Rolf Potts On Vagabonding, World Travel, And The Writing Process
This is a written transcription of the audio version of The Tim Ferriss Show. It is not endorsed by Tim Ferriss or his affiliates, but has been created to help fans and readers to absorb the material at their own pace.
This episode with Rolf Potts, the author of Vagabonding, originally aired on The Tim Ferriss Show here.
Tim Ferriss
Hello, my little munchkins. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. It is late at night. I’m in Boston. Back on the east coast for a beautiful, beautiful fall day or should I say evening, it is probably close to 1am and I just finished up some work with build.org, and if you are an entrepreneur, you’ve got to check them out. Build.org But to our subject matter at hand.. Rolf Potts… Rolf Potts… Rolf Potts… Rolf Potts… Rolf Potts… I’m in the Halloween spirit and I’m attempting to summon Rolf Potts to my hotel room like Candyman. But it’s not working but why would I do such a thing anyway? I would do that because Rolf Potts is hilarious and he is one of my favorite writers and this episode showcases his intelligence and his wit. I think one of the quotes for instance is “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” This guy’s hilarious and he’s also a very astute observer of human nature and a master world traveler, among other things. He’s the author of several books including Vagabonding. Vagabonding has an important place in my life. I sound like the science duck modeled after Albert Einstein gotta run with that. But I won’t subject you to that horrible imitation for the entire bio. So Rolf Potts wrote Vagabonding. Vagabonding is a very important book in my life. It is one of two books, the other being Walden by Thoreau that I took with me when I left the US and ended up traveling at nearly 18 months around the world in 2004 and of course all of those experiences set the stage for later writing 4-Hour Workweek, all the notes that I took. And Vagabonding had a huge impact on my thinking and how I approached all of that time. And it was initially a 4-week trip that turned into 18 months. So Vagabonding is an incredible book, so much so that I partnered with Rolf very recently to produce the audiobook because it is one of my favorite books of all time. You can check that out by going to audible.com/timsbooks if you want to check that out and get a free sample or listen to an excerpt. But long-term travel – long-term world travel – does not have to be a wealthy person’s sport. In this conversation, we talk about all sorts of things ranging from how to travel, how Rolf travels, writes, wanders, gets lost, studies success, studies quitting success or managing success, or maybe you haven’t thought that that’s an element of life planning but apparently it is I’ve come to believe. And, I almost forgot, of course there are a ton of resources and links and websites and books mentioned in this episode. All of it can be found in one place in the show notes. You just have to go to fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. You can find the show notes and resources and links for this episode as well as every other episodes like those for Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Mike Shinoda, you name it. So you don’t need to scribble furiously unless you want to. But fourhourworkweek.com/podcast is where you want to go. And I had a blast with this interview. It is a 2-part interview. There’s going to be part one, then there’s part two. I really hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did, as it was just fantastic fun. Without further ado, please meet Rolf Potts.
Tim Ferriss
Hello ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I’m very excited with this episode because I get to catch up with a good friend of mine who didn’t start off as a good friend and that is Rolf Potts. Rolf, thank you so much for making the time.
Rolf Potts
It’s good to talk to you.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, and I realize by saying that you didn’t start off as a good friend it makes it sound we might have been arch enemies. But what I mean by that is I really felt that I got to know you through your book Vagabonding which was one of two books, many people do not know this, that I took with me around the world for about a year and a half starting in late 2004 / early 2005. It must have been 2004. It is one of my most heavy underlined books and really acted as my guide and my companion for all of the various travels, adventures, and misadventures during those times. So first and foremost, thank you for writing such a spectacular little tome.
Rolf Potts
My pleasure, thank you for reading. You know, it occurs to me that I heard from you in late 2005 which, in retrospect, was pretty soon after I’d written the book, so you must have found it pretty soon after it came out.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I found it soon after it came out because I suppose this may be true for many people. The buying of the book, then the reading of the book, and then the implementation of the book had a quite bit of lag time in between of those various junctures. But I think a lot of people, I really spend a lot of time fantasizing about travel and taking that leap, but had more than a handful of nebulous fear about it. I suppose we can start there actually. And I could ask very simply, what are some recommendations that you have for people who may be able to work up the savings, if necessary, and are really just fearful of taking the leap and exploring long-term travel? And I suppose just wrapped into that, you might give a brief description of Vagabonding itself and its subtitle, and why you wrote it. But I’ll let you explore that multi-part question if you wouldn’t mind.
Rolf Potts
Yeah, I like that you bring up the idea of fantasizing about travel because I think it’s something that everybody does, and it’s one of those top three, if not top two or one, things that people dream about that. And you see it in the movies all the time. In fact, I mentioned this in Vagabonding. The heist movies where the whole goal is to have this complicated robberies to have enough money to move overseas to a wonderful place. And as I say in the book, you don’t need to do rob a bank to do that. In fact, you can do that for a cost that is equal to and sometimes less than your cost of living in a major American city. So I think an important principle I bring up in Vagabonding is saying, “Don’t put this off!” If you’re dreaming about travel, and most people do, and if you don’t dream about travel that’s fine, but I really address this travel dream that is so common. Don’t wait until you’re too old because you know retirement isn’t necessarily the best time to do something like this. In fact, Henry David Thoreau, I think Walden was the book you took into your travels, talks about how people, I’m not quoting him directly, they put off what they really want to do until they’re too old to actually do it, that’s a paraphrase. So if you’re 18, 28, you know 38 to 40, whatever. If you dream about travel, make your goals soon and don’t put off those goals because they are very attainable. I think there’s a lot of fears that are tied into confronting vagabonding, and you asked me for the definition. Vagabonding is long-term travel, it’s not just a vacation. It’s not a week or two off that society gives you as a vacation. It’s six months or two years or six weeks that you make for yourself to travel in earnest. Not as a consumer experience. Not as a vacation. But as a more deeply meaningful life experience. And as a way to actualize your wealth of time, and I think this is an idea that we’ll come back to a lot, and this is something you write about as well as me, is the idea of time wealth, the idea that your experiences are more valuable in life than the things you like or the things that are always being touted as the most important things in life. Travel is a great way to cash in your time wealth. And vagabonding just by definition is a more meaningful way of travel. It’s a way of slowing down and really discovering parts of yourself instead of just buying a lot of experiences which we’ve sort of been conditioned to do as American consumers. My first vagabonding trip was 20 years ago this year. Oddly enough…
Tim Ferriss
Happy anniversary.
