Ep. 275: How This Location-Independent Nomad Adopted An Experimental Mindset To Tackle The Unknown with Jason Robinson
In this episode, I speak with Jason who is an author who helps others get unstuck and take risks on themselves.
He has adopted an “experiment mindset” to tackle the unknowns of long-term nomadic travel and how to make a living while on the road.
After many methodical experiments, he eventually transitioned to being a location-independent nomad, earning his income by being a freelance designer and writer. All this while diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.
Listen on to find out how Jason adopts an experiment mindset to face his fears and experience life fully.
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Transcription:
Debbie:
Hey everyone!
Thank you so much for being here.
I am really excited to speak with my guests today.
I’m here with Jason. Hi Jason. How are you?
Jason:
Wow, good to see you.
Debbie:
Thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us about you and why you live an offbeat life?
Jason:
Yeah, I would, I would have to say I live an offbeat life because I learned, I started learning about travel really late. Essentially, I grew up in a working class family. I think I was the second person in my entire lineage to go to college and get, you know, what we consider like a white collar degree or so, or advanced degree. I didn’t start traveling until I was in my mid thirties. I didn’t see my third country until I was 40 years old. So, I really pushed myself outside of my comfort zone to say, “Okay, I’m single. I don’t have a lot of money, but I’ve heard that this travel thing is possible with, you know, not a lot of money. How are you gonna figure this thing out?”. So, I really started doing these experiments and things like that in my late thirties, traveling internationally.
And then a couple years later went nomadic. So the hook, there was literally nine months after I went nomadic, I was diagnosed with type one diabetes. So, kind of throwing this whole spin into it of not only are you learning this thing on your own and kind of going through those trials and tribulations, but here’s another thing you’re going to need to figure out, whether you’re here in the US or you’re traveling internationally. So, yeah, not the cards I wanted to be dealt necessarily, but that’s what I’m rolling with. So that’s probably why my life’s a little bit offbeat.
Debbie:
Well, there’s a lot to unpack there because first you mentioned that you traveled a little later in life and two, you were diagnosed with diabetes while you were making this huge change in your life. So let’s go to the first, which is why you actually decided to start traveling so late. What made you decide to do that in your forties rather than when most people do it, which is like their early twenties and they do all of that traveling, why later in life?
Jason:
I mean, the easy answer is money, my family, we just didn’t have it growing up travel wasn’t really a thing. Our vacations, every summer were going camping, you know, an hour away. I think at about every two years, we would drive from Ohio down to Arkansas and our family had some land down in Arkansas. We would camp for a week down in Arkansas.
Those were the big vacations that we had whenever I was, you know, up through 18 years old. So I was, you know, I’m not one of these digital nomad stories of, you know, somebody who isInstagram worthy that has been doing this since they were eight years old. I really just never knew that it was an option. I didn’t even leave my home state until I was 24 years old. I was, you know, 23 years old in college and I was like, “wait a second, I could leave.”, and you know, that never really crossed my mind.
That sounds silly, but it might sound silly maybe not to some people, but yeah, I didn’t even know that I could leave my home state. That just wasn’t something that was programmed into me at a young age. So, you know, I left home, I left my home state at 24 years old to come to Charlotte, North Carolina, and then it wasn’t for a few more years later, I started hearing about these digital nomads and reading about them and going, “oh, wait, this is a whole thing.”.
So I, was 30 years old before I really started understanding some of the possibilities, let alone, then, you know, starting to put some things in motion and saying, “wait, you know, this isn’t just stuff in books or on the internet, I can actually do these things and, you know, it takes a long time for you to get this, the strength and the courage up to, to go from noticing something to actually implementing and starting to figure out how to do those things.
Debbie:
Well, it does, especially if it’s something that you weren’t exposed to when you were growing up and you didn’t know that it was possible for you, and that takes a lot of guts. And, and there’s also a lot of fear that goes along with that, when you finally wanna take that leap. So was there a moment that you just knew that your life had to change? Was there a big change or was it just something that happened gradually for you until you finally took that step to, to get out of your comfort zone?
