Ep. 233: How this digital nomad quit the cubicle and hit the road with Mitko Karshovski
In this episode, I speak with Mitko who has been living as a digital nomad and spent a majority of that time growing an agency from a small team of 6 to over 25 professionals all working 100% remote.
Mitko is also the host of That Remote Life, where he interviews entrepreneurs and thought leaders on the topics of business, remote work, global citizenship, economics, tech, and much more.
Listen on to find out how Mitko quit the cubicle and lives life on the road.
Listen Below:
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Transcription:
Debbie:
Hey everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I am really excited to speak with my guest today. I’m here with Mitko.
New Speaker:
Hey, Mitko. How are you?
Mitko:
Hey, Debbie, I’m doing great. How are you?
Debbie:
I am wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today. Can you tell us about you and why you live an offbeat life?
Mitko:
Yeah. So, like you mentioned, my name is Mitko, and actually, you and I have a very similar background in that I know that you immigrated to the United States when you were quite young. And I immigrated from Bulgaria when I was about 10.
And then both of us actually are college dropouts. I know that you dropped out of school and I dropped out of school as well for very similar reasons because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And I thought that I was going to go do one thing.
And while I was studying, I was actually studying biotechnology, and I was sitting there in this classroom and I just saw the rest of my life kind of flashed before my eyes. And I just saw the suburbia, house on the cul-de-sac, all this kind of stuff. And it just freaked me out ’cause I never imagined myself and that sort of lifestyle. And so I knew I had to do something drastic to make sure that I don’t end up there.
And so I dropped out of college and, yeah, joined the startup scene sort of thing, got really involved working with startups, and then discovered the digital nomad world. And for the last four or five years, sometimes I forget, I’ve been traveling full time working completely location dependently.
So yeah, I feel like that’s my offbeat life kind of thing.
Debbie:
That’s amazing. Love it. Yeah. We do have a lot of similarities and it’s kind of interesting how life just takes you to so many different places. And like you mentioned, I think most of us were shown this life, especially as immigrants, you have to live the American dream and there’s a lot of expectations and I’m sure it happened to you too with your family. Like, “You’re here for a better future, and this is the future that we’ve set up for you.”
Mitko:
“We sacrificed everything to come to America.” And then I was like, “No, that’s good. I’ll just drop out. But thanks though.”
Debbie:
I know. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, they did all of this stuff.” And in a lot of ways, there’s a lot of burden on you too as a child, as an immigrant, and then the child of immigrants, because you’re expected to do all of these things. And when you don’t follow a set of like rules that you’re supposed to follow, then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh my gosh, what happened to you? This is not what we all planned.”
And it’s so crazy how now this is what a lot of people are doing but before, we were rebels, now, this is like what everybody else is doing.
Mitko:
So I’m very fortunate in that my parents have always been very much like support as whatever it is that I was doing. And they never really put any sort of expectations on me. They were always like, “Hey, we just want you to do whatever makes you happy.” So in that way, I was very, very fortunate.
I have a lot of immigrant friends who did not have a similar situation. I will say though that I placed the burden on myself because even though my parents never said this to me, I always had this expectation of like, “No matter what I do with my life, I need to like make a lot of money to take care of my parents, to take care of my family because they’ve sacrificed so much.”
And that was like a burden that I carried around for a very long time. And I think served me negatively because I was always in whatever I was doing, I was like, “Where’s the money? Where’s the money? Where’s the money?”
And so I think that that was certainly one of those things that I picked up as an immigrant child along the way in terms of like a burden.
Debbie:
That is absolutely true. And I think it’s because our parents took care of their parents. And then we want to take care of our parents.
So this is the thing: it’s not like we’re told that we have to do it, right?
Mitko:
Yeah.
Debbie:
It’s just something that we see our family do. And it’s not like my parents are like, “Well, you have to take care of us now,” or your parents say that, it’s just like you saw your parents take care of your grandparents and they did the same thing to your great grandparents.
