Apr 22

Destination Freedom by Marginal Boundaries

A Day Out – Isla Mujeres, Mexico

Posted by T.W. Anderson | Live Like a Local, Mexico, Quality of Life, Traveling Tips | 4 Comments

If you’ve ever spent any length of time in Cancun, Mexico, you’ve probably heard of “la isla”, as the locals call it. What they are referring to is the island known as Isla Mujeres, or the Island of Women. It’s a small enough little place, with only around 15,000 inhabitants and clocking in at a mere 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) long and 650 metres (2,130 ft) wide. It’s the perfect day trip given the beauty of the beaches and the relative smallness of the island, which makes it a popular destination with both locals and tourists looking to escape the cluster-fudge that are The Hotel Zone beaches.

Over the years, it’s become one of our favorite hangouts, and Cris and I usually spend at least one weekend per month out on the island. While it can be a bit crowded in the downtown area and Playa Norte (north beach) during the high season due to the amount of tourists, they usually head back to the mainland and Hotel Zone around 5 p.m. in the afternoon, which means if you want to have a quiet island dinner you just wait for the tourists to leave and then hang out with the locals and catch a later ferry back.

Speaking of which, can only get there via ferry, which takes 20 minutes or so from the mainland at Puerto Juarez (or Punta Sam if you are commercial transport or a local with a car), or from the ferry in the Hotel Zone. Only locals are allowed to drive vehicles on the island, which means the ferries are only bringing people over, although the Punta Sam car ferry will transport commercial vehicles with supplies for the island. As of 2013 prices are are 140 pesos round-trip (70 pesos there, and 70 back, or 10-12 dollars depending on the exchange rate), although if you are a resident (of the island) you can get a discount on those prices.

On April 7th, we decided to take our Destination Freedom group out to the island for a day of relaxation and fun away from the headquarters to enjoy the beauty of The Riviera Maya. They’ve been here hard at work since the start of March, and we try and get them out of the house a few times per month to enjoy the area. It’s not all hard work! There’s plenty of fun and games as well, although we do run them pretty ragged in terms of 7-8 hours a day of classes and training to get their Spanish and social media skills going and their brands built up, so these little outings are a well-deserved reward.

After an early breakfast, we hit the ferry where we met up with my buddy Hans from the Pro Web Group and his girlfriend, who is a Russian expat here working for a travel agency alongside other Russians. He runs PSD2HTMLPros, among other sites, and specializes in website development. He’s helped with a few classes during our program and covers some of the basics of development for WordPress sites to help our members tweak their websites on their own for the little things that go into the day-to-day basics of running a WordPress blog.

From there, it was a quick and uneventful ride out to the island where we disembarked and made our way to a local restaurant for the second breakfast, to satisfy the hobbit in all of us. Cris and I shared some French toast and coffee, while Dave and Sophie just had some fruit and tea, and Hans + his girlfriend Anna enjoyed their first breakfast of the day. After that, it was time to get started on finding a golf cart rental agency.

Normally, when it’s high season, you can negotiate a better rate on rentals (as low as 400 pesos for the day down from 500 for the day, which is the normal price), but they were being sticklers on the rates because we are in the middle of low season. Prior to breakfast Anna was able to get them down to 480 per cart, but after breakfast she was able to get them down to 475 for two. Not a huge savings; basically we got $20 USD off for the rental of two golf carts for the day. Note: you have to speak Spanish to get a discount, and it does depend on the time of the year + other factors. I tried negotiating with the first two rental agencies we came across and they wouldn’t budge. Anna has connections in the hotel industry since she’s a travel agent, and she did some well-timed name-dropping to get them to drop the rates a little.

The day started off a bit funky with partly cloudy skies and some spitting rain/drizzle, but there was only a 10% chance of rain overall for the day, so Cris and I weren’t worried about it. Sophie, on the other hand, doesn’t like to get wet, and we got a kick out of her cruising along in the passenger seat of the golf cart Hans was driving while holding her umbrella up over her face so she didn’t get any drizzle splatter. Go ahead…feel free and giggle. I know we did!