Jason:
Yeah, this is funny. I was listening to one of your interviews recently and somebody commented that you don’t hear a lot of CEOs or male CEOs talking about, you know, empathy or their dealings and things like that. And I’m exactly the opposite.
I’m an empath, I’m, you know, I’m very emotional by nature and introvert. So a lot of those things do play into the fear. You know, essentially it was one of those where I knew, I guess I knew that I wasn’t going to change unless I started doing things to change. And what I mean is mentally, emotionally, politically, have an understanding of, of what people are dealing with around the world unless, I actually get outside the United States, I understood the filters that we have on in our news and our silos of media and things like that.
And I knew that if I just allowed myself to continue down this path, I was not going to open up. I was going to close and that was really the important move in my heart was, no one’s teaching you this, no one’s gonna come and help you. You can do podcasts, you can read books, you can do all these things, but at the end of the day, you have to do these things on your own.
And for me, it was a matter of, I didn’t want to grow into a grumpy old man with these terrible perceptions of the world that has been fed to me. I needed to go out there and learn on my own, whether those things were true. And I knew they weren’t.
I mean, I knew a lot of the media and things like that we get, you know, it’s such a skewed or a one view perspective that I needed to go out there and see some of the things and that’s easier said than done whenever we’re traveling, the way that we do and typically stay in tourist hotspots or places that are, are easier for us as nomads, but just seeing people from other parts of the world and having good conversations and understanding, I knew things, that was really the impetus for, I knew that I didn’t want to turn into a grumpy old man with second hand knowledge of the world. That’s why I got started.
Debbie:
And it’s so interesting when you go to a different country, especially when it’s been on the news and there’s a lot of fears that goes into it. And then you actually meet the people and you experience a culture and it’s usually a very different perspective when you actually go there.
And you’re like, “wow, this is totally different from what I had seen on the news.”. I mean, even here in the United States, there’s a lot of things happening, right? But for most of the states, you know, people are usually very nice and friendly and there’s not that many, well I live in New York city, so that could be different, but yeah, so it’s the same.
When you look at the different parts of the world where, you know, there’s a lot of things happening, you actually go there and you meet the actual people who are living there, and it’s a totally different experience for you. Has that, or did that happen to you when you finally went out and started looking at different parts of the world?
Jason:
Yeah, absolutely. I like to say that people of the country are not their government. I think keeping that, you know, top of mind is probably the most important thing. And we can reflect on that living here in the United States, there’s, there’s so much of our political process that is not directly governed by the actual people, the percentages of people that want one thing, but yet our government is acting a different way.
So that’s, you know, that’s front and center for us here, if we pay attention to it. So when going to these other countries, I try and keep that in mind with taking into consideration. Some of those fear, you know, fear is a good thing. It keeps you aware of, you know, potential problems. You know, it keeps you non complacent as best you can be.
So knowing some of these potential problems or potential issues going into visiting a country is a good thing, but really setting that up to say, these are things I’m gonna be aware of, but these are also the things that I wanna overcome or make sure, you know, that I, that they’re actually appropriate. They’re real things. That’s kind of the mindset that I try and go into it with.
But to speak about a certain example, when I was 40 years old, my third country that I went to, I had been to Canada and I had been to London when I was 25 years old, but the third country I went to when I was 40, I bought a one week ticket to Mexico and flew into Mexico city because I was telling myself, “okay, if you wanna be a digital nomad or, you know, location independent and essentially live out of a backpack around the world, you might actually wanna try that before you sell everything and go do it”. So, I said, “okay, well, Mexico, City’s a fairly, you know, inexpensive place to fly into.”.
I know that, you know, a lot of people go down there for months at a time and live location independent through Mexico. So, let me just find Mexico City, see how long I can stay. I had a one way ticket and, you know, see if I can stomach it and fight the fear or do whatever I need to do to stay there, as long as I need to stay there. Mexico City was rough.