Rolf Potts
Thank you, thank you. It was just this time that I was traveling back to Kansas after having this amazing 8-month trip around North America. And this was a trip that I thought would be my last. I thought I would get travel out of my system so I could become a responsible American workaholic, and then maybe return to travel when I was old. But you mention the idea of fear, and the fears I had when going out was, “Is this going to be expensive?”, “Is this going to be dangerous?”, and “Am I going to come back and be compromised professionally?” And all of those sort of turned into the opposite: it was a lot safer than I expected, and it was a lot cheaper than I expected. And I came back, and for 20 years, I’ve been integrating travel with a professional life that continues to diversify. I continue to do other things to make money while at the same time having big swaths of time to travel. And I’m not suggesting that everybody needs to become a vagabonder for a 20-year chunk, and in some ways, I travel a lot less than I used to 10 or 15 years ago. But it’s something that you can do. It’s an option that you can have. It’s not an option that you wait for life to give you – you create it. And so I’m a big believer in the active aspect of vagabonding, of saving your money. The lottery is another metaphor I use a lot in Vagabonding, that people keep waiting for the lottery to reward them, but as we all know the odds that you’re going to win the lottery are pretty low. But you’ve already won the lottery: you were born with time wealth. So it’s just a matter of creating these travel experiences or these time-rich experiences, through things like simplicity, and just the decision to make these sort of things happen.
Tim Ferriss
That’s one of the themes or gifts you provide in Vagabonding. For those perhaps wondering, the subtitle says a lot which is “An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.” I think uncommon and art are both key words in that subtitle. You provide a portfolio – that sounds too financial – a quiver of philosophies and suggestions for simplification and viewing the world through a different lens, really decluttering your life both materially and emotionally and psychologically, even if you do not travel. What I’ve noticed is, I recommend Vagabonding to people who have no intention of traveling or for whatever set of circumstances feel like they can’t travel simply because, and I’m blanking on the attribution here, but I really believe that most people, even those people who have more money that they don’t know what do with, live lives of quiet desperation, and they have fallen into a drone-like schedule where they have these material objects they thought might make them happy or give them something they were lacking beforehand. But they’ve lost the excitement and anticipation perhaps they once had, the leaping into the unknown. The feeling that kids have the night before Christmas or the week before Christmas. And adults lose that. And I think one of the easiest way to capture that is to actually fantasize about travel but do it in detail. It’s not One day I want to travel but to read Vagabonding and go “Oh my god, I could do A, I could do B, I could go to Japan for the first time, I could go to Europe.” I could do all of these things that rekindle that passion and enthusiasm and excitement. I think that excitement is a much more tangible metric for perhaps what otherwise can be very nebulous and the word successful. Right, in the US, I think that for better or for worse – and perhaps for both – we have this Protestant-like work ethic towards a relative undefined goal which is this success. So what are some exercises just in terms of helping to address that fear? You mentioned one thing that is setting a near time horizon for travel, right? And I completely agree in many ways the utility of travel decreases as your physical capacity decreases, right. So you can do the most, you have the most options the younger you are when you travel or at least the more functional your body is when you travel. Aside from setting a tight goal, whether that’s in a few weeks away or a few months away, are there any exercises that people can go through to decrease that fear factor or anything that they can read besides Vagabonding to decrease that fear factor? There are stories, for instance, that I’ll tell folks, and Colombia is a good example. Recently, not too long ago, I spent a month in Medellin Colombia, which is formerly the murder capital of the world when it was under the iron fist of Pablo Escobar, the drug lord kingpin. And I feel more threatened on Market Street in San Francisco on a daily basis whenever I go and walk down certain portions of Market Street then I ever felt in Medellin. And I went all throughout the entire city. And sometimes those stories can be helpful. But do you have any recommendations whether its exercises or things to read just to overcome the fear of big bad overseas adventures and all of the terrible things that await you or not?
Rolf Potts
Yeah, there’s a couple of big picture. Funny in Medellin, I was just there a year and a half ago. And I think now, it’s the breast augmentation capital of the world.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, in South America, I guess Korea has its facial bleaching. Brazil there’s the butt implant capital of the world which is still incredible to ponder. But yes, continue. Sorry to interrupt.