However, by the time we did some cruising around and checked out some of the island property tucked away in the back ends of the south-western section of the island, the clouds had broken and the sun was shining through. When we arrived at the turtle rescue farm it was a bright, sunny day.

Funniest thing? Check out the little guy who is hanging out towards the middle of the shot, soaking up the sun with his back feet splayed out and up in the air. Cris and I couldn’t figure out if he was planking, doing Pilates, or enjoying some morning Yoga. Regardless, he was enjoying himself completely!

After we finished up at the turtle farm, it was time to cruise around to the south side of the island. While the beaches on the north side are great for soaking in the sun, the island’s best snorkeling, as well as the best views, can only be found on the south end. This is also where the vast majority of the locals live, considering the northern section is the “touristy” part of town where you can find Centro, Playa Norte and all the restaurants + hotels + rental agencies. Granted, there’s a lot of rental properties to find along the outskirts of the island, but the more private the retreat, the more you can expect to pay.

As a general rule, if you want to live on Isla Mujeres and you are looking for a middle-class lifestyle, you can expect to pay roughly what you would in Centro of Cancun. Between $200 to $400 a month for a single individual if you live under the radar, and $600 to $800 if you need extras like constant air conditioning (not really needed with the ocean breeze on a daily basis) and you drink a lot of beer/wine/alcohol.

Once you get around to the south side of the island you get into those turquoise blue waters that Cancun is so famous for. There’s a park here called Parque Garrafon, which is a national park set up by the government. You can buy a day pass which gives you access to the snorkeling and kayaking areas, plus the beach and all the lounge chairs, the restaurant, locker rooms, zipline and more. While it’s easy to spend an entire day just at the park enjoying all the amenities, we were here to explore the entire island with our group, so we only stopped by for some photos.

After that, we jetted down to Punta Sur, or the South Point, which is where the lone Maya ruin is located, as well as the lighthouse and the sprawling vista out over the Mexican Caribbean. There’s a restaurant, some tourist shops, a walking trail you can explore, as well as plenty of coastline to enjoy and take photos from. Including a ledge I almost stepped off when they were taking the below shot. Not a long drop, but it would have hurt a little bit =P

After that, we cruised back to Playa Norte and hit up one of the bars on the beach for a late lunch, beers and some kick-back-and-relax time before we had to take the golf carts back to the rental agency at 4:30. Decent food, cold beers, bit touristy in their prices but that’s what you get when you want to kick it beach-side They had people’s forgotten swimwear and undies up on the ceiling, throwbacks to drunken days and nights out on the beach. Thankfully we didn’t see any skid-marks. And yes, that’s the WiFi code for the restaurant.

We were pretty wiped out after that point, having been on the island from 10 a.m., so after we turned in our golf carts we headed back to the ferry for the 6 p.m. departure and made our way back to the headquarters for a good night’s sleep before returning to classes the next Monday morning.

To follow along with our adventures with the Destination Freedom Spring of 2013 event, don’t forget to check out the photo galleries at our Google+ and Facebook pages, plus you can check the videos of our recent adventure trip with Snail Adventures over at our YouTube channel. Plus, don’t forget that registration is open for the Summer retreat (July, August and September of 2013) where we’ll be doing the whole thing all over again with a new round of globally-conscious and unplugged adventurers who are ready to take their lives to the next level.

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Apr 18

Living off the grid in Cancun, Mexico

Posted by T.W. Anderson | Live Like a Local, Mexico, Quality of Life, Traveling Tips | 8 Comments

One of my favorite aspects of living in Cancun, Mexico is when I have the opportunity to dispel some of the myths around the city. The first of which is that people assume all of Cancun is The Hotel Zone, the all-inclusive strip of beach-front property separated from the mainland by a lagoon and only accessible by two bridges. It’s a haven of resorts, dance clubs, bars and restaurants, all of which are over-priced and full of obese, drunk, consumption-addicted tourists from all around the world. What many people don’t realize is that there is an entire city on the mainland that is completely separate from the HZ, and it marches to the beat of a very different drum.