There were a lot of things that I had never seen, but the people were not the thing. It was just a lot of these misconceptions and just the different grittier world, you know, more like a New York city and, you know, Mexico City wasn’t my vibe, I was there for a week. I saw a lot of things that I wasn’t comfortable with. I saw a lot of things that I was, but then I moved to Oaxaca for a week with 200,000 to 50,000 people. And it was much slower lifestyle. And I got to experience more people.
So, you know, over the course of three weeks, I got to see three different cities in Mexico and experienced three different ways of life and just experienced a lot of people. I’ve been back to Mexico many times since, I love it down there and it’s just one of those places where as an American, we just get, you know, this ingrained, wrong perception, I think, from birth, I think I did. And you know, that was definitely one of the places that I overcame fairly quickly.
Debbie:
Yeah. And that’s what the issue is for, for a lot of us who are born in a specific country and you have the cultures that you have, and you’re used to that and you’re in your little bubble and you’ve never been out and then all of a sudden you see that there’s a whole other world out there and there’s different cultures and there’s different people.
There’s different ways of eating a meal. There’s different ways of communicating with each other, even the way people talk to each other, you know, the way they’re affectionate, the way they use their hand gestures, the way they it’s, it’s just so different. And it’s really beautiful to see that when you go to other countries, you know, some countries you find to be super loud and obnoxious, some like super slow and gentle.
And then, and there’s just so many oddities that you find. And it’s also really great as well, because you start seeing that there is other things out there that you can have, right? You can maybe even live there and be a place for you to call home. So, that’s really great that you were able to do that and Oaxaca and, you knew that Mexico city wasn’t for you, Jason.
So, that’s amazing that that was your first try in digital nomadism.
Jason:
Yeah. I think one of the things that I try and tell people is really pay attention to what your travel style is from the beginning. I’m very introspective and analytical. So, I’ve really paid attention to what size cities I like, what climates I like how much rain, these are things that I wasn’t paying attention to at the beginning, by having things happen along the way. I look at that and go, “wait a second.”.
You need to pay attention to this thing. So, so now I have a fairly targeted idea of place that I know I tend to acclimate to better. I function in better. There’s less hurdles for me to get more work done or to create relationships and, you know, certain size cities to certain locations, it’s relation to nature all these different things, uh, obviously finances or those things might play in.
But, I think if we all pay attention to those things, very specifically, we can always expand on those and leave room in the, you know, off to the sides. But the more we understand what we’re acclimated towards, I think it makes a lot of the hurdles that we have with fear and trepidation or logistics easier because you’re not dealing with these other things. You don’t need to deal with it. You just pay a little bit more attention to that.
Debbie:
Yeah. And obviously the logistics and the financial part of all of this is extremely important. Right? You have to understand what type of lifestyle that you want to live. And then you can transition into that.
So for you, Jason, how did you become location independent? How did you afford this lifestyle? How did you transition from a regular nine to five to now this location, independent, digital nomadism that you’re living right now? Because that’s one huge fear for a lot of people is that they can’t do that.
There’s certain jobs that they, you know, you just can’t do, or maybe you don’t feel comfortable enough to, to jump into it and make it a whole different system for you.
Jason:
Yeah. So I think we have to play the cards we’re dealt, and obviously we’re all dealt with the cards, different, you know, backgrounds, all the disclaimers. I, I respect that. We’re all coming from different places. Me personally, I’ve been single, I’ve never been married. I don’t have kids. That doesn’t mean that I have this excess of money sitting around. When I was 28 years old, I was $50,000 in debt. And I realized that was not really a, a place that I wanted to continue, a hold that I wanted to continue not down and more importantly, I was stressed out.