Rolf Potts
Yes, the drug lord moved out and the plastic surgeons moved in. It’s a beautiful city, it was just a strange physical attribute, it’s obvious that surgeons have been hard at work. Wonderful city. There’s a couple of big picture pieces of advice that I have for this, and they’re both sort of mental. They’re about redefining your relationship or just how you think about things. One is your relationship to money and what it represents, and one’s relationship to information and what it represents. You mentioned success, the idea of the American puritanical idea of what success is. And money is a great metric for success, but it’s not the only metric for success, and I think people fixate on money to their own detriment. As I mentioned before, it doesn’t take that much money to travel the world. Travel isn’t a consumer experience, and I think you said, you weren’t sure on the reference, but I think you are quoting Thoreau when you are talking about these certain people who are bound to their own riches. He was actually stealing that from the Bible and the old Hindu scriptures which talked about these golden chains under which we sink. We’re bound to our possessions. Through success – this is a very old philosophical idea – through success we lose perspective on the good life because we tie success so closely with money and possessions and material splendor. And so if you can just redefine your relationship with what success is, and it really goes back to the idea of time wealth, that success is being able to do what you want whenever you want, and there are billionaires out there who are compromised in ways that you or I or your plumber or your local park ranger are not because just realizing that money is a tool, it’s not a metric for success – it’s a nice side product of success – but it’s a tool for allowing you to live in a time-rich and experience-rich life and really living in ways that allow you to not only follow but discover passions that you never realized you had.
Tim Ferriss
I agree on so many levels, and because we both think of this stuff a lot, just on the billionaire point to give a concrete example. This is very recent. I was talking to a fellow. He’s putting together an event. There’s going to be 20 or 30 people. A number of billionaires in attendance, and it’s a week-long retreat of sorts. And he said to me, and the gentleman organizing it is very materially successful but actually has a very level head on his shoulders and has been able to keep things like time and mobility in mind as important currencies and metrics for his quality of life, he’s done a really good job. But he said “Of course the billionaires can’t take a week off, so they’re only going to be there for 24-36 hours.” And I thought about that and it’s like, the billionaires can’t take a week off. What the hell is the point of having their billion dollars if they don’t have the options, if they have fewer options than I do, if that makes sense. And it reminded me of a conversation I had at one point with another person who shall remain unnamed, but he has at least several hundred million dollars, maybe a billion plus, and he was commenting on the number of homes that he had. And he’s a good guy, but in effect, his accumulation had gotten so out of control, he had between 6 and 12 homes around the US and he said, “I no longer feel like people work for me. I feel like I work for them.” Because he has staff of 5 to 10 people at each of his homes. He’s never at 9 out of 10 of them. So he’s effectively just working to pay for homes where his staff basically are the owners of the homes because they live there. It’s like, Wow, it really brings to mind the idea that things in excess become their opposites. Money that provides you the freedom basically takes away your freedom when it reaches a certain point. It starts to reduce your freedom. The idea that so-called freedom fighters in excess, given too much power, become tyrants. So things tend to flip when they get to certain points of excess. Also, just because I’m such a diehard fanboy of Vagabonding, so correct me if I’m wrong, but the example you gave in Vagabonding of Hollywood-nonsense related to overseas travel was from Wall Street. Was it from Wall Street, where Charlie Sheen’s big goal was to save up enough money so that one day when he strikes it big to get a motorcycle and drive across China?
Rolf Potts
Yeah.
Tim Ferriss
And you pointed out that you could scrub toilets in China, not even in the U.S., for a month or two, and probably figure out a way financially to make that possible. So certainly, I mean when I was traveling, and ultimately putting together the notes and observations that became The 4-Hour Workweek, I saved tens of thousands of dollars compared to simply staying in the Bay Area in California.
Rolf Potts
That’s the thing, if you live in an expensive city like San Francisco, New York, there’s probably a half-dozen of examples in U.S. alone. You’re going to be living on fewer dollars per day by far if you’re traveling in Southeast Asia or South America or the Middle East then you will if you’re just paying your bills, paying your rent, and buying your groceries at home. You’re traveling in a completely different economic zone. Which was sort of the point of Wall Street example. And that movie was from the 1980s. Certainly China is more expensive since then, you might not have to clean toilets, you might have to clean something else now to ride your motorcycle across China. But the point is that all those importance is placed upon conspicuous consumption or romantic ideas of what we can do. And oftentimes it is not money that’s in the way, it’s a mindset thing, which is why it’s really a mindset about relationship to money, your relationship to information, which I’ll get to in a second. But you’re talking about the billionaire who sort of become a slave to his own parasitical wealth. That’s an old idea too. I have a quote from the ancient Sanskrit scriptures in Vagabonding which is about the king and his palace only has half a bed and a food on his plate from the grains in his field. Does he own the rest? At the end of the day, even the kings, and they knew this 3,000 years ago, only eat one meal at a time, they only sleep at one bed a time. And at the end of the day, the substance of your life is through experience and if you are suddenly compromised, your material wealth and your money is there to actualize your experience and to enhance your life meaning and the moment that it becomes parasitical, the moment that you’re billionaire who has only 36 hours to go to conference – and I’d love to know how much money was spent flying to the conference, catering it, you know, because I know people who could travel probably for five years for what one billionaire spent to go to that 36-hour conference, and I’m sure you know people who could do the same, that’s such an important thing to keep in mind. I have nothing against success or material success. But really know where the line is. The point at which the success you’ve achieved is actually getting in the way of actualizing a good and meaningful and option-filled life.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely. Where does the information come in? I’m very curious what the relationship to information plays in all of this.