Cancun proper is a thriving, bustling, very Mexican hub of activity, where a smattering of the locals speak English but the vast majority are simply living life as all Mexicans live: in Spanish, simply and without the bustle and hum of the tourist section that the governments of the U.S. and Mexico both promote.

One of the primary reasons I came here was the simple fact that Cancun is smack-dab in the heart of the Riviera Maya, while at the same time boasting an international airport and a global hub of expats. The combination of easy in-and-out transportation, along with the fact this is the hub for one of the region’s busiest ADO bus terminals for routes in and around the rest of Mexico, make this the perfect hub for travelers who are here to spend time immersing themselves in the Mexican culture.

On top of that…Cancun is cheap. Or at least it’s cheap if you want to live like a local, speak Spanish and get off the beaten path. If you want to live the typical tourist lifestyle here, it’s very easy to spend 2-3k per month in living expenses, but if you are looking for middle of the road accommodations, comfortable living, cheap healthcare, high speed Internet and a modern infrastructure, you can have everything you need as a working professional for around $600 a month (individual; couples are around $800 a month; families dependent on how many).

We have two rooms available for rent in Cancun for those of you in the market for something quick and easy.

I’ve covered the costs and etc. in other posts, such as Cancun – Beyond the Hotel Zone, as well as in our immersion travel guide for the city, but there’s more to it than just the cost of living. I’m a resident, here on a visa, which means I get the same bonuses as Mexicans. I have access to the universal healthcare system (costs me about $300 per year, and that gets me unlimited, free prescription medication along with free healthcare, although there are some limitations, such as no orthopedic surgeries for 2 years to make sure I’m not just going to buy in and abuse the system), and I can get into the national parks and museums for free on Sundays alongside the nationals…which means I can visit places like Chichen Itza just like the locals do.

But what if you aren’t here as a resident, but just as a temporary visitor? Even then, the costs are cheap. Especially as it relates to medical tourism. The perfect example is Dave from Nomadic Retiree. He was one of our retreat members down here for the Spring 2013 Destination Freedom brand boot camp for March, April and May. He’s getting a lot of dental work done currently. Root canal, some crowns, cavity work and beyond. We were tallying up the costs the other day and he took his quote from the United States (between $14,000 and $15,000 depending on which dentists he talked to) and compared it what he’s spending here in Mexico…basically he’s saving around $12,000 USD by the time everything is said and done…and the work he’s getting done is more professional than anything he’s ever received in the United States.

He’s going to be writing a blog series on it, so you can follow along at his website for the nitty gritty details, but the bottom line is that even if you aren’t here as a resident, things are cheap. If he was on the universal healthcare system it would be even cheaper, as some of the procedures would be covered by the healthcare, but he’s only down here as a visitor, not a resident, and you only have access to the system once you have an official visa and go pay your healthcare taxes/fees.

Speaking the language also opens a lot of doors in Cancun. First of all, the taxi drivers won’t try and give you the gringo rates if you speak the lingo. Secondly, the bus drivers won’t try and short change you. Thirdly, the respect level gets cranked up to 11 when you are meeting the Mexicans on their own turf and speaking their language as opposed to being the arrogant tourist who demands their menu in English and berates the staff in the serving industry for not speaking English. I’ve already covered some of this in The Importance of Language Immersion for Expats, but the basic rule of thumb is this: when you give respect, you get respect back. It’s the age-old rule of reaping what you sow. Act like an arrogant twit, and you’ll be treated accordingly.

Knowing Spanish also gives you access to local rates on accommodations, as well as the ability to negotiate, which is one of the major bonuses of living in a Latin country: everything is negotiable. For example, my buddy DJ Vishnu negotiated a year’s worth of “free” rent at a hotel where he was staying simply by offering to manage their social media campaign for 2 hours a day and build them a new website. Which freed him up to work solely on his meditation videos and create more awesome music for his fans rather than stress about bringing in income from another source. Had he only spoken English, that door would have been completely closed to him.

