Back in September, I read a book called The Four Hour Work Week, which I mentioned here. Roughly, the message of the book is:

• Figure out what you really want to do with your life
• Realize the risks of trying to do it aren’t as big as you think
• Stop wasting so much time online / watching television
• Realize that a lot of the offline reading you do may not be worthwhile
• Start an online business–once you get it running, it will pretty much run itself while paying your bills
• If you don’t just live off money from the online business, see if you can do your old job working from home, which frees you up to travel
• Travel–if you do it right, it doesn’t have to be expensive.

I’ve been to the author’s forums, and there are people there who have experience with online businesses, and will tell you that what he describes is possible, but harder than he makes it sound. In spite of that, there is one benefit to the section on online businesses that you’ll get even if you don’t want to put in the effort to start one: you’ll understand how a lot of online hustles work and be immunized against them.

But that’s not what this post is about, I’m not doing it. This post is about what I am doing, traveling. And, using what I learned in The Four Hour Work Week and the associated website, I’m doing it cheap. Right now I’m living in an appartment in France, which I’m paying about $1,000 USD for two months. The three plane tickets it took to get here cost under $500. Total expenses for the trip, maybe $2,000 / month, even after you include transportation and the pricey language courses I’m taking.

And as a nice side effect, I’ve gone through involuntary internet detox: I didn’t make sure to have my WiFi working before traveling, so when I showed up at the European hostels I was staying at while I sorted out where I was living, I had to pay about 4 euros / hour for their internet kiosks. It makes you efficient fast. And, as if the universe is trying to make the lesson stick, the internet in my appartment just went out a couple days ago, and won’t be back for a couple more days. I’m typing this in a text editor rather than online to save money. Last Sunday, this caused me to finally start work on a writing project that I had been letting linger in my brain for too long, because I couldn’t surf the web as a way of putting off writing. (What project? Mmmm… maybe I’ll announce it in a little bit.)

The tricks I’ve used to save money for this trip have a ring of obviousness to them, once you know them, but they never occur to most people. This, I think, confirms the most basic point of the book: we assume the way of doing things society feeds us is the only way, and we let that keep us from doing what we really want with our lives. If you’re not currently following your dreams, I have to ask: what’s your excuse?