So it’s kind of like, I dunno, I guess it’s like an inheritance in some way that you’re expected to do that. It’s like an untold thing, but it’s so true. We all have that on our shoulders. And that’s why most of the time coming here, it’s all about money. It’s not really about being happy and making money. It’s just surviving.
It’s just to be able to survive because that’s really what we saw with our life, with our parents. And then coming to the United States, all of a sudden you have all of these possibilities. Then it takes a turn, it switches for you.
So when did that happen for you exactly? When that all switched and you were like, “I also need to do something for myself. I also need to be happy by not only taking care of my family but also myself”?
Mitko:
I think one of the beauties of what we do is that I don’t need to choose one or the other. You know what I mean? Like, I think I very early on realized what was happening with entrepreneurship.
And I just saw the possibilities of that versus going in becoming a lawyer or something like that or like going to work a job, which to most people seem safe. But to me, there was this, I love this idea of I have unlimited potential as a business owner, as an entrepreneur.
And I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, my dad was very entrepreneurial. And so I saw both the good sides and the ugly sides of that, but I knew how good it could be. And so for me, this is what makes me happy. It’s what I love to do. It’s my hobby as well.
It’s like I nerd out on all sorts of things related to entrepreneurship and location independence. And for me, it’s like, “Yes, I get to do the thing that I love, but it also has this unlimited potential in terms of financial benefits. And also like, as an entrepreneur, as somebody who runs their own company, owns their own time, I have the ability to spend time with my family.
Like for example, my father and mother-in-law are coming to town and I’m able to take a week off and show them around Bulgaria where I’m at at the moment. And I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do that.
So yeah, I think I’m in a fortunate case where the two things are sort of married – if that makes sense.
Debbie:
Yeah. And I think, for the most part, a lot of us really go into this, wanting that type of freedom that we don’t have when you’re in a nine to five, or you don’t own the business. But reality though, if you do own the business a lot more is on your shoulders.
And especially in the beginning, you’re most likely going to be working more than your nine to five instead of a nine to five. It’s probably going to be like a six to eight or an eight to eight. So it does have its ups and downs, but once you get it right, once you get your systems going, there is really no earning cap when you own your business like it does when you’re in a nine to five.
You can only go so far and then what do you do from there? So there is a huge difference in that. And I love that you had your dad to show you that because it’s hard. Entrepreneurship is hard, but when you have at least somebody that you can look up to and show you some of the ways, it’s pretty awesome to have that.
Mitko:
And it’s been really fun on the other hand now because my dad is now also a digital nomad.
Debbie:
Oh, wow!
Mitko:
And he was somebody who I’ve been telling about remote work and like, “Hey, everything that you do in your business, you can do remotely. There’s nothing stopping you.” And he was always kind of like, “Yeah. Look, I understand that theory…”, But like kind of wasn’t sold on it.
And he was already starting to take on clients remotely and then COVID hit. And essentially like forced him to go all in. And now he’s like here in Bulgaria for a month, which he hasn’t been able to do since we immigrated to the US. And he’s like, “This is pretty nice.”
So on the flip side, now I’m helping him manage this whole remote world and how he can like do certain processes and set up so that everything functions the way it should. So it’s been really fun on the other end to now kind of like lead him down this path. So, yeah.
Debbie:
I love how it went full circle, right? And then it’s like now before the pandemic, everybody thought that what we did was so unstable, and then it all switched and it’s like, “How do we get to where you are? Because you could still work from home. You still had income when all of this stuff was happening. You weren’t panicking as most people were.”
And now there are so many businesses that are transitioning. And so many more people are aware that this is actually something that is realistic for them, which is pretty incredible. And I love seeing so many new people trying this and really enjoying it.
Mitko:
The interesting thing is you said everybody used to think that what we were doing was unsafe or kind of scary or whatnot, but I don’t think that was ever the reality. It’s just that most people accept only the data points that they wanted to accept, right? They were accepting truths that weren’t really true.