There’s also an untapped market in terms of web development, social media development and beyond here on the local level, which means there are almost literally an unlimited number of job opportunities for the entrepreneurial sort who wants to come down here and put their nose to the grindstone. It’s the reason we are teaching Spanish language in our brand boot camps, so that our graduates can go on and find work not merely in English, but also in Spanish, both internationally and locally.

Cancun has a fairly negative reputation due to the Hotel Zone and its endless array of all-inclusive resorts and Spring Breakers, but the reality is that the city itself is completely separate. On the mainland we have quiet suburbs filled with parks and schools, Mexican barrios with 3 and 4 bedroom townhouses, a thriving middle class, the typical street food, plenty of mom-and-pop restaurants and businesses, cheap living and a completely laid-back, Bohemian way of life.

The buses run regularly, taxis are always available, there’s grocery stores every few blocks, you can find an Oxxo or Extra on every street corner, violent crimes are almost nonexistent, and it’s nothing but middle class Mexican families raising their children and living their lives no different than any other suburbia on Planet Earth. And if you get away from the Hotel Zone into the outer barrios on the mainland you’ll never see a gringo or an overweight tourist or find a strip club or hotel or any American restaurants. In fact, you’ll probably be one of the only foreigners that the locals have seen outside of when they go to the Hotel Zone or into the heart of downtown Centro.

And contrary to popular belief they don’t want to rob you, rape you, kidnap you or cut your head off. Cancun has a 2 in 100,000 murder rate compared to Washington D.C.’s 32 in 100,000 (as of 2010), so as far as safety goes, you are safer here than you are in the capitol of the U.S. Instead, the Mexican people are warm, inviting, friendly and ready to kick back a beer or smoke a joint with just about anyone. This is called the “land of tomorrow” for a reason: if you give a Mexican a reason to take a break, relax and enjoy life, they take it. End of story. And once you get a little Spanish under your belt you’ll quickly find that everyone, everywhere, is always looking to strike up a conversation and kick back a cold one, no matter the color of your skin or what country you come from.

On top of all that, you have access to the entire Riviera Maya, from places such as Isla Mujeres to the secluded coves at Akumal, from Isla Blanca to Cenote Ik Kil, from Playa del Carmen to Tulum to Cozumel and beyond. This really is a magical place to be living, and I couldn’t wish for a better place to call home! Don’t forget to give us a shout if you are going to be in the area as we are always up for beers and fun, and if you have questions about anything related to long-term living in the city, whether it’s apartment rentals or beyond, let us know!

If you want to rough it on your own, head on over to our Cancun travel page for boots-on-the-ground information, or pick up our best-selling Cancun travel guide (on sale since 2011!)

Don’t forget to check our Cancun page for dozens of videos from our time here, as well as other Cancun-specific posts below.

Cost of Living in Cancun, Mexico

Modern Mexico: The Real Story

Cancun, Mexico – Beyond The Hotel Zone

Living Off The Grid in Cancun, Mexico

Market 23 in Cancun

Market 28 in Cancun

Gourmet Italian in Cancun – Assaggiare

Tacos in Cancun – Tacos Rigo

Tacos in Cancun – Los Aguachiles

Beaches in Cancun – Playa Tortuga

Beaches in Cancun – Puerto Morelos

Apr 14

Travel blogging is about more than numbers

Posted by T.W. Anderson | Live Like a Local, Passive Income, Quality of Life, Social Media, Traveling Tips | 22 Comments

The following post was written in mid-2012. It was meant to be posted around October, but I held off because I felt it would push too many buttons, offend too many of my peers…many of whose blogs I no longer follow because of the issues laid out below. I shared it with a few friends, such as Ryan from Jets Like Taxis, and I broke it down into a much longer chapter for Beyond Borders – The Social Revolution discussing the importance of “being everywhere” and how numbers don’t mean squat, but it wasn’t until I came across a recent post by Nora from The Professional Hobo discussing the evolution of travel blogging that I felt inspired to go ahead and push this live to the blog.

So. You want to be a travel blogger. You have aspirations of traveling the world, taking pictures of your travels, writing stories about them, and making money from your time invested.