I was, you know, all the bad things to come from being in debt were there. So, I started working to get out of that debt a year later, I, the bubble burst and my design firm was, that wasn’t my design firm, the one I was working at ,was forced to close the doors and essentially me and my boss split our clients up. And I took some of my clients with me. So, it was almost by default that I became a small business owner or a freelancer or a contractor, whatever you want to call that. But at the same time, I was $50,000 in debt and I had to figure all these things out over three or four years at, well, four years specifically, I paid off $50,000. I was making around $30,000 a year at that time.
So, not a lot of money hanging out. So first and foremost, I got my financial sh!t together and I encourage everybody. Like, that’s a scary thing. We don’t want to do it. We drag our feet. We make a million excuses. But if you don’t know your situation, you are so handcuffed in actually making informed and good decisions. So, you know, number one, I got my financial stuff together and I said, “you need to get out of this debt”. And I did that, it opened up a lot of opportunities for people that want to change their life.
Whenever you’re not losing a hundred to $200, $300 a month, and it’s a 20 to 30% change in your income and I don’t think a lot of people view it that way, but, around 2009, I was technically freelance, location independent, but I stayed in Charlotte and I, was chained to my desk for about eight or nine years. And I finally got to the point where I said, “okay, you’re learning about travel, you’re doing all these things, but how are you going to be location independent or a digital nomad?”.
And I started doing these test trips. Like, I actually went to Bend, Oregon for two weeks. And I didn’t tell any of my clients that I was in Bend, Oregon. They all assumed I was in Charlotte. And this was an opportunity for me to prove to myself that this was possible. And I had these, I have tons of meetings. I did all this work. I was more productive there on, in all facets of my life than I was when I was sitting back in my more complacent place in Charlotte, where I lived, in a house.
And so I kind of, of proved to myself, okay, that’s feasible. So I did these little experiments to kind of push my comfort zone and finally, you know, through traveling a lot more. And I traveled domestically a good bit the first year around, you know, just before I went to Mexico, I traveled domestically to feel that out solo. And then I started traveling internationally, went back to Mexico a couple of times that year. And eventually my comfort zone became travel and not my home, where originally my comfort zone was, was home. I would be on a trip and I’d be like, “okay, I’m freaked out. I need to go back home”.
But it ended up transitioning to be, “I want be out on the road. And when I get back home, I’m stressed out.”, cause I got all these chores, I got all this different stuff I had to do and keep up with the Jones’ and all these social obligations. So, it naturally started to flip its switch over the course of four or five years. Once I started doing that work and then it was kind of like, “okay, it’s not a big decision at this point.”, like the decision is clear at this point that this is the next chapter of my life for as long as I want it to be that chapter.
Debbie:
Yeah. I feel you on that, Jason, whenever my husband and I come back to New York, we feel so much more stressed than when we’re out traveling and seeing new places and we’re working in other locations.
You had mentioned this a little bit, is that you created experiments for yourself and you call it your experimental mindset. So, can you tell us a little bit more about that and how you started doing that? And aside from going to different places to, to see if that was right for you to be a digital nomad, what else have you done in terms of experimenting with life experiences?
I guess that that has really changed the way you travel and even lived your life.
Jason:
Back in my mid thirties, when I started, you know, pushing my threshold of travel and comfort zones and things like that. I really started to give myself a little bit of grace and patience to say,” just try this one thing, like do this, just go to this city for a few days and give it a try”.
So, the mindset was there. I didn’t label it for a while. And I’m one of these analytical people that needs to check boxes and have a reason to be doing things.
So back when I started this, yeah, I was writing about it. I was blogging about it in my website, six or so years ago, it was called the digital nomads. The digitlnomad.com, it was terrible. And I didn’t even know what a digital nomad was, but I was like, well, if I’m gonna do this thing, I wanna create something that maybe somebody else can learn from. And I was having a conversation with my mom and I said, “you know, I don’t even understand what I’m doing. What is a digital nomad? I don’t even understand what it is, but I have a website that’s called this thing.”. It’s more like an experiment. It’s like a nomad experiment.
