Here’s every article posted at TMBA since 2009.
This post attempts to sum it all up (but that was 3 years ago!). Since that time, we sold our business and many new things have happened around the blog.
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Site updates: I’m currently in Bali, Indonesia with my business partner @AnythingIan. For me, Bali totally lives up to its billing. I am loving it
The two Tropical Sean’s and myself got together this past week to brainstorm ways to run the next semester of our program and to review
You can live on a Tropical island for next to nothing. We will pay for room and board. Travel, gadgets, nights out on the town, and local transport are on you. How much you spend per month will depend on your budget and goals.
There’s a lot of important factors that go in to owning a business that makes 10K a day, but the most important one is mindset.
Semester 2 of the Tropical MBA is going to be structured a little differently. That isn’t because we don’t believe in our 1st round model, in fact, Sean and I have talked seriously about doing something on it later this summer.
This time, we’ve got a much different and very special opportunity.
I was just writing a post called “How to Make 10K in One Day (YEAH!!!)” I was excited. It was a “x tips” post. I’ll still publish it. Probably. But then I found out I got a new competitor. I got PISSED. And then I got pissed about my post. All this feel good shit about passion and business and whatever. Sometimes it just comes down to kicking the crap out of people who can’t create companies as good as yours.
I’m often asked, “how can I become a lifestyle designer?” I’m not going to focus on what that means. If you are here and have a heartbeat you probably want tons of personal freedom, unforgettable experiences, and boatloads of cash. Let’s talk about how to get that done.
Let me just say: I am an American. The first amendment of our constitution requires me to believe that America is the best country in the entire world.
I believe that.
But three years ago I decided to uproot and live in Asia. Despite the fact that San Diego is one of the most prestine and pleasant cities in the world, I feel that my happiness and excitement levels have increased dramatically by making the move to Asia. I couldn’t have predicted this before I made the leap.
I’ve been SUPER busy trying to orient my actions on revenue-focused activities. Sean, Ian, and myself often use that sentence as a rubric for planning our days out. “Are these activities revenue-focused?” While part of me would prefer to be reading blogs, writing comments, and screwing around around on twitter, a lot of my non-revenue activties this month have involved banking, offices, personnel, and condos.
I spent the day visiting an impressively ambitious internet startup here in Manila. I found myself missing my office days– a little. It was tons of fun to see office comraderie, leather couches, power lunches, killer work stations, and big LCD screens. I realized my longing is well-timed with a few other rumblings in my behavior. Let’s call them”entrepreneurial nesting instincts.”
Man, I’ve been blabbing on for weeks about how I’m going to share the nuts and bolts of what we are doing at the Tropical MBA. I am just talking a lot of junk.
Here’s the truth: I’m not even talking nuts and bolts with Sean.
I made the jump to location independence before it made sense. My business wasn’t ready, neither were my friends, family, or business partners. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if I was ready. There are a lot of reasons why I was brought to finally take the plunge– but by living this lifestyle for two years now I’ve realized that a lot of my initial worries (and the warnings of just about everyone) weren’t that helpful or predictive of how things played out
VIDEO INCLUDED: I love the idea of baselining your expenses and going into hardcore “start-up” mode. My whole business could blow up in my face and I could stay in a place like this for years before having to get a job. That would give me plenty of time to build another business that could fund a great lifestyle. Click the blog title to check out the video.
VIDEO BLOG: I believe in the next decade we are going to see a huge relocation of ambitious, talented, online business people re-locating to premier lifestyle locations in the developing world. Here’s the kicker: affordability is only one reason. I’ve got a slew of reasons why relocating to the developing world can help jump start your online start up, and I’ll be pulling together videos on that topic over the next few weeks.
During the course of my corporate career, I’ve made the final call in over 20 full time personnel decisions. All high dollar employees, all in-depth hiring processes. I have never, in the course of 5 years, seen such high quality applicants for a position. To me this is striking, and definitely a strong entrepreneurial lesson.
We are still alive and kicking and will be accepting applications until the last hour of November 30th. Thanks to everyone who has applied, we’ve
Things get kick started December 1st. Stay tuned until then!