But if you were to kind of like come into it with like a fresh perspective and say, “Okay, what is the actual data? What is the information telling me? What is safe? What’s not safe? Where’s the world going? What is the trajectory that we’re headed on?”
This was always going to happen, right? Remote was always going to take over. It was just a matter of time. It wasn’t if it was going to happen, it was when it was going to happen. And COVID kind of came along and reduced what would have taken, let’s say, 10 years and did it in one year.
And I think the same thing is going to happen with entrepreneurship because this idea of the “safe job” doesn’t exist, right? The safest job that you can have is the one that you create for yourself because how many people going through COVID or the financial crisis before that had a nice, safe job that they showed up to and they were just another head on the chopping block, right?
So this whole idea of like a safe job that gives you a steady paycheck. Yeah, that’s all great. And I understand that there are some benefits to having a steady paycheck. I understand that it can be very frightening in the beginning when you start your own business and you’re like, “I’m making a bunch of money this month.” And then for three months, there’s like nothing comes in.
I understand that can be very stressful, but this is the way the job market is headed in. And we can talk about like, why that is as well. It’s becoming far more entrepreneurial. And the sooner that you accept that, and you begin to build those entrepreneurial muscles that have atrophy because of your constant working for a boss and being so reliant and sort of like, soft so to say about working in a job, the better it’s going to be for you because when there isn’t an option to have a job and you have to be more entrepreneurial, you’re going to have that muscle built.
Debbie:
Yeah. And one of the things that I think a lot of people are afraid of is exactly that, going off on their own, right? Because that’s a scary thing. When you have a job, it’s a safety net, there’s always income coming in every week or every month. And when you take that out, that’s really the scariest thing for a lot of people. And that safety net is, “What happens if I fail? What happens if I don’t make money or I don’t create income?”
And you talked about this too, it’s an up and down, right? One month you could be making five or six figures, and then the next month you barely make four, even any. So when you have that up and down, Mitko, especially when you first started this entrepreneurial journey, how did you kind of measure yourself?
‘Cause it’s a roller coaster. And I say this all the time, entrepreneurship is kind of like being bipolar; one day, you’re super happy and the next day you’re really depressed. How do you flex those entrepreneurial muscles that you’re talking about so that you can ride the wave? Because it is constantly a wave, especially in the beginning. And honestly, we’ve been doing this for several years and it still is. There are still waves happening.
Mitko:
Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing is it just comes down to experience and having like hindsight, because I remember like when you become entrepreneurial, and maybe you score like a big client, all of a sudden like 10, 20K land in your account and you’re like, “Oh! I’m a baller now. We got money. Only upwards from here,” right?
And then, you know how this works is when you work with clients or you do projects, you might get like a big whale and then you might not have anything for a few months. But what happens if you don’t have experience, you don’t know how this goes, you look at this big whale and you think that that’s going to be the pattern, is that every month is going to happen ’cause you’re used to that happening at a job, right?
The same amount of money landing your bank account every month. And so you don’t have this muscle of like, “Okay, I need to spread this out. How do I make sure that this lasts me for at least the next few months until the next whale hits,” right?
And I remember when this happened and for me, it landed right around Christmas, which guess what happens around the holidays is nobody that you want money from, wants to talk about money, right? It’s one of the most difficult times to find new clients because everybody’s on vacation, right?
And so here I am kind of like I had had this big spike and now I need to go find the next client and nobody wants to talk to me because everyone’s out for the holidays or whatnot. And so it was on the most depressing periods of my entrepreneurial career ’cause it’s like this spread of like two, three months where you’re like, “Am I a failure? Am I a fraud? Because nobody is interested in this kind of stuff. I thought that I could always figure things out. And all of a sudden, I can’t figure this out right now.”
And what ended up happening was that around, I think, the end of January when people kind of like got back to the swing of things, clients started coming in again, right? But there was this, I remember this, the spirit of time where I was like, “What is happening? Everything’s falling apart around me.”