Rolf Potts
This is where the fear factor comes in. You’re talking about Medellin, there’s Mexico that has a lot of drug war violence going on, of course the Middle East is perennially a bad reputation place to travel to. But keep in mind that information is something that can work against you or work for you, and these days, information is everywhere. When I left to travel the United States 20 years ago, I was actually more afraid to travel the United States in 1994 than I’m afraid of any place in 2014. Simply because pre-world wide web, I didn’t know what to expect. I had no examples in Kansas which is sort of bullseye middle-class circle. I didn’t have a lot of friends traveling full time. So I didn’t have things to compare to. Now, if you’re a successful person with the money to do it and the physical capacity to do it, you can go online and not only can you realize that people are traveling in Mexico, they’re traveling in Colombia, they’re traveling in Egypt and Israel and other parts of the world that you think that might be dangerous. You realize that there are family bloggers out there who are traveling with five kids to these places or traveling with a diabetes problem or with physical handicaps or with money that they made on a job that has a fraction of what most people make. People who simply decided to become wealthy in time regardless of the fact that they work as park rangers or exotic dancers or maintenance men. Media exists in a man-bites-dog world. They’re going to talk about explosions and revolutions and bad things around the world. And so much of what we understand, in fact there’s that famous phrase “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
Tim Ferriss
[laughs hysterically] That’s so horrible and so true.
Rolf Potts
Because Americans are so in particular, our international understanding is really pegged to major world events that don’t really represent day-to-day life of these towns around the world. So if you can look past the panic-driven man-bites-dog tenor of media, and realize that Mexico is actually a giant country and that the drug violence is very isolated, and that there are ways of traveling in a very safe way and in a very inexpensive way. Suddenly Mexico becomes this amazing way to travel. My sister is a college professor in North Central Kansas, there’s a big Mexican-American community in Kansas, and they just took the local Mexican minivan down to Fresnillo Mexico. Just a family of four and they traveled with next-to-nothing in an amazing way for their teenage sons into a part of the world that people assumed is full of drug violence. And that was just taking a minivan five blocks away from where they live. And so that information realizing that the big picture news media information will always be panic driven, it will always be man-bites-dog. So the more you get to this specific information, and think, “I’m 37 years old, I’m looking to take a sabbatical from my job, I live in Virginia, and I like to drink beer.” Within 30 minutes, you can find somebody who lives in a very similar life situation who is doing what you are doing. And again even if, I mean there’s people who are blind who are traveling for years at a time, there are people who have major impediments, and if you are able-bodied and you have a little money tucked away, there’s really nothing stopping you except your own fears, which are sometimes tied to your ideas of money and what the world is like that is pegged to information.
Tim Ferriss
Right. Agreed. What type of sites or resources would you recommend to people who are trying to find comparable folks? Let’s just say people who will help them alleviate their fear of travel, or just in general. What type of online resources do you recommend?
Rolf Potts
Google for one. I mean if you just Google, 35 years old, 2 kids, 1 year of travel, then odds are you will find 20 blogs of people in that demographic who are doing just that. So really, be unabashed and be very specific about Googling your fears or your demographic and just see who like you is out traveling the world. There are a lot of great traveler communities. I’ve been affiliated bootsNall.com since the very beginning of Vagabonding. And part of their modus operandi is just sort of creating community and support for people. And they have blogs and resources on their site. And there’s other travel communities as well.
Tim Ferriss
And we’ll put the links to everything in the show notes of course, for those people who are listening, but it’s bootsNall.com, right?
Rolf Potts
Yeah. They’ve been operating in Portland, Oregon for years. And just quietly been doing the nice work of reassurance, saying, “Oh, so you’re worried about round-the-world flights? Here’s what round-the-world-flights look like. You’re worrying about a certain situation, here’s some resources for that.” And they’re not alone. I’m most familiar with them because we sort of shared a similar mission for a long time. But there are big communities of travelers who are happy to help newbies feel better about these prospects of long term travel.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, they’re all over. I remember one which is very helpful to me in the beginning was Virtualtourist.com. I was with the site for a long time and then The 4-Hour Workweek came out and I ended up becoming friends, much in the same way that I reached out to you, I became friends with the founder of Virtual Tourist. And now I’m actually involved with a site of his called Trippy, just trippy.com, as people would expect. It’s a community of open questions and follow specific locations. If you are interested in San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Spain, Medellin, all of the questions that come up, for instance, I’m just taking a quick look here. You can pose any question you want: “What’s the steepest place you’ve ever been in Country X? Where’s the best rock climbing in San Francisco?” which is generally going to be extremely inexpensive. “What are the best online tools for group vacation planning?” If you are a family or multiple families, so like you said there are many different options. Speaking of technology, how have different services like Couchsurfing or even say AirBnb or anything else these collaborative consumption companies changed travel for you, and perhaps there are older examples, but you mentioned that you’re taking a trip before we start recording, and you’re doing a home swap. Would you mind perhaps elaborating on how some of those options work, those that you are familiar with? Because I think that people who consider travel think in terms of one of their main expenses being staying in a hotel, right, and I’d love for you to share any of your thoughts on that.
Rolf Potts
Yeah, well it’s shifted the way the travel world works, in some ways that are delightfully convenient, and in some ways that are a little bit strange. I think technology is one of these double-edged swords that in some ways has turned us into insufferable micromanagers on the road.
Tim Ferriss
Can you elaborate on that?