In the old days, you would have had to jump through hoops and find your way past the gatekeepers of the publishing industry to make it into the print market to find readers. But in the modern era the availability of global technology, crowdfunding, social media, passive income, video chat and live streaming, the old way of doing things have thankfully gone the way of the dodo. Now, anyone with access to the Internet and a story to tell can find an audience for their adventures, without needing to prostrate themselves before someone.

That’s an important element in the evolution of the species. Equality. Sharing. Freedom of information and access to an equal level of opportunities. Working together to achieve common goals without superiority We are moving closer and closer to a global consciousness and as technology advances we are only becoming more and more powerful at making personal connections across great distances, without the need for someone standing in the way giving us permission or denying us.

In other words, it’s incredibly easy to make a living writing about traveling. It is not a difficult job, especially if you love traveling, exploring and having adventures. I was long an Indiana Jones fan as a child, and I always wanted to be an archaeologist, and I think everyone has their own version of inspiration. Now, with the ability to travel around the world and see the sights of old and document them for others’ enjoyment…well, it’s pretty darn close to what I always wanted to do growing up.

One of the first steps to blogging for a living and using social media as a platform for passive income generation is creating an engaging environment for your blog, with depth of information that goes above and beyond and an atmosphere of equality that benefits everyone equally, as opposed to The Greedy Bastard Syndrome.The karmic principles of sharing equally with everyone builds trust, which eventually leads to profit. It’s also important, as far as travel blogging is concerned, to talk about the culture, the people and the places, and portray them from a realistic viewpoint…not merely from the consumption-based adventure travel point of view.

Unfortunately, too often in the modern era of travel blogging there is a penchant by many “travel bloggers” to pride themselves on one thing more than anything else: numbers.

The Lie of Numbers

In browsing many travel blogger websites over the past few years as I’ve developed my own brand and following of fellow expats and digital nomads, one trend has begun to emerge which in my mind completely detracts from what travel blogging is about in the first place: an obsession with Google Analytics and “top blog” contests.

While it’s certainly important from a marketing standpoint when you are looking to organize a press trip to another country while traveling on someone else’s dime to promote a hotel, airline, country, or when lining up advertising and negotiating publicity deals, do your readers really need to know how many views per month your website gets, how many followers you have, what your page rank in Google is or how many times you’ve been featured in X, Y or Z publication?

Bragging rights are all well and good, and we all want to be proud of our achievements as travelers and writers, but I sometimes feel as though there is an obsession with chest-beating that completely detracts from what travel blogs are really about: showcasing the various elements of a country, its people, the culture and the adventure of travel itself. Unfortunately, these days it seems that the majority of travel bloggers are more interested in promoting their page rank, Analytics numbers and number of followers, ranking on Klout, current press trip and how successful their Kickstarter campaign is rather than actually providing any real, valuable information to their readers. The same readers who, by the way, got them to the point where they could land press trips in the first place.

Travel blogging is about more than chest-thumping. It’s our responsibility as writers, photographers and journalists to provide an insiders’ view on what it means to travel, live and explore another country, city or culture. The primary focus of our writing should be about the stories of the people and the culture of a region and how to integrate with and experience that culture…not an advertising billboard for a hotel chain or a restaurant catering to the tourist crowd.

Often when you go to a travel blogger’s website you are spammed with a pop-up from the moment you get to the website talking about “look at how many followers I have on Facebook” or “We get 50,000 visitors per month; why aren’t you one of them?” or “Check us out, because we are a PR5 website and that means we are important!” The actual information is left by the wayside in favor of promoting the numbers as a way to achieve funding, sponsors, selling advertising space and driving sales of products related to the press trips the bloggers in question are taking.

What average readers don’t know is that these numbers don’t actually mean anything. First of all, you can buy views on places like Fiverr, which means while a person might have 20,000 followers on Facebook or Twitter…you have no idea of knowing how many of those followers are actually active, real, live people, and how many are just purchased accounts to beef up a person’s profile to make it appear as though they are actually super important. They might actually only have 500 followers who are actively engaged in their content on a regular basis while the rest are just fluff for appearance’s sake. In short, numbers are never the best nor are they the only way to judge a blog.