All these bells and whistles went off in my head and once I had that moment of like, “this is a nomad experiment” and started thinking to myself, analytically of course, like “what is an experiment?”. An experiment is an opportunity to learn something. It has a start and a finish. It has a few factors involved. And then you take away from that, what you learn and you decide to do another experiment. And as somebody who is very structured, that gave me this freedom to make more mistakes than I was willing to do in the past to look at things and say, you don’t have to have the right answer. You just need to learn something from this.
So, give yourself three weeks, three months, three years, or until you decide you’ve learned enough from this little moment and then change directions, take what you’ve learned. So, at that point I really did start doing experiments like flying to Mexico when, you know, when we took and just going, as long as I could go, by the way that trip ended with broken ribs, surfing down in Puerto Escondido with five friends that I had met in Oaxaca and they all said, “let’s go down there and surf.”. So, we went down there and surfed, and I broke some of my ribs. The experiment played itself out.
But, I bought a van, because I wanted to try van life, so I bought this old, sh!tty, blue conversion van and I went to Shenandoah National Park and I worked out of the back of my van for a couple of weeks. And you know, I’ve done these experiments to go to different cities or to try, you know, different types of work, all at the end of the day I wasn’t thinking about them as these grand experiences or experiments, but looking back, I see, wow, these were all very pivotal and I need to keep that mindset of what are you trying this year? What are you trying this month? What are the book ends on these little things that you’re doing? And the other thing that whenever you put book ends on these things, you know, for instance, you know, keep saying book, I wrote a book, I was, you know, trying to figure out how to get that fulfilled as a digital nomad. So, in other words, when somebody buys a book, you need to have a shop.
You need to get that their hand, somebody needs to mail it. Well, if you’re location independent, you’re a digital nomad, you gotta pay somebody for that. You gotta pay a fulfillment service, a warehouse, you gotta pay all these fees and I didn’t have all the answers. So, I told myself, “okay, that’s fine.”. Give yourself six months or a year of running it this particular way and the freedom to learn those things and then make some changes.
So, again, just giving yourself that opportunity to have a small window of time where you say, “I’m gonna try this thing. I’m not getting rid of all the other things in my life. I’m not changing things drastically. I’m just gonna try this little thing in this window and then see what happens.”, is just a huge game changer.
Debbie:
Yeah, that’s amazing.
And yeah, I mean having that mindset that it’s not permanent, you just try, you see what happens. If it sucks, then you let it go. If you love it, then that’s another thing that you can add to, you know, to your list of things that you love. Right?
And it’s such a great thing to do for yourself. And it’s such a great experiment that you have done, Jason and ironically, that is also how I ended up finding what I’m doing now is just trying a few things. And I think that’s what really most people do when they do find something that they really love is you just have to go out there and try and experiment.
And sometimes they work and most of the times they don’t, so it’s, but you know, and in a lot of ways, it’s the fun way to do it because you get stuck with doing the same thing over and over again, when you are not willing to try something new and you’re not willing to experiment in something because of that fear that you have, that it may fail.
Jason:
So, I think there’s an important thing at play here that we all deal with and that is how we identify ourselves to the outside world. And I’m not talking about physically, emotionally, I’m talking about the label of graphic designer or author or podcast or these things that I think as we grow up, the whole goal in the United States at least is to identify yourself as this thing and then ride off into the sunset until you retire.
So even with me, when I was writing this book, I had to think to myself, okay, “how do you introduce yourself to people? What’s your, what’s your elevator pitch? Are you a graphic designer? Who’s writing a book. Are you a writer? Who also is a graphic designer?”. Like those two perspective shifts can completely change your output and what you’re putting out in the world because you now believe one thing more than another thing.