And so now looking back, like this kind of stuff, doesn’t really stress me out because I’ve planned for it. And I know that this is kind of how things work. But I’m also, whenever there is a big landfall of client work or something like that, you know that this isn’t like, “Oh, now we have all this money to blow this month.” It’s like, “This is money to drive. We’re on a road trip and we just stopped at the gas station,” right?
You don’t just floor the pedal to the metal and burn that entire gas tank right away, right? You kind of drive leveled and spread that gas out across hundreds of miles until you get to the next gas station. That’s a terrible analogy or metaphor. I never know which is which. But just trying to get my point across here.
Debbie:
But it’s interesting because I feel like when I started being an entrepreneur, which was years and years ago, and I failed like three businesses that I started and it was horrific, but I also learned a ton, right? And then when I started this business that I have now, it just started to take off fairly quickly.
And it was within maybe half of a year, maybe five months. And then, I started making income from it. And then within eight months, I was making more than my day job. And it was really interesting because I actually realized that if this happened to me in my first business, I would not have understood what on earth to do with my clients or with the success, right? Or how to ride the wave that you’re talking about, Mitko.
Because after that eight months, then it was quiet for several months. And if I didn’t know that this is a wave that you’re talking about and understanding how to budget, understanding how to have hindsight, it would have been very depressing, right?
Because you have this huge ride that you’re just surfing and then all of a sudden, you just fall and you keep falling and you keep falling. And you’re like, “What is happening to me?” Like, you’re talking about, “Did I just have a fluke? Is this just a one-time thing? Is this going to happen again?”
And I always feel like the universe really prepares you for something that you’re going to need to get ready for. Because if you’re not ready for that, then it’s not going to happen, right? It’s going to fail. And I think it’s pretty interesting because a lot of people just want to succeed right away. But I do notice that when you do succeed right away, you don’t understand how to actually deal with it. And it doesn’t last for very long, right?
Have you seen these lottery winner shows where they win the money and then after like a year or two, they absolutely lose everything, and then they’re like back to square one? I feel like it’s kind of like that.
Mitko:
Yeah. I mean, I think there’s this concept that doesn’t get talked about enough in entrepreneurship, which is exit velocity. So you talked about having two, three failed businesses, right? And you might look at them as failures, but one of the things that you said was that you learned from them, right?
In each one of those failures, built up your exit velocity, right? The same way that a rocket has to build up a certain amount of speed in order to leave earth’s orbit, that’s its exit velocity. And you need a certain amount of exit velocity for everything to start to click.
And in the very beginning, you might not have had enough of that velocity built up to leave, right? You didn’t have enough experience. Maybe your product-market fit wasn’t very good. You probably weren’t that good of a salesperson, right? You hadn’t had enough of those conversations to learn from them.
And there are several different ways to build a business’ exit velocity. But I think people need to look at it more this way, right? Like, “Okay, there are 10 things that I need to get right in order for this work. And this time around, I only got two right. Next time, I’m going to get it up to five. Maybe that’s not going to be enough to cut it. Then I need to get up to that ten.”
The thing is that we almost need to relearn everything once we jumped into entrepreneurship because don’t forget that the education system that we go through was developed during the industrial revolution and our education system is built to create factory workers, right?
Maybe not in the factory, but it’s basically that same style. Like, think about the way that work is at the moment. It’s not very entrepreneurial. People want you to fall in line to do part of your cognitive system. And so when you all of a sudden leave that system, the education system has not prepared for you to be in this new existence and you need to relearn.
And part of like gaining this exit velocity of those tries and failures is you relearning all of those lessons and figuring out how to work outside of that system that we’re essentially taught to be a part of.
Debbie:
I absolutely agree with that. I mean, I think honestly, you’re right. The educational system sucks when it comes to preparing us for the real world, especially for entrepreneurship. Like, it just doesn’t do that at all. Like, we’re not even taught how to budget our money. Like, that should be the most basic thing.
