes you.  

Once you’ve graduated college, and made your parents proud. You leave your university and go out to hopefully get a job. In your job, you probably won’t ever use the things you learned for your degree. Some employers may want to look at your transcripts, but for many, they just take what you have on your resume at face value. You have spent almost half a decade working for something that someone a little more suspicious could just forge.

In the process of chasing after stamps of approval, you will probably forget how to learn. You forget that there are subjects that interest you, and instead, pick courses based on rumors of where you can get an easy A or what major has the highest average income. The end goal is not valuable knowledge, but instead, something that will look good on your transcript and the reality is some courses will look better on your transcript.

After a semester at university, the idea of taking a class that actually interests you has probably become a dream. The professors are there to research, and not to teach students. They make a name for themselves and earn tenure by writing papers, not by helping you learn, so a lot of them don’t try that hard. There are exceptions, but the majority of professors are experts in taking a potentially interesting subject and making it dreadfully boring or completely unintelligible.

With the bleak picture of education in universities, it is not hard to see how you can learn more traveling.

Instead of leaving home to go get your stamp of approval. You could invest a fraction of that time and money to leave home on an adventure.

As you leave your hometown and go off to a new country, with a different language you NEED to learn a lot. You are entirely responsible for yourself, so there is a significant incentive to actually learn things. As you travel, you learn about finance, business, history, communication, and more, but the most important thing you learn is that learning is fun.

As a child, you knew this. You were naturally curious. You asked questions and tried to make sense of the world. But after years of school, the curiosity is gone. They have spent 16 years in an “educational” system that seems to do nothing well other than crushing the inherent urge to learn that we all at one point possessed.

Getting out of the top-down school system and having space to remember that learning is fun may be the biggest and most important lesson you gain from traveling.

Not only is learning fun when you follow your interests but through the process of exploring your those interests, you will circle in on the things that you want to be doing with your life.

In university, people will tell you to follow your passions. But only those passions that are realistic and that your university offers as courses.

Going to university is supposed to be an event that opens up possibilities for you, but all too often it closes down possibilities in your mind. You begin to think the options for your life are only as broad as the options offered in the course listings. But the truth is, that as the world develops and becomes more interconnected the amount of possibilities you have has become almost infinite.

In a world where you can learn almost anything you want online for free, and you have access to a market of billions of people connected by the internet. What is important is not what your stamp of approval says you know, but what you actually know. It is real education that matters. And real education comes from curiosity and necessity, not from assignments and tests.

When you decide to travel, the first subject that becomes of interest to you is your new found interest in saving and budgeting.

Tomorrow —-> FNCE 101