Rolf Potts
Yeah, I’ll start with the negative. You know, the travel culture which I started in which was 20 years ago, but really my more international travels are more or like 15 years ago. It’s about showing up in town and knowing that when you get there, the unexpected awaits you. That you’re going to walk to the hotel district, you may have a guidebook with some hotel recommendations. But you’re going to shop for your hotel, you’re not going to find a deal online. You’re going to walk in there and see the room. You’re going to haggle, because all throughout Asia, basically anywhere outside the industrial world, prices are up for grabs and haggling in person gives you so much more leverage than haggling online. You can go in and look at the room and physically leave if the owner doesn’t give you a price that you’re into. And so these days it has become so convenient – not always a bad thing – but it has become so convenient that people just assume that the best deals to be had are the ones online. And pretty soon you’re locked in you’re traveling for 6 weeks and you know where you’re sleeping every night in advance, and it really compromises the flexibility of travel and the serendipity and being inspired by a place and thinking I’m going to stay here for a few days or Wow, I just met this travel about this great place up in the mountains. I’m not going to go to Varanasi. I’m going to go up the Himalayas and spend my time there. This technologically-enhanced micromanaging cuts into that serendipity in a certain way, and it also connects us to home. And again it’s a two-edged thing. Social media and the constant connectivity that comes with smartphones, for example, allows us to find things that we couldn’t find before. But it cuts to the idea of wandering around and finding things by surprise, finding things organically, and letting a destination reveal itself to us on its own terms instead of finding that place as a consumer before we get there. And a lot of technologies have eliminated things like loneliness and boredom, which sounds good and is good to a certain extent, but loneliness and boredom can lead you to those moments that sort of force you into a new version of yourself. They forced you to become more extroverted.
Tim Ferriss
Totally agree, totally agree.
Rolf Potts
They force you to read the local newspaper instead of looking through your Facebook feed. And so that’s what we are up against with these technological advances. And I don’t want to be the grumpy older traveler, because I remember being 20 and listening to this baby boom era hippies sort of lecture me on how travel used to be, back on the time when telephone answering machines and credit cards were seen as this decadent form of technology. And so I know that there are younger travelers who don’t know anything but the concept of connectivity of travel. But unplugging is important and we can talk more about that if you want. We can also talk about the positives, and I have many recent examples about how technology have helped. This recent home exchange is just a long-time friend who lives in Brooklyn, she’s a writer, and she just wants a quiet place, and I have a 30-acre place in Kansas. So I get an awesome pad in Brooklyn for a week, and she gets a quiet farm in Kansas for a time.
Tim Ferriss
And the positives you mentioned – I definitely want to delve into the importance of disconnecting. Especially living in Silicon Valley, I have some thoughts. What would you say are the recent positive examples?
Rolf Potts
You mentioned Airbnb and Couchsurfing. I think in places or more expensive places like Europe, the hostel was your go-to. If you want to save money, you would go to the youth hostel. And it was a great place to meet people, you get a cheap bed, you would forego a few amenities while you are in the hostel. I went to Amsterdam this summer. I teach a writing course in Paris every summer and my sister and my nephew came and visited me. And we wanted to go to Amsterdam. And using Airbnb, I was able to get a full cottage a 15-minute train ride outside of central Amsterdam for about half the price as a hostel for 3 people in the center of Amsterdam. So instead of staying at a somewhat grungy hostel in the red-light district, we were staying in this little town filled with windmills, and we had our own house to ourselves. We could just walk down the streets and get groceries. That was an Airbnb hookup. Couchsurfing has similar benefits. It just allows you to breakout of that old hotel set of assumptions, but also out of that hostel set of assumptions. The idea that the cheapest option in a place is going to be a hostel, especially traveling in groups. If I’d been traveling along maybe the cottage wouldn’t have been as cheap as the hostel for the three of us, if we were going to get a hostel one bed at a time. We just got the perfect place to stay through Airbnb. And so those services and even social media, even going on Facebook or Twitter and I’m not a big believer of tweeting while you travel, I think that that really puts you in a whole mindset and pulls you out of the place of where you are, and the point of travel is experiencing what is before your eyes and not what’s coming across your social media feeds. But before one travels, I’m a big fan of throwing out a tweet or Facebook post that says, “Hey look, I’m going to be in this place. What are some suggestions?” And that is something that didn’t exist ten years ago, and is not tied to a business or social networking thing like Airbnb and Couchsurfing. But it could just be that your buddy from high school has a friend who is in the military in Germany and they have an ex-girlfriend in Stockholm and suddenly you have a place to stay through very random circumstances, and so it’s the old model of sitting in a hostel or sitting in a guesthouse or bar in an exotic part of the world, talking to the six travelers who are there with you and they’re giving you advice on points further down the road. That principle has been taken to social media and through networking, that’s another way that technology has actually killed the literal hostel room where people are staring at their phones in a hostel room. But it has expanded the virtual hostel room where instead of talking to the six travelers you’re with physically, you can be talking to 600 travelers through your networks who might have good advice for you.
Tim Ferriss
Agreed. And to touch on the disconnection point, I think that social media and being online while traveling if the objective of travel is to gain some introspection, have unique experiences, and come back better than when you left in some way, is very dangerous, at least speaking for me personally. The laptop is a portal to many different things and it’s very common at least speaking from my personal experience and looking at many of my friends whose professional lives are based on computers. And they look at their laptops, they look at their smartphones, they look at their desktop computers for work which is most of the vast majority of them who are managing emails using Basecamp or other online services to manage business. It’s very easy to use Twitter or Facebook socially as a gateway drug and you’re only one tab away from going right back into your old routine, and it’s extremely easy and seductive, like you said, because of the convenience, to travel abroad, and I know many people who do this unfortunately, I don’t see the point, but they will take a laptop, go overseas, stay at a hotel that could just easily be as The Four Seasons in any major city in the United States, and they come back and they really haven’t – they’ve changed time zones – but their mindset, their experience hasn’t changed more than perhaps what they had for lunch while they were abroad. Which is a real shame. When I’ve taken sabbaticals, which are typically because I feel like I need to reassess my priorities and gain some perspective on things that are hard to assess when you’re down on the weeds, right. When you’re deflecting bullets and dodging problems and putting out fires, looking at your email inbox, it’s very hard to step back and look at the larger picture of your life and goals and whatnot from the 30,000 foot view. For instance, when I went to Bali, to Indonesia for the first time. I took 30 days off of computer, phone, and calendar basically to, like you said, move from the micromanaging of my daily experience to the extreme opposite, for me at least, which was pretty much pure serendipity, and forcing myself to, rather than feel comfortable and convenient, to feel as uncomfortable as possible, at least when you consider how routinized life becomes, especially if you’re kind of optimizing for efficiency, right? It’s very easy to become trapped in systems of your own making where you’re like, “Fantastic. My per-hour output is wonderful, I’m doing all these new things. I’m taking on new projects.” And then you step back and think “Wow, I might as well just be a cyborg running in all these systems.” So this is a very long meandering observation, but I think that even if your only goal, and I don’t think it’s a crass goal, but if your only goal is to improve your professional life, especially if you run your own company, taking a month off the grid is perhaps the best way to do it, because you have to set up systems that will persist after you get back. If you’re taking three days to go to Amsterdam, you don’t need to do that. A week off and you can probably come back and still rescue things. But a month off completely off the grid, and I was available for emergency via phone by my assistant or other people, they had to call the office at the Bahasa Indonesian Language School and find their way to me. You really have to think about the bigger questions that are easy to avoid by keeping your hands full of busy work. Anyway, long sort of preachy observation, but I really think that the less you feel you can go without your smartphone, the greater the value of going without your smartphone.
