Dream off the Beaten Track

Sawadee Ka from Chiang Mai, Thailand!

Before I begin, let me start with this disclaimer.

I do a lot of content creation and have been recently studying how to create the best content out there. The secret is simple: setting a clear goal, defining a specific audience, and writing with empathy.

I was uncertain whether I should document this journey or not, and to be honest, I'm still not entirely sure. But today, I felt like writing.

So, here's my disclaimer. My motivation behind writing this is a bit egotistical: it's for the purpose of REFLECTION. I've found that writing enables me to retrospect on my experiences, allowing me to understand my feelings and grasp the lessons I learn along the way.

Since my goal is introspection, my audience has to be none other than myself. What follows is one, or perhaps the first of many, letters to myself.

If you're reading this, welcome to the whirlwind that is my mind. I hope this format helps you in some way. I've learned a ton from other solo travelers' accounts so, who knows? Maybe this isn't just for me, but for you as well.

I'm sitting at Da's Home Bakery, a tiny cafe in Chiang Mai (northern Thailand), reflecting on how I got here.

Backpacking is amazing for many reasons, but the people are the most unexpected part. Most people here have decided that travel would be their lifestyle.

Some are digital nomads, others work for six months to travel the other half of the year, and many have quit their jobs.

All of them have one thing in common: they are curious humans who realized that, as cliché as it sounds, life is what you make it.

Nothing more, nothing less.

They have all gone against the grain, challenged what they were told they could be, how their life was supposed to look, and have followed their intuition. Funny how all our intuitions led us here.

“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”

My story is as simple as it is complicated.

After working for six years as a startup founder, I decided to make a career change.

Why? Many reasons.

The main one is that I am not the person who started that company anymore. Starting my business changed everything. It made me understand that most limits are non-existent and they are just ideas waiting to be challenged.

My entire life I've been telling myself that some things are just 'not meant for me'. It is as if, in my brain, each human had their own track, and switching lanes was not even a possibility.

But the funny thing is... seemingly impossible things happen all the time.

In 2017, I went to San Francisco with my best friend, Andi. We were studying economics at the time, focusing on public policy. I remember we visited the Google campus and looked at each other. We both felt that the tech world was amazing, too bad it 'wasn't meant for us'.

Three days after returning, Andi, her sister, and I started what would become a tech company for social good.

Slowly, I started to understand that most limits are not really limits... they are just the end of the roads that have already been traveled.

Travelers called the most used trails: the beaten tracks. If I've learned anything from my first few days as a solo traveler, it's that magic always awaits on the path that is off the beaten track. In the trail that has not been traveled before.

This realization reminded me of Peter Thiel's (PayPal co founder) Zero to One book.

When I read Thiel's book I learned that humans normally move from 1 to N, meaning that most of the things we do are simply iterations of what others have done before (this is called horizontal progress). If we want real progress and innovation, we will not find it this way. We have to start by doing something that has never been done before; we have to go from Zero to One.

I have applied this way of thinking many times in my professional career but I never thought to do it in my personal life. Thank God skills are transferable.

So my first lesson is this: if limits are really only the ends of roads people have traveled before, and I want to achieve something extraordinary, then my best strategy is to venture off the beaten track and create my own way.

I'm not going to lie, dropping everything and becoming a solo traveler is scary AF. But then again, so is doing nothing. And as my good friend (whom I've never met before) Peter Thiel says: “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”

And hey, I can't complain. This mindset has led me to beautiful Thailand.

Talk soon,

Fef