With that being said, a certain amount of numbers for visibility can be helpful in establishing credibility and helping to build trust. It’s the domino effect: people are more likely to read along and listen to what you have to say if they know that others are doing the same. And there’s nothing wrong with a little subtle promotion of it, such as a counter on your website or even a separate page (not a popup) or section in your About page which details your personal statistics, away from the front page and the actual content and instead in the background, where it deserves to be.

Not to mention, bloggers with smaller, more loyal audiences can trump the bigger blogs every day of the week, at least in terms of interaction. Traffic is not the only determining factor in whether or not your blog is reaching your targeted demographic; it’s also important to look at the level of interaction, sales percentages, click-throughs and beyond. A perfect example of what I’m talking about can be found at the official TBEX Blog, with a guest post written by William Bakker of Think! Social Media, talking about the 9 Criteria for Getting Invited on a Travel Blog Trip.

Specifically, there are three things in this particular article which are of vital importance to you as a blogger, even if you have nothing to do with the travel industry: your actual “reach” compared to the size of your audience, your actual authority within your niche, and your connection to other movers and shakers of your industry/niche.

While reach is an important metric, it is not as important as you might think – at least, not in terms of your power to influence readers. A blogger who has a smaller audience might very well have a higher influence than someone who has ten times the followers. For example, a blogger with only 2,000 Twitter followers may be of more value than one with 50,000 if those 2,000 people are passionate, engaged and more likely to be influenced by the person they follow.

Tools like Compete.com, Quantcast and Alexa allow a far more realistic view of a blogger’s reach (as well as for analyzing your own data) than merely using Analytics alone, because remember, since people can buy Facebook likes, Twitter followers and beyond, raw numbers on a page don’t necessarily mean squat.

The other thing to think about is the fact that the blog itself is only one small aspect of your overall social media outreach. Consider this: while Marginal Boundaries the website has X views per day, I’m replicating that over numerous different places (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google+, etc.), which means overall traffic is far larger than what Google Analytics alone is providing me with data on…and overall interactivity must be taken into account.

The website is only 1/6th of my overall traffic…and many of my Facebook readers don’t visit the website, or my YouTube, or the G+ page, and so forth, but only ever interact with my videos or buy products on Amazon…which means Analytics is a finite tool that only tracks a very small portion of my overall reach with the brand. I have users on social media outlets who only ever interact with me there and only ever buy products through the social media platforms…they never reach the actual website itself.

The Bottom Line

I personally feel that as a writer and travel blogger I have a responsibility to provide information about culture and travel, not a life of consumption and certainly not about how many hits per month my website gets or how many followers I have or the breakfast I’m eating from the balcony of X hotel or the bedroom with the Egyptian cotton sheets and the Jacuzzi in the bathroom. It almost seems to me that the generation of income bloggers are more interested in getting the next free press trip to X destination rather than providing actual, useful and pertinent information regarding a culture.

Instead of seeing stories about the people or the regions of a place, many travel blogs are full of sponsored blog posts on restaurants and hotels. Instead of learning about a culture or its people or the destination itself, we are forced to read yet another review of a hotel balcony view, the poolside bar, the restaurant, or one of the tourist hotspots promoted by the government/agency who paid for the trip.

Or worst…a blog post that is nothing more than an Instagram collage of food pictures or shots of adventure activities, such as zip-lining, cave tours, snorkeling, scuba diving, skiing, kayaking and beyond. There’s nothing of actual value to the article/post other than visual appeal. Sure, it’s fun to look at, and the photos certainly convey a sense of adventure and excitement, but where is the cultural appreciation? Where is the actual story about the people, the culture, the country and its ins and outs?

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m finding myself reading fewer and fewer blogs these days because it seems that as the industry of travel blogging matures the real stories of travel are being left behind in favor of “whatever someone is paying me to write about”. And while it’s true that we all need to earn a nut to keep food on our table and fund our travels, it seems to me that some bloggers are less about actually exploring, writing about and sharing a destination or helping others with actionable advise on how to travel full time, and more about simply scoring a free trip. And as a result the real stories of culture and people and adventure and excitement are left behind in favor of virtual bragging and leveraging big-name brands who are cutting bloggers a paycheck.

