Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Digital Nomad?

The digital nomad lifestyle looks glamorous, but what is it really like? A growing number of people embrace the idea of running businesses from the road. The image of the digital nomad used to be that the solopreneur, the young man or woman working from caves and the backs of camels, often writing about his or her adventures.

These days, it's becoming a more viable and high-paying lifestyle. It even has a new name: Location Independence, which can mean anything from operating a high-income solo business, to having far-flung offices and a mobile CEO, to having a mobile CEO working with a network of employees and freelancers. And plenty of people dream of the lifestyle espoused by organizations like Dynamite Circle. The 900 members in its invitation-only circle include substantial, multi-employee companies.

It can seem ideal: you travel, your business grows faster as you widen your global network, and you benefit creatively from the constant rush of meeting new people and learning about new cultures. But what kind of person can pull this off in reality? It's like being an entrepreneur and a traveler at the same time, with freedom as the goal. Dan Norris, who runs a quasi location-independent business, WP Curve, doing WordPress support from the Gold Coast of Australia, wrote bluntly about his failures in a post on Medium. He noted that he'd failed 83% of the time.

In other words, only one of six ideas he had in his first year worked. He travels a lot, he says, but is fairly settled because he has children. He wrote about the struggles here: "After 12 months full-time and spending about $60,000, I was

• making $476

• spending $2,000 a month on expenses

• shutting down 2 of 3 products

• 1 month away from having to get a job."

Two weeks later, he launched WP Curve, which had $20,000 a month in recurring revenue last year, he said.

I asked Woodward about the essential qualities of someone who can make this kind of fast-paced entrepreneurial lifestyle work.  She says she guesses there are a few hundred thousand people living the location independent lifestyle worldwide, based on the number of people in online communities and support networks.

Be comfortable with chaos. If you are a person who needs to feel organized to function well, this is probably not for you. Woodward said this was the hardest challenge she and her husband faced: "We had to get good or comfortable with not knowing, uncertainty and change!" Even people who think they are comfortable with uncertainty may require some time to adapt. And to a certain extent, you calibrate your own uncertainty. If you want more money certainty, go for long-term contracts or take a job that enables you to work from anywhere.

Be able to manage your own productivity. "Having a high level of self awareness helps you manage the ups and downs and continue to meet your own physical, emotional, and spiritual needs, no matter where you are." How does this translate into real life? Though it seems obvious, there are many work habits, counterproductive and productive, that you have probably adopted without thinking about them. For instance, I worked on a story once about a woman who was able to become much more productive when she realized that she needed to focus on a certain kind of work — balancing the books and making income projections — early in the morning. She could put in long hours, but couldn't afford to redo mistakes on detail-oriented work, which tended to happen if she worked on it late at night. People who have never worked for themselves or have never faced the need to be highly productive in a short span of time might not have developed those kinds of insights.

Discipline. While the lifestyle looks like the embodiment of freedom, running a business remotely means working twice as hard at being disciplined. Even in a typical workspace, it's easy to put off a hard conversation with an employee who's not working out. If you've planted yourself at a beach in Thailand for a few months, the temptations to put off those harder tasks of running a company or being self-employed is even even tougher to overcome.  "There's no-one telling you what to do, where to do it, when to do it or or how to do it, so you must be able to define your own boundaries and the discipline within yourself to get done whatever needs to be done," said Woodward.

Know when you or your family needs a break. Your identity can change over the years. Many location-independent entrepreneurs, like Woodward and her husband, scale back their travels to some extent when they have children.

Source: Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Digital Nomad?