Location Independence and the 12 Week Challenge
You can't awesomise your life without making some changes. However, as I previously highlighted, procrastination is soon to be banished to the discarded Amazon packaging of time and changes from this moment onwards will be hard and fast.
Word jazz aside, what concrete steps am I to be taking? Where am I going? How will I get there? To answer this, there needs to be ambitious focus and for some time I've intended that my primary goal is to be to achieve location independence.
What is Location Independence?
"Location Independence" is a term made up of the words "Location" meaning a place or situation occupied by somebody or something and "Independence" meaning lacking reliance on or requiring support from somebody or something. Together, the phrase is the state of running your life such that you could be (almost) anywhere in the world without detrimental effect to your lifestyle.
Less obviously, the aim in Location Independence is to set up a sustainable income stream that doesn't rely you on being in any specific place. With this, you are able to roam the country, continent or world freely without ties.
Imagine being able to go anywhere in the world without pressure to come home in two weeks. Imagine being able to spend some time working on a netbook in a cafe in Rome, a Brauhaus in Munich or the station pub in Birmingham New Street and then have the rest of the day or evening to go out and explore that fair city. Imagine being able to repeat this over several places over several months or even years.
I can certainly imagine it, but how does one about face from the rat race to chase a life without base?
The 12 Week Challenge
Whilst I have several projects being planned or developed, I feel a more focused thrust on some key ideas would be a better short term approach to setting up this ronin lifestyle.
To this end (and ultimately several other ends), I shall be following the steps laid out in a 12 Week Challenge presented by locationindependent.com. I note that the first week started five weeks ago, but also that the first few weeks are fairly lightweight in workload. Thus I plan to double up the weeks until I catch up.
So, I shall be starting Week 1 today and am hoping to be moving on to Week 2 on Wednesday. I will keep blogging on my progress with this challenge and also my overall attempt to -- to paraphrase the 20th century wordsmith, Richard Stannard, -- "spice up my life".