So, I think it’s really hard for us to take a step back and say, “if I wasn’t doing this thing, if I wasn’t a lawyer, if I wasn’t a doctor or a graphic designer, what would I be doing? If I could identify myself to the world as any profession I wanted to, or trying these things without it, this fear of backlash, what would we do?”. And another good way of looking at that exercise is if something massive changed in your life tomorrow, if you lost your job, or if, you know, you had a major medical diagnosis or these things that completely up, upheave where you’re at, then what would you do moving forward? If you had a completely clean slate, what would you do moving forward?
So, doing these exercises I think is important, especially when people are thinking about changing their life to say, you know, just because I’m good at something and I have a good job doesn’t mean that it’s great. And I’m great at this thing, you know, are there other options out there and why not explore those things? What’s the worst that can happen?
Debbie:
So, yeah, Jason, I definitely understand where you’re coming from. I mean, here in New York city and a lot of metropolitan cities and honestly, anywhere in the United States, the first thing that we do is we ask somebody what they do for a living, right? Or somebody meets us and that’s one of the first questions that they ask aside from what your name is, because that is how we identify ourselves.
And I always feel like there’s more to us than one job. There’s more to us than just that occupation. And I find it so much more interesting actually when people reinvent themselves and do something else, because there’s so many facets to an individual and to each person that you can be really good doing more than just one thing, even really high achievers, like Olympians they can only do an athletes, they can only do their job for a certain amount of time. And then they have to think about something else because they can’t do that anymore, right?
So, you have to reevaluate everything and redo your whole life. So, it’s so crazy how for a really long time, for most of our lives, we’re taught that we’re only supposed to be this one thing, go to school for this one thing, and then stay until we retire when there’s just so many things that we can do.
And it doesn’t have to just be that one defining occupation. So, that is a really good way to think about that too when you take that out of the equation in a way and start thinking outside of that.
Jason:
Yeah, it’s easier said than done, but it’s a good exercise.
Debbie:
Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely!
And it’s so, I mean, if you think about it too, if we really just have this one life, wouldn’t it be amazing to create different types of life for yourself and to see what you can discover and what other talents that may be hidden if you do other things, which could be really fun.
Jason:
That’s one of the most important. Yeah, that’s one of the most important things that I think I’ve, I’ve taken away from the past five years of my life is the amount of, and I’ve written about this, the amount of adventure that I feel now, this, this doesn’t take away all of the messy parts of life that anybody who’s listening to this going, “oh, it must be super easy to be nomadic”, or “oh, they’re just”, we’re all dealing with the same logistics that we just choose to do it in a different location.
It gets a little bit, actually it’s more messy, but the reward, in my opinion, is this ever changing feeling of adventure. And I’ve documented, I have this list, uh, it’s called my momentous moments. And essentially I started keeping track of big things in my life that happened. And that might have been a job change. It may have been a relationship change. t might have been a thousand followers on X, Y, Z, but essentially over the past five or six years, I started to see these things grow.
And I started filling in the dots over the past 20 years. And what I found was over the past 20 years, there, weren’t a lot of things that I, that I saw as these major impactful moments. But over the past four or five years, since these changes, there’s so much, it’s hard to keep track of because when your life now revolves around movement and seeing new things, and everything seems like this unique pinnacle moment, that’s not taking away from anybody that stays in one place, but it is just pointing out the reality that when we, we have this more complacent every week looks very similar to the next week.
You don’t have as many of those moments that you really kind of find adventurous or, you know, as exclamation points. But when you live this nomadic lifestyle or really push towards a more remote location independent lifestyle, you see these new places, you have these experiences and all of a sudden you’re experiencing so much more in such a small amount of time. You gotta write it down to keep track of everything that’s going on.
So, it’s definitely one of the benefits of this lifestyle is just it’s eye opening as to, you know, kind of how watered down our nine to five life here in the United States can be. If we’re not careful compared to some of the potential that it can cost less for even the same amount as our current life, but you can do it in a way where you’re getting so many more experiences.
