Dive in Blind!

De volgende blog gaat over een nomad die ik heb ontmoet in Thailand en waarmee ik een aantal weken samen mee heb mogen reizen/werken. Toen ik zijn verhaal hoorde, heb ik hem gevraagd of hij het leuk zou vinden om dit te delen. Tyler komt uit Canada en heeft een rigoureuze stap genomen om Canada te verlaten en zonder enige ervaring en vast inkomen, een leven op te bouwen als Digital Nomad en daarnaast de wereld over te reizen. Deze tekst is vertaald vanuit het Engels. Veel lees plezier!

I never saw myself as someone who would ever want to travel the world. But two years ago after I realized that my at times 70 hour a week door to door job had become my whole life when I was only 19! I noticed I had to make a change in my life. So logically I decided to move to Australia for a year. The next thing I knew I was backpacking around Australia meeting tonnes of amazing people. Then I was living out of a van in New Zealand with a girl I had met in Byron Bay and when I was on my way back to Canada I knew I had to find a way to continue traveling. I had already planned on going to Germany to study which was the main reason I chose Australia. I planned on working in Australia for a year in order to save up for my studies in Germany. But after a delay in getting some money back from Australia I noticed I wouldn’t be able to prove sufficient funds once arriving in Germany to study. I had been accepted into Universities in Canada but at that point I had noticed that I wanted to travel rather than accumulate debt for four years only to bang my head into a desk for 40 hours a week trying to pay off said debt. So I had to look for a different way to make money while travelling.

But two years ago after I realized that my at times 70 hour a week door to door job had become my whole life when I was only 19! I noticed I had to make a change in my life.

What’s the plan?

I had looked at many different options from tree planting in Scotland to teaching English in China. After turning over options in my head for quite a while I realized I had already been somewhat working towards something. Back when I had arrived in Australia I had a plan to get ahead of my studies by learning how to code. This would help me out quite a bit since I was planning on studying Electrical Engineering. It was hard at first, I had no idea what languages to learn or how to go about learning them. So I decided to just look up “how to C++” I watched a few tutorials but quickly became unmotivated due to the fact I had no idea how to use what I was learning in any practical way. The only thing I was learning from the YouTube tutorials I was watching was how to assign a value to a variable and then how to add them together. I would eventually give up and forget the very small amount of information that I had learnt. I went through this process with a few different programming languages until I came across Chris The FreeLancer’s video “how I learned to code”. After watching that video I immediately signed up for free code camp and started learning HTML which I vaguely remembered learning a bit about from a computer lab I did back in middle school that was intended to teach us how to edit our myspace page but did very little to inspire anyone to learn how to code. The visual feedback from learning HTML, CSS and then javaScript kept me motivated and got me to every once in awhile log on and learn something new. Even while I was travelling.

Back in Canada

So back to when I was in Canada deciding what to do. I was working a torturously boring job at a factory to save up money for University and I was back living with my parents. After I made my decision not to go to University in September I quit the job at the factory and got a subscription to teamtreehouse to help me study full time towards becoming a web developer. It was difficult for me but I found a few things I did ended up helping me along the way. First I uninstalled Facebook and all other social media from my phone. Push notifications were probably the biggest distraction while I was trying to study but putting my phone on silent wasn’t enough to keep me on track. I needed to make it so that if I wanted to mindlessly scroll through Facebook Instagram or anything else I would need to download the app again. Even though it’s easy to download the app again it made me think twice before wasting my time on social media.

Second I left the house to study. I love my family but when I was learning from home I had to face too many distractions. The constant flow of people going in and out of the house as well as the“how was your day?” and easily accessible games and other distractions divided my attention. To combat this  I would usually go to the library since it was a bit of a distance from my house and it meant that if I wanted to leave early from the library I would think about the effort it took to get there which in all reality was quite trivial but it usually made me second guess my decision to leave and I would commit to longer learning sessions. But still I didn’t learn very fast. I had no one around me that was doing anything even close to what I was trying to learn. This meant I had no one to talk to about what I was learning as well when you are learning by yourself it’s usually difficult to find out what you don’t know. I now know that there are a lot of great online communities for people that are in the same position I was in. Hell, the two platforms I was learning on (Team Tree House and especially Free Code Camp) have great online communities but I often felt intimidated to ask questions or engage with the community. Even though both of these platforms do an amazing job to encourage community interaction.

At the end of my time in Canada I had only made two websites. One for my dad’s one man crew excavation company and one for a local non profit and my god were they horrendous. At the sametime I only had work experience in Door to Door sales and construction. So not the best to prepare experience to prepare someone for remote work.

Off to Bangkok!

I arrived in Bangkok with a few hundred dollars and was being told that my tax return money from Australia would be arriving any day now. That money was intended to give me a bit of a cushion so I could learn more skill and not be stressed to get a job right away. So with the money I had at that time I went travelling with a great group of people from Bangkok to Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, Pai and then back to Chiang Mai. Upon my arrival back in Chiang Mai I looked at my bank account for the money from Australia, but it wasn’t there. I contacted the company in charge of doing my Australian taxes and they let me know that there had been another delay in the process and they had absolutely no idea how long it would take to get my money. So at this point I was on the verge of being broke with no job leads no paid experience in web development and no idea how to get a job. So I thought the best option I had was to teach English. I have almost 4 years teaching experience through the Canadian Cadet program and I am a native English speaker. Easy Peasy right? Nope. I applied to a few place and since I don’t have a Uni degree or a TEFL no one would hire me. To be fair I didn’t try very hard. But it did frustrate me to know that someone with no teaching experience or any idea of how to teach would get the job over someone like myself just because they have an expensive piece of paper. So after that I decided to go back to the websites I had made and re do them  to make them even better than before. I had the technology! I also went to some freelancing sites and make an account on each and bid on some jobs. After a week I wasn’t having any luck and was starting to panic a bit. But luckily in the end, on one of the days a few people from the group I had been travelling with were moving on from Chiang Mai I went out to say goodbye and have one last hurrah with them. During that night I was at a bar talking with a few people and one guy asked me what I do for a living and I told him I was a freelance Web Developer and he responded with “I am actually looking for a web developer right now.” We exchanged contact information and yesterday I completed my second small project for him (roughly 20 hours each) I am by no means out of the woods but it’s a start and now that I’ve got my first paid job it’s something I can point to when looking for more work.

Tyler heeft dus de eerste stappen genomen in het opbouwen van een leven als Digital Nomad maar heeft nog een lange weg te gaan. Zo is hij momenteel bezig met het verdienen van actief inkomen. Op termijn wil Tyler ook projecten gaan starten door te investeren in passief inkomen. Wil je ook aan de slag met het bouwen van websites? Lees dan eens onze blog Hoe maak je een website. Wil je meer weten over Tyler en ben je geïnteresseerd in wat hij voor jou zou kunnen betekenen? Neem dan eens een kijkje op zijn persoonlijke website tylerthetraveller.com.