I don’t want to read about your page rank. I don’t care if you have 50 followers or 50,000 followers. I could give two shits about the view from your balcony or the pool or the free mojitos or the suite with its king-sized bed. What matters to me is if you are providing me with valuable, usable content.

I want to know about traveling, not about your press kits and your Analytics numbers. I want to hear your stories about what it’s like to eat fried caterpillars in some African backwater, I want to know about the kid from Indonesia who went from being a gutter rat to a full-time traveler by learning how to design websites and make a living online. I want to read about adventures in the hidden caverns and canyons and cities and villages of a country, not about a sponsored trip to Stonehenge or the pyramids in Egypt where all you talk about is how X company or government flew you in while you promote the hotels and restaurants where you’ve racked up free meals as a result of your trip.

Tell me a story about culture. Show me the living conditions of the local people. I want to learn about the off-the-beaten path places. I want to know what it means to go to a country and live there. I want to read about immersion in a culture, how to live there and be part of the people, make local connections and do more than simply talk about numbers.

While I understand that for some travel bloggers their gig is scoring as much free stuff as possible, it has soured my view of the travel blogging industry as a whole. Perhaps it’s a personal thing, but I am much more interested in people who are actually exploring cultures and people and helping make the world a better place through exploration and sharing the Human Experience rather than read about yet another travel blogger beating their chest regarding how many free trips they took this year or who is sponsoring their next hotel stay.

When advertising trumps your content, you are no longer a travel writer; you are a puppet on a string.

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Unplug from The System, cure yourself of The Greedy Bastard Syndrome, tap into your universal potential and create your own reality. Build a brand, travel the world and realize your cosmic consciousness.

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Apr 09

When Economic Crises Hit, Expats and Entrepreneurs Thrive

Posted by T.W. Anderson | Live Like a Local, Passive Income, Quality of Life, Social Media, Traveling Tips | 2 Comments

When Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.

This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.

Today,” Wagner said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.”

Read the full article over at The New York Times, courtesy of Thomas L. Friedman.

One of my personal favorite moments from the article was when the author, Friedman, discussed the current state of affairs. “My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to ‘invent’ a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it.”

In the age of free information, ignorance is a choice. The ability to innovate, to adapt, to evolve with the times, is crucial to your continued success on a global scale. While there are still a handful of brick-and-mortar examples that continue to hold steady (albeit in very specific, tight niches), the vast majority of jobs have moved into the digital era, which means they are available to anyone on a global basis. The above photo is accurate beyond a shadow of a doubt: information that you previously had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have access to is now available freely on the Internet, which means higher education is largely irrelevant in the modern era.

That’s not to say that there aren’t jobs which still require specialized knowledge. Dentistry, for example. Quantum physics. Neuroscience. But these are nothing more than a handful of degrees that require the use of a dedicated education system. The vast majority of other degrees (such as the world’s most over-marketed and least useful, the Masters of Business Administration) are available completely for free online.

Not only that, but there are jobs today which did not exist even as few as five years ago. Social media managers, for example. To this day, the vast majority of universities do not have a degree program for social media, nor do they have a university program for self-publishing books or blogging for a living or creating a YouTube channel and building up a brand. These are jobs which have been created out of the ether that is Virtual Reality, the digital era that we are now living in.

Automobiles. Airplanes. Telephone. Computers. Internet. WiFi. Crowd funding. Faster and faster. Onward and upward. Human ingenuity knows no bounds, for we are the children of the universe: infinite in our potential for expansion and growth.

Our understanding and growth have exponentially increased at every turn. Leaps and bounds are happening within a matter of months now, rather than decades apart. Just as the Mayans predicted with their endless cycles of compounded and sped-up cycles as things progressively begin to vibrate faster and faster and faster until we reached the end of the last era and entered into the endless possibility stage and moved into the great beyond, the infinite universe.