Rolf Potts
This is an old conversation. The first person to do this in the technological age was actually J.P. Morgan. When the telegraph was invented, he went to Egypt, and I forget exactly when, but it was a little over hundred years ago. His companions talked about how he was in Egypt but not really, because he spent his all time in Egypt attending to business. It was like the turn-of-the-century version of what you just explained. It was him in a hotel room, you know, attending to his business. Technology, basically, the telegraph which seems very primitive in retrospect, prevented J.P. Morgan from actually being in Egypt. He may as well have not left home. So this is an old problem. In fact, travelers of previous generations had complained that sailboats, steamships were compromising travels in ways that sailboats didn’t. In the Roman era, the technology of roads was changing the way travel was experienced. George Orwell talked about how trains were changing the way travel was experienced. And trains, when you think about it, is a technology that allowed you to travel so quickly compared to how you previously could that you could maintain a business relationship of sorts while you were traveling. I don’t think there’s a silver bullet that can keep you from being a slave to your smartphone when you travel. It’s hard. As you mentioned, there are some things you have to maintain back home if you’re traveling for more than a couple of weeks. To an extent, it’s a lot about self-discipline. There’s something to be said for physically not taking your smartphone with you, which is something I don’t do when I travel. I use the Internet, right.
Tim Ferriss
Yeah, absolutely. I make it harder so I don’t have a data plan that generally allows me to get international coverage so I can’t use the phone.
Rolf Potts
Yeah. And this pays off in tangible ways. There’s been recent research that having a vacation that is actually a vacation, and this isn’t even about vagabonding, this is about vacations, is important for your creative mind, it’s important for your brain. That having a cessation on obsessing on your creative life will allow your brain to work in ways that will make you more creative. Even if you go or travel to Amsterdam or Bangkok or the Andes for a week and you’re constantly attached to your smartphone, in some ways, it could be less advantageous to your creative life or your business or your career than if you just let go, because if you let go of that constant stream to the information of micromanaging, then your brain is working in the same way that it was back home, and part of the gifts of travel is that your brain and your emotions and everything is working in a new way. And your brain, that obsessive part of your brain is resting but it’s actually working in its own way. This is actually scientific information, the New York Times reported on it about a week ago, that you actually come back, if you can unplug, if you can actually immerse yourself in a new place, and turn off that obsessive part of your business brain, then you can come back and your mind will gift you with creative ideas and insights that it didn’t have if you had spent your whole time in the Andes, or Amsterdam or Bangkok obsessing on those very business issues.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely. I’m sorry, you took an inhale, it sounded like I interrupted you.
Rolf Potts
Well, there’s one more point that I was going to make is that it sort of ties the idea of time wealth. That sometimes, these days, this new generation has a way of stealing time wealth. Again, it’s not that new. I mean, Plato complained about that written literacy was ruining people’s ability to memorize poetry, right. But now that technology is so immersed in our lives that we can steal our own time wealth by being hooked into virtual experiences, into our social media feeds instead of the experiences that are before us. You used the right phrase which is optimizing for efficiency, and just think, if you you are going to sit down to an Italian meal in Italy, are you going to want to optimize that meal for efficiency? If you are going to hike for a week in the Andes in the Machu Picchu region, are you going to make sure that that hike is optimized for efficiency? If you’re going to be sitting on a beach in Thailand or Brazil, are you going to want to optimize that experience for efficiency? I think that that Italian meal metaphor can apply so much of travel. Of course you don’t want to make it more efficient, you want to savor every bit of it. You want to be eating tomatoes that were in the ground two nights before. And having just these very sensual, tactile experiences, not just food experiences but just ideas of the unexpected, of unplugging yourself from the life that you can predict, the life that you can consume and buy, and stumbling into experiences that catch you by complete surprise. And I don’t want to overuse the word serendipity, but it’s something that is at risk when we can’t unplug, and the gifts of serendipity are not just, actually you can stumble into a bad experience just as easily as you can stumble into a good experience, but it’s the misadventures or the unexpected good experiences that actually change you to the core of your being in a way that those pre-planned experiences don’t. And so if you can’t unplug, you’re robbing yourself of that aspect of your time wealth. To extend this metaphor, you’re making an optimized efficiency out of an Italian meal, in every sense of the word. And it’s hard to break away from. But in the vagabonding sense, it’s essential. You’re going to be selling yourself short if you can’t stop micromanaging and optimizing for efficiency and the more you think about those phrases and the context of the best parts of travel, the more you realize that you really have to throw the efficiency jargon of daily life out the window and just throw yourself open to the travel experience.