We’re not even taught how to like deal with taxes, right? These are things that we really need to be taught as young children. And you don’t learn that unless you go to school and specifically seek that out. So you’re right. It’s like, we’re always taught to be employees, right? Like you said, just to follow along, not to have our own mind.
And it’s hard to think for yourself when you’re taught your whole life, not to do that. And when you start doing it, there’s going to be a lot of things that are not going to go right. And this is I think that’s why a lot of people are not equipped for failure. I’m sure you can attest to this, Mitko, you fail every day as an entrepreneur and you learn every day from these failures that make you keep getting better and that’s why you succeed.
But there’s also a lot of people who are not equipped for that, right? They’re not equipped to handle them or even hearing the word no from people, which is really interesting. And then when you start kind of getting yourself in that group, I think you mentioned this before like you start getting used to it and you’re just like, “Just another one. Off to the next one. What’s next?”
So it’s kind of interesting. It’s relearning everything that you’re taught and teaching yourself and also surrounding yourself with the people that are also in this same journey. And that’s why I love talking to someone like you, because we’re like, “Yeah, this is what we’re all going through. You know what I’m talking about.”
Mitko:
Yeah. For sure.
This all makes me think of when my wife graduated from college, I didn’t graduate from college but my wife did, when we went to her graduation ceremony, this girl got up to introduce the person who is going to be presenting the commencement speech, I guess it was called.
And she said that this professor taught her one of the most valuable lessons. It was like the thing that she now walked her way from college. It’s like one of the most important things that she’s been told and I’m like waiting at the edge of my seat. Like, “I can’t wait to hear what this is.” And she just goes, “FIO, figure it out.” And I was like, “Okay, well that was like not special because expecting some sort of like the answer to life sort of thing.
Mitko:
But it is this idea of like, I think as entrepreneurs, we need to FIO, we need to figure it out way more. And we need to be comfortable with this idea of like, “I don’t know what the answer is and I need to go figure out even where to figure it out,” right? ‘Cause sometimes it’s not as easy as to just figure out the answer. It’s like, “I need to figure out first where to look, to figure out the answer, right?”
But when you’re in this sort of, I think, the education system prepares you in this kind of like coddled way where it’s like, there’s always this path, but it’s kind of figured out. And then when you go work for somebody, there’s always somebody there that you can be like, “Hey Joe, how do you do this?” Or like whatnot. And you’re never really trained to have this sort of like, “I don’t know what the answer is. Why don’t you break it or try to break it and then figure it out,” right?
Like, get out there and throw some stuff, throw some darts at the board and see what works and be okay with not hitting the bull’s eye right away, but figuring out what went wrong and then retesting and retrying. And actually, I think this is something that, for me, has been really helpful having a science background. Like I said, I studied biotechnology in college.
And even way before that, I was in the biotechnology program in high school. And I look at a business exactly the way that you look at an experiment in a science class. You have a problem and you have a hypothesis of how that problem is solved, right?
So you go out there and you test your hypothesis. And once you run the experiment, you get to analyze the results and see, “Okay, well, did this work, did it not work? If it didn’t work, what variables do I need to change in order to retest that hypothesis and run that experiment again?”
And I think that looking at it from that viewpoint has really helped me go with like, “Oh, I need to go out there and figure this out. And I might run the experiment the first time like you said you did. You built one business, didn’t work, a second business didn’t work, a third business didn’t work.”
You were just running the experiment and every time changed the variables until it worked. And so that’s just like a way for me, I think, to remove myself from this constant up and down and the roller coaster of emotions that is business and say, “It’s just an experiment. We’re just testing the hypothesis.”
Debbie:
Yeah. It’s really, that’s the thing right there. It’s not to take things personally. And I think whenever something doesn’t go your way or exactly the way you want the experiment to go, you take it personally, right? Then you start feeling bad about yourself. Like, it’s a reflection of who you are.