With the power of free information on a global scale, with global communication, comes the ability to advance the entire race forward at the same time. No more “my country versus your country”. No more nationalist beliefs holding people back from working side by side over a misguided notion that because someone was born somewhere else they are inferior. No more 99% versus 1%. No more reliance on a system of control telling you how to think, how to work, how to live. There is only the Human Experience as the entire planet works together to achieve the same goals.

We have the ability to create infinite realities merely through thought and will. To create something in a digital space and have that extend outwards into the physical realm. Blogs. Websites. YouTube videos. Digital eBooks and other products. We understand, finally, the symbiotic nature of it all, and the planet is moving away from capitalist and selfish systems of personal gratification and into a global community of sharing, networking and outward expansion and understanding.

In the words of Alvin Toffler, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

In short, those who cannot adapt to the times, those who refuse to evolve with the digital era, those who cannot comprehend the vastness of the universe and their own infinite potential, will be left behind.

Evolution does not wait for the weak, the slow, the ignorant. It is survival of the fittest, and only those who have the desire to educate themselves, to unplug from The Matrix, who will mature into the next stage of The Human Experience.

The only people suffering from the so-called “global crisis” are those who have put their faith in credit systems, in governments, in the so-called “higher education” system and their so-called “required” degrees. The only ones currently sitting around without any work and living third-world lives, even in first-world countries, are those who choose to be ignorant, such as this poor sap who went from a $75,000 a year job as an architect to making less than poverty-level income (according to U.S. standards) with the snap of a finger.

He has submitted more than 3,000 resumes in a period of three years, which have only generated a half-dozen interviews…and a mere $10,000 per year for his efforts, and yet despite all of this, despite thousands of hours of wasted time and energy, despite three years of watching his life savings drain away, despite the the fact that the jobs he once thrived on no longer exist, he still prefers to stay plugged into The Matrix and live within the illusion.

He cannot comprehend the changes the world is going through because he refuses to unplug, to wake up, to enlighten himself. He is, as Alvin Toffler described, one of the illiterate of the 21st century. A man living in the dark, choosing to remain ignorant when there is a world of free information at his fingertips, freely available and freely accessible to anyone, anywhere, regardless of language, birthplace, religion or color of skin.

We are living in a time of infinite possibilities. That is what the new era represents. A time of change. A time of growth. With our understanding of the universal truths, we realize that we don’t have to do things the way they have been done before. The credit system or the banking system or the so-called global crisis are nothing more than peripheral. Our focus is on the future, on the new way of doing things, on the global consciousness of the entire planet working towards common goals and expanding our knowledge of science and technology to unlock the rest of the mysteries of the universe.

The journey is far from over, my friends. The best is certainly yet to come.

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Mar 11

A Riviera Maya Adventure

Posted by T.W. Anderson | 30 Ways in 30 Days, Live Like a Local, Mexico, Passive Income, Quality of Life, Social Media, Traveling Tips | No Comments

We are hip-deep in the Spring Destination Freedom retreat. If you haven’t been paying attention to the Facebook and Google+ pages or the YouTube channel, there have been plenty of photos + videos going up of the classes. And things aren’t slowing down here!

Not only have we been busy getting everyone’s brands built up (the next two weeks are specifically dedicated to content creation at their websites + interviews coming to the YouTube channel), but Wandering Earl guest-spoke for a couple of nights, and we have a group dinner out with him and his tour in Playa del Carmen this evening, along with foXnoMad, since he’s helping Earl with his Mexico tour.

While the presentation for the Summer Destination Freedom event is coming down the pipeline later this week (early access for our loyal newsletter subscribers before we go public at the end of March), we also have a special tour I’d like to announce to the Marginal Boundaries community.

In June, in between the Spring and Summer Destination Freedom retreats, we are putting together an 8 day/8 night Riviera Maya adventure tour for those of you who want to come down to Mexico and hang out with Cris and myself while we take people around some of the local hangouts where we live.

For more information, check out the photos below, and if you think you might be interested in coming, send us an email at frontdesk@marginalboundaries.com.