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely. And one thing that I think about a lot and part of my motivation for traveling oftentimes, is that you don’t have to travel overseas to achieve this, but I find the change of scenery to be very helpful for resetting, is to focus on appreciation as opposed to achievement. I’m very type A, always have been, and competitive and those can sometimes really reinforce themselves in good but often destructive ways. And when I go abroad, I think food is a fantastic lens to use not just metaphorically but to really focus on slow, long meals. I think it’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself. And that was one of the experience I brought back after my 9 months in Argentina, which was supposed to be 4 weeks as these things often turn out, but the really long dinners. A couple bottle of wines, a bunch of friends, of course they have the parrilla, the incredible meats of Argentina, but putting aside the fact that they’re famous in South America for being unproductive, putting that aside, the long meals with larger groups of friends is something that I brought back with me to the U.S. and that I try to do at least once a week or once every two weeks. The other observation I wanted to make for folks, because I really was, well forget was, I think once a computer addict, always a computer addict – just to kind of borrow from AA, “Once an addict, always an addict” – and you have to manage that. One of the easiest way to manage that is not to rely on self-discipline. What I mean by that is when I took my trip in 2004 which some people know began with a one-way ticket to London and no planned itinerary and no planned return date, I didn’t take my laptop. I knew I couldn’t take my laptop because I would default to using it. What that meant was at the time, there were different ways to do this now, but I had to GoToMyPC installed on my computer at home and if I wanted to use my laptop, so to speak, I would have to go to an Internet café, which is not generally one of my favorite experiences, they’re usually dingy, it’s just not an experience I enjoy, which is entirely the point, I wanted to make it inconvenient and unpleasant to engage in this sort of masturbatory computer use. And I think that it’s very easy to default to that because you can always find something on the Internet. You could very easily go to Morocco and then end up sitting on your laptop watching the stupidest cat videos on YouTube for hours a day because that’s what the internet optimizes for. It optimizes for clicks and views and everything else that can be commercialized generally speaking. So don’t even enter, don’t walk through the door if you don’t want that to happen. So when possible, change your environment and remove things that facilitate bad behaviors as opposed to trying to rely on willpower, which I think is very, very fallible. You mentioned creativity, and I wanted to ask you about that because I really, really enjoy your writing and I don’t say that lightly, not that I’m the ultimate connoisseur in writing. But I think that a lot of writing is very, very bad and I’ve loved your writing and enjoyed it for a long time.
Rolf Potts
Thanks.
Tim Ferriss
Of course, it’s had a huge impact on my thinking, and moreover, on my actual behavior and way of living. I want to talk about the concept of a staycation. Are there times, for creativity and let’s just use writing as an example, do you find that you can replicate some of the benefits of travel in what people might refer to as staycation?
Rolf Potts
Yes, and this goes back to something we were talking much earlier in the conversation about decluttering emotionally. You talked about the idea of, I think you used the word portfolio to describe something. But I think the principles of Vagabonding apply to life in non-travel ways. It’s been used as a text in social studies classes, and it relates to something we were talking about earlier. You were talking about something that sort of constitutes what some people call the beginner’s mind, which is part of the excitement of travel.
Tim Ferriss
Definitely, definitely.
Rolf Potts
And we get stuck into being experts. And the online resources allow us to be sort of dilettante experts in everything. We can suddenly know a little bit about everything. When in fact, the beginner’s mind is one of the most emotionally daunting and exciting parts of travel where you just allow yourself to be a child again, and in fact I have some quotes in Vagabonding talking about how you go to a new city and you’re as dumb as a 5-year-old. You can hardly read. You don’t know if it’s dangerous to cross the street. This is a gift of travel – it allows you to have the vulnerability of being very young and also the excitement of being very young and the discovery of being very young and sometimes for all the research you do back home, the coolest part of showing up in Bangkok or Buenos Aires or Cape Town is just smelling the place or going not into a tourist place but into a supermarket and realizing how different everything is. It’s that beginner’s mind, it’s the wonder of childhood stuff. It can turn into a cheesy metaphor but it’s a real thing. It’s the beginner’s mind that allows you to engage in a new way. And that ties in the idea of creativity and the staycation, which is a silly word for what is a great idea, which is taking that beginner’s mind, taking that travel mindset which I talked about at the end of Vagabonding, the idea of coming home and treating your neighbors as exotic tribesmen, back home. And one thing I’d love to talk to you about is the idea of appreciation vs. achievement because there’s limits to achievement. I mean, 4-Hour Workweek came out in 2007, 7 years ago, and I think there’s an extent to which ongoing success can be as meaningless as ongoing lack of success, and you have to have a relationship with that to realize that appreciation becomes more important than achievement, because there comes a point where you achieve your goals, and now what, you know?
Tim Ferriss
Definitely.
Rolf Potts
And so I think that achievement is a linear way of thinking which is very American and important and I’m a big believer in that. But appreciation is that more Eastern, circular way of thinking, being able to savor what you do have and balancing that with your achievements. And so that goes back and ties in with creativity. The idea of coming back home. And I own a house on 30 acres of land in Kansas, and that’s no accident, I’m close to my family. But it’s also really, really cheap. Instead of living in a fashionable part of a big city, I can, I mean, what’s happening right now is an example of it. I’m going to live in Brooklyn for a week and do a little home exchange, and I have the option of living for short periods of time anywhere, while at the same time saving money, and really building a relationship to a place which is my quiet 30 acres in a sparsely populated part of north-central Kansas, and I’m extraordinarily creative there. Not just because it’s quiet, but because I can have sort of a quieter sense of discovery. Sort of a walking pace, neighbor’s pace of discovery in the place where I live. This is another one of those silver bullet things you were talking about how you enjoyed my writing. It is so tortured sometimes to write well.