And then another thing that I wanted to talk to you about too, Mitko, is this mentality that we have as entrepreneurs of constantly hustling. And then when we don’t get the results right away, like, again, there’s something wrong with us.
And then we compare ourselves to other entrepreneurs who, I know we hear this all the time, have probably been in business for like 10, 20 years. And we’re literally comparing ourselves and we’ve been in business for two or three years, right?
And there’s always this constant thing. I’m a New Yorker. I live here, I grew up here and I see this all the time and it’s a hard thing. It’s a hard thing to stop yourself and just being okay with slowing down and resting, or maybe the work doesn’t have to be that fast for you to figure it out. And maybe because you’re rushing so much, you’re not figuring it out the right way.
I don’t know how you feel about that, Mitko, but I think that’s definitely one of the things that I’ve learned throughout this whole thing is actually slowing down has allowed me to learn more and taking things out. Saying no to things that we don’t need has been so crucial to all of this.
Mitko:
Yeah. If I have to be completely transparent, I’ve never identified myself as a hustler.
I remember I got really interested in web development. I thought I was going to be a web developer because I had a mentor who told me that the best web developer or the best coder is a lazy coder because they always want to get it done with as little code as possible, which is the best kind of code, right?
Like, the simpler the code is the better it is. I was like, “Perfect for me, man. A place where you get rewarded for doing less work. That’s awesome.”
For me, I have friends who are crazy hustlers and they’re constantly putting in 10, 12 hour days. And a part of me really wishes that I had that bone in my body because I kind of look at them like, “Oh man, they’re constantly doing more than me. They’re constantly outhustling me, they put in more work, what kind of stuff.”
But what I look at is like, “Look, that’s one of my weaknesses, but usually where your biggest weakness is, is also where your biggest strength is, right? And one of the things that I always look at is like, “Okay, maybe I’m not going to spend as many hours in front of the computer as some of my friends.” But what that means is that every single hour that I spent in front of the computer needs to be that much more powerful.
And this is a place where like some of the Valls writings have been really helpful. And Eric Jorgensen, who has been on my podcast and wrote the Almanac of Nepal, he’s been really helpful to me. This is uncovering leverage, right?
And always working out of like, “Okay, if I only have an hour or two to work on whatever this project is, what is the most important thing that I can get done today that will then make everything else unnecessary or easier, right?”
And so I think that if you are somebody who has a hustler mindset, like I would almost like challenge yourself to do this where it’s like, don’t do it every day, but say, “One day a week, I’m only allowed to work three hours.” So if I only have three hours to work, what are the things that I’m going to work on that will make everything else easier or unnecessary, right?
And so drive that hustle and that need to be the best and be competitive and get the highest score the game and whatnot, focus that in that direction. And you’re almost like hacking your hustle, if that makes sense because then those three hours are going to be so valuable and so leverage that you’re like, “Okay, those are the rules of the game. And I won the game and nog gets up, leave the workplace.”
You just need to set some boundaries, but like really hustle within those boundaries.
Debbie:
I love that challenge. We should all do it. Do you do that? Do you challenge yourself to do that?
Mitko:
Yeah.
Debbie:
Okay. Let’s all do it.
Mitko:
So, I mean, for example, every other week, this is sort of like my way of doing it ’cause it’s slightly different. Every other week I take a Friday off and I take that and I call it Fun Friday. And I work on whatever project I want to work on. Whether it’s something completely out of the blue. One day, I bought a beer website and like just play.
Debbie:
Love it.
Mitko:
And for me, that’s my way of like I like to spend 10 to 20% of my work and time on something completely non-related ’cause sometimes that’s where the really interesting things come from. And so yeah, what that means is that if I have one less day this week to work on my business, I need to get it done in four days, right? So that’s kind of like a mini way of doing that.
Debbie:
Yeah.
So for me, I call myself a lazy entrepreneur because, yeah, I’m a lazy entrepreneur, but a lot of that really comes from delegation. And it was so interesting because my podcast now is pretty much almost a hundred percent passive, right?