Debbie:
Yeah and you have a say on how you live that life. You can be as fast as you want, or as slow as you want. That’s the beauty about this type of lifestyle and having that freedom is, you do have a say in your own life and it doesn’t depend on other people’s expectations, but in a lot of ways, it’s very scary, especially if you’ve never had that type of freedom before, because you don’t know what to do with it. It’s a lot of responsibility when you are completely entrusted with your time because for the most part, when you’re in your nine to five, you’re like, “okay, sit at your desk until a certain amount of time. And then you can go home and go to sleep” or, you know, “have your two week vacation”.
But, when you’re not being told how to deal with a lot of that time, cause that’s a huge chunk of time that you give to a business or a corporation that doesn’t have a remote first type of mentality, right?
If you do decide to do that or if you’re a freelancer and you are, you know, dealing with your own time it’s kind of crazy. And it’s a process, it’s definitely a process that you have to get used to as well.
So, Jason let’s look forward to around 20 to 30 years from now and you’re looking back at your life, what legacy would you like to leave and what do you wanna be remembered for?
Jason:
So, I actually write down every year or so, my goals for the future and I was looking at this a couple months ago and this isn’t a concrete answer. This isn’t something I can put my thumb on, but what I wrote down was essentially that I, you know, I wanted to be remembered for helping people more than, putting more into this world than I took out this world. And kind of moving that needle every day.
Something I penned a while back was, I wanna be better today than I was yesterday and better tomorrow than I am today.
So, this thing about helping the world, I don’t really care for money that much. Obviously we need that to live. And that’s a very privileged way of maybe looking at things. But at the end of the day, I really just wanna move the needle and help, you know, help other people do things that elevate them at the end of the day, you know, so I guess when people look back at me, they say, you know, “you did a lot, did a lot of good in the world.”.
That’s about the best I can do at this moment.
Debbie:
I mean, that’s the best that anyone can do, right?
So that’s amazing. I love that legacy and another thing that I could see for people to remember you by is being able to go out there and change your life. And you didn’t think about how old you were like, you just did it and you don’t have to be a certain age. You don’t have to be super healthy, right? Because you did all of these things and all of these different obstacles and you didn’t even know if it was possible.
And that’s something great to look at, you know, to look at your life and live, and see how you’ve lived that and see that it can be possible because for most people that’s pretty superhuman right there, you know, taking that leap to do something, that, it’s not normal and to reinvent yourself in a lot of different ways.
Jason:
Well, and none of us know what we’re doing. Like, I think that’s a theme that runs through a lot of these conversations of people that change is, you know, I’ve sat at boardroom tables, I’ve sat on teams for multibillion dollar projects and they all look at me like I have the answers and I’m sitting here going, “What? Like, no I’m here because I think you guys have the answers.”.
And these folks are, you know, 50, 60, 70 years old and have been doing this for 30 or 40 years of their lives. And they’re looking at me for an answer and I’m like, “wait a second, this doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”. And once you realize that we are all just figuring this thing out, that’s helpful.
Number one, like everyone’s figuring it out no matter what facade they put on, but number two, we’re not bastardizing anything that we’ve done in the past by making a new choice for the moment. If you follow through on what you do, if you, you know, you always do what you say you’re gonna do when you say you’re gonna do it. And if you don’t do those two things, you work your off to rectify that situation.
You’re already doing better than 80 or 90% of the people that don’t follow through on what they’re doing. So you’re gonna have options. If you were this designer in your past and you choose to do something else for three or four years, you might take a pay cut, but you can probably go back to being a designer if you didn’t burn bridges and you follow through.
So, I think if we view things as you know, on a spectrum, instead of these, you know, hard stop and start points and they can overlap more than they have these hard stop and start points, we can all expand a little bit more. So.
Debbie:
Yeah, I love that.
Well, thank you so much, Jason, for joining us today, we really appreciate you for sharing your story with us.
If our listeners wanna learn more about you or can they find you?
Jason:
The website is thenomadexperiment.com and all the socials and on Instagram @thenomadexperiment.
Debbie:
Perfect!
Thanks so much, Jason.
We really appreciate you!