Tim Ferriss
I’m very familiar.
Rolf Potts
One beautiful, smooth-reading, logical, inspirational, paragraph of prose is the process of a day of labor and self-loathing. So just because I have this wonderful place to write and that my creativity is enhanced by marrying my travel mindset to my home doesn’t mean that I just am sitting at my desk laughing in glee with my glass of wine writing brilliant prose. It doesn’t get easier, but you know, I guess it enables that tortured process to be fruitful in a way that perhaps it wouldn’t have been otherwise. Annie Dillard said that schedule is the net for catching days, and I think you are a big believer in being disciplined about having a writing schedule. I’m not very disciplined but somehow it works anyway.
Tim Ferriss
Well, just because I’m a believer doesn’t mean that I’m a fantastic practitioner, right? But I think for folks who are wondering what it’s like to be a writer for most people – now I should caveat that with the observation that I have extreme jealousy/anger sometimes towards extremely good journalists who have daily or weekly deadlines because many of them, to my great upset, disagree that writer’s block even exists. And they say, “I don’t have the luxury of writer’s block. I need to kick out 1500 words a day.” And they’re exceptionally good at it. It’s just infuriating, because my experience with writing is: #1 It’s not getting easier – generally people ask me, “Oh, after the third book, it must have gotten easier for you.” But actually, it just gets harder and harder because I feel like I have to ensure that I’m not repeating myself. But the most accurate portrayal of my experience on writing is Adaptation.
Rolf Potts
Right. Oh my God.
Tim Ferriss
I actually think Nicolas Cage is amazing in it. But the movie is weird. I read the screenplay first. But just the idea that you sit down and think, “Ok, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this.” And you’re like, “God, I should really wash my face. I should just eat a donut. I need to relax before I start writing.” Ayn Rand had a book called How to Write Nonfiction and there’s a portion called the white tennis shoes. And the white tennis shoes refers to the fact if you sit down to write and there’s a pair of white tennis shoes with a little blemish on it, you will convince yourself that you need to clean those shoes before you write. And that a writer will do anything to avoid writing. That’s my general experience. I feel like a schedule or at least a plan helps to, even if you don’t fulfill that plan, for me, I think this is actually a Winston Churchill quote, when he said that, “In effect, a plan is important not because you will follow the plan but for the planning itself.” And I find that having a plan for writing decreases my anxiety associated with writing, which helps me to write even if I don’t execute that plan perfectly.
What is your writing process like? And I have some additional questions about travel, of course and vagabonding I should say, rather. What does your writing process look like? When do you typically sit down to write and why?
Rolf Potts
It’s funny that you mentioned the Nicolas Cage character in Adaptation as something that you can relate to, because that’s the least glamorous depiction of a writer. And you’re going to compromise people’s romantic conception of you as a writer. And my process is possibly even worse. I think because there’s different neuroses attributed to writers and mine is maybe a little obsessive compulsive, and sometimes I could be the guy who writes 2 hours before breakfast every day and sometimes I am, but sometimes I’m the guy who writes for 14 hours and is most fruitful at hour 13. And so if I wrote a writer’s handbook, and I teach writing and I try to instill discipline and ideas of discipline in my students because that’s important, because people can over-romanticize writing and think about the news visiting them when in fact you need to be the one who creates this. But in practice I’m sort of a bad example. There are some days where I’ll just sort of be frustrated at myself. I’ll have my spot on the white shoes problem. I actually bought the Freedom app, do you know the Freedom app which turns off your Internet connection?
Tim Ferriss
Oh the Freedom app. I thought you said the Freedom map. I was very excited. Yes the Freedom app is cool. I agree.
Rolf Potts
It’s just one of those things where despite my good intentions sometimes my monkey brain goes back to the Internet I just have to be my own mother and discipline myself. I wrote a screenplay in 12 days earlier this month. And so it was really a sort of a pulpy B-movie screenplay that I did it for fun just because I had this idea and I would compromise my happiness if I didn’t suddenly write this movie that was about zombies and giant dinosaur attacks. And I think that was almost part of resting certain parts of my intellectual brain that it was just delightful to write a really pulpy story. But it was interesting. It’s like I keep teaching myself lessons. When I wrote something low stake, when I wrote a B-movie, you know, a monster movie earlier this month, it gave me such an interesting creative perspective of my own processes and the importance of just getting work out there. That I was able to write 90 pages in 12 days, whereas sometimes I can be tortured over 1500-word article. So I think there’s something worthy in Anne Lamott’s idea of shitty first drafts and getting the words on the page. Kurt Vonnegut said that there’s two types of writers: there are swoopers and bashers.
Tim Ferriss
I’m so glad you’re bringing this up. Please go into this.
Rolf Potts
Are you familiar with the concept?
Tim Ferriss
I am, but I want you to explain it because this so key.
Rolf Potts
Yeah. Swoopers tend to be the people who tend to blast through their first draft and then they’ll spend days if not weeks working on draft #2 and #13 and #67 until they get it right. Whereas bashers, they go sentence by sentence. By the time page 1 is done, then paragraph 1 has been rewritten 10 times. And by the time they finish what they’re working on, be it 1500 words or 30,000