So, my assistants, my editors do everything. And then there was one day, Mitko, and I was like, “What have I been doing? Why am I not spending any time on my show? I feel so lazy. How come I took off like all these days?” And then I realized, shit is getting done.
Like, I’m not even there and stuff is getting done. I’m like, “Oh yeah. It’s because I have a whole team that goes along with it.” So it comes after a while, but you can definitely get there. And like you said, you don’t have to constantly hustle in order to do things.
Debbie:
And I love that exercise, that challenge that you mentioned, because I think every entrepreneur should definitely do that because a lot of times it’s kind of like school, right? You go to a school and most, or half of your day is just doing nothing, right? You’re just wasting time. And you’re kind of doing things just to do things, honestly.
But when you’re hyper-focused for a few hours a day, then you’re actually getting things done that will move your business, not just busywork. So that is such a great challenge to do for everybody. I love that. That’s such a great idea.
Mitko:
Yeah. And actually, I’m just like you. Like, that’s my thing as well. I work with SLPs and operations a lot. And so for me, it’s like, “Yeah. I might not be the most hustler person, but I’m very good at delegating and creating systems around things that need to get done and how to automate them.
So anytime that you can figure out a system for getting something done that you do manually, usually, the quality will also be better as opposed to you doing it every single time, over and over again.
Debbie:
Yeah. Love that. It’s just all about systems, systemizing everything.
So, Mitko, let’s fast forward to 50 years from now. And you’re looking back at your life. What legacy would you like to leave and what do you want to be remembered for?
Mitko:
I want to be remembered for laying the groundwork for this new location-independent lifestyle because I really think we’re just getting started. And I think when you accept the truth that right now is the first time in the civilization that our economic growth is completely separated from our geographic location – everything changes.
My parents, if they were living through this today, wouldn’t have to immigrate to the United States to give my family a better life. They could just get a remote job living in Bulgaria, working for a US company. And when you kind of internalize that idea and you see what dominoes fall down because of that, you come to realize that the world that our kids are going to be living in 50 years from now is a world that is drastically different than the one that we’re living in right now.
And I love to be an early adopter of these things. And so if there’s an article 50 years from now that talks about how I saw it coming and kind of helped to bring it into reality, I would be at the super-stoked. So that would be my answer.
Debbie:
That is such a great legacy to have because you’re right. Like, thinking about it, our parents wouldn’t have done what they did, right? And it’s a lot of suffering. To be honest, it’s a lot of suffering. You literally leave everything that you know.
And also it’s most likely going to relieve a lot of the suffering that a lot of immigrants are facing right now in a lot of these different countries. So love that. That is such a great legacy. I’m so glad we’re in this industry because it does, it really changes people’s lives.
Well, thank you so much for being here. I really thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. I love talking to you so much. If our listeners want to know more about you, where can they find you?
Mitko:
Yeah. So, if you enjoyed this conversation, I also have a podcast called That Remote Life where I get to talk to some really, really interesting people. Some of the biggest thought leaders in this space and in this entire revolution and transition. So yeah, if you want to check out the podcast is That Remote Life.
And then my Instagram is @mitkoka – all over social media. And if you’re building a business, I have a membership, a community called Parable. You can find joinparable.com where we create case studies of real-world location-dependent businesses.
So you get to see behind the scenes, look at exactly how a business like this works at everything, all the information. What do they use to build the business? How much money does the business make? How much money did it make when it first got started? When did they hire? How did they hire? All that information is available on that.
So yeah, I’d say those are the three best ways to get in touch with me.
Debbie:
Perfect. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you and love hearing your story and your journey. Thanks again, Mitko.
Mitko:
Thank you.
Listen to Mitko’s extended interview where he shares how to find out your minimal viable income to become location independent.
What you’ll find:
In this episode, Mitko will help figure out your minimal viable income that will determine your readiness to become location independent.
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