Jan 15 2010
Lucky Breaks I’ve Had Along the Road to Earning Online
I just read an interesting post over at Untemplater by John from Jetset Citizen that got the cogs in my head turning for a post here on my site. John was questioning whether achieving the whole four hour work week, nomadic lifestyle is as easy as some people make it seem.
This is a topic that has been done to death online but he had a different angle to it. What really caught my attention was this part:
There are many successful long term travelers and lifestyle designers out there, so it definitely is not all hype. However, some of those success stories leave out details about how they got where they are.
And this part:
Most people hide those stories of essential assistance. It is important to acknowledge that we seldom do it alone.
His post got me thinking about my own path to where I am today and how many advantages I have had along the way that might not seem hugely obvious.
My parents aren’t rich and I don’t have a trust fund, but they are very supportive of my travels which, to me, is worth far more. Knowing that my parents will have my back if I ever get into financial or some other trouble abroad is huge. This became apparent to me years ago after a conversation with a friend of mine who has no family left except her sister. She loved the idea of world travel but she felt that, because she had no family to back her up, she had to create her own backup plan by becoming successful and putting money in the bank now and travelling later when she could better afford it. Knowing that I have a supportive family is something that makes taking risks and doing what I do a lot easier.
I didn’t have a computer at a young age, but I did do most of the early development of my very first website as a hobby while I was in university. This meant that spending hours learning HTML and tinkering with images and code were fun for me, rather than a chore. At this early stage I didn’t think that making money online was possible. My motivations were to learn HTML and to create a site that would help people travel around Europe and I wasn’t hung up on how many Adsense clicks I had gotten that day or how many followers I had on my RSS feed. I think establishing a website early on has been ridiculously important to my success, at least in the early stages.
Once my longer-term travels began, I arrived in the UK in 2002 with about $300 Australian dollars to my name. But I was able to go there knowing that I could stay with my aunt and uncle in Scotland for as long as I wanted. Having family or friends in a country you are hoping to move to is huge for helping you save money on rent, find a job, and to establish a group of friends. Six weeks later I went down to London where I had no family or friends but spending that time in Scotland allowed me to save a bit more money and even land a job in London before I moved down there which were both essential for starting out in such an expensive city.
My supportive parents, the early start I had building websites and my family connections in the UK are three things that have really helped me get to this point of being able to work online from anywhere. It has been a lot of work and a long road to get to this point, but I have had help along the way that has probably had more of an impact than I might have previously thought.
How about you? Are you a lone ranger in your quest to earn online and live from anywhere or can you look back to some key things that have helped or hindered you?
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go. 
I really enjoyed John’s article as well. While we get annoyed when people always tell us how “lucky” we are to take a journey like ours (as if we woke up one day with savings in a bank account and clients lined up), we do realize how fortunate we are in many ways. We are both healthy with supportive family and friends. Our parents are also still doing well. We started our careers in the offline work and have a whole slew of professional experiences that I believe help us in the online world.
Nope, we’re not all trustafarians and yep, there’s always a story behind travelers and how they got there.
In our case, we worked our butts off for it for 10 long years. Grew a small business, sold it in 2007 to hit the road with our terminally ill dog Jerry, and now we just can’t seem to get the traveling bug out of our system.
Even though we aren’t rich, and still mostly living off savings, we are having a damn good time while trying to grow our newest online web venture. We finally found something we are passionate about, now the only problem is figuring out how to make it generate some real revenue.
Jim and I don’t have family to fall back on, and it’s funny to think that if it wasn’t for our dog, who taught us the secret to having a real life, we’d still be slaving away in our office.
The luckiest thing that ever happened to me is that my Kiwi mother gave birth to me in the UK giving me - eventually 3 passports (UK, NZ, Australian) - makes it a lot easier when you can get a job legally. It wa a lot tougher for Americans and South Africans in London working illegally than it was for me working legally.
I always used to get the “lucky” thing when travelling long term in 20s and 30s - people forget that its just priorities - skip the house and the kids and see how low your expenses can go!
Its attitude to - more and more as I get older people have more and more excuses as to why they can’t travel - its just fear - but we don’t like to admit that!
At beginning i was traveling like that girl, save money, then travel , damn it, i love traveling a lot. I met a lot of different traveler on the road, who share their a lot of great make money online story with me. Now i am trying to make my life as i want.
I haven’t achieved yet what you describe. My wife and I have worked in the corporate world for the last seven years and just recently began saving aggressively for two big changes: a travel writing career for me and a jewelry business for her.
Our parents will be supportive once they hear about the plans, but I’m sure they’ll secretly question the wisdom of leaving lucrative jobs. We are planning to keep our house in the U.S., I will just be on the road a third of year.
It’s a huge risk, but I can’t imagine a more awful series of twilight years if I never took some large risks.
Good find Kirsty, John’s article has a lot of truths in it, and a highlights a lot of truths. I have had assistance in many forms to get where I am today lots of lucky breaks, including free accommodation and much more…
I Like how he also stresses how hard it can be to take the leap & dispose of everything for a life of travel, I have been talking planning for a few years now and have a small residual income “enough to survive” each year though something new crops up LOL
Yes! It’s hard to pinpoint all the little things in life which can affect your future successes. But they’re there and usually go unspoken.
Kudos to you for speaking up!
I too am constantly amazed at how many people tell me how lucky I am!
Yes it might seem like it on the outside, but they dont know how much time you can spend alone working on the web, and the negative that can have on health.
I really liked that article and this blog post on it. No one makes it alone. Anyone who is successful has someone who helped them along the way and without that help they wouldn’t be where they are. But those people and things that are essential to reaching success are rarely mentioned. So thanks for sharing.
it takes a very honest person to acknowledge all the support that has made where you are right now possible. kudos for it.
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Having supportive friends and family can make entrepreneurship so much easier. I unfortunately was not able to take advantage of living with family while starting my business. So it ended up taking quite a while to get things off the ground as I concurrently worked a full time job. Still their moral support helped give me the confidence that I could make the business work. My parents also helped financially by paying most of my college expenses. If it weren’t for that financial support, I likely would’ve never started a business.
I think this is really an excellent post. I recently wrote a post about how so many travel writers who have done the whole “abandon the corporate world and sell all your stuff to travel” thing don’t realize what a privilege they had to HAVE a well-paying corporate job to quit, and stuff to sell. I think that many, many folks in the travel/lifestyle design arena really don’t ever stop to think of the support they have had over the years. You do, which is one of the reasons I love reading your blog. If you’re interested in that post, it’s over here: http://www.driftingfocus.com/blogs/?p=6436