Chris Guillebeau's Blog, page 28

8 Easy Actions to Kickstart Your Way to Free Travel

When you’re just starting to learn about free travel or travel hacking, it’s easy to get overwhelmed in a deluge of information and recommendations.

Fear not!Here’s a current and highly practical list of things you can do right now to kickstart your way to the trip of your dreams.

Bonus: most of these actions are very simple to complete, and almost all of them are FREE.

1. Never fly without earning miles.

This is simple: don’t get on a flight without making sure that your boarding pass has a...

8 Easy Ways to Kickstart Your Way to Free Travel

When you’re just starting to learn about free travel or travel hacking, it’s easy to get overwhelmed in a deluge of information and recommendations.

Fear not!Here’s a current and highly practical list of things you can do right now to kickstart your way to the trip of your dreams.

Bonus: most of these actions are very simple to complete, and almost all of them are FREE.

1. Never fly without earning miles.

This is simple: don’t get on a flight without making sure that your boarding pass has a...

Winners Give Up All the Time

*My brand-new book, Born for This, is all about helping you find the work you were meant to do. This series explores some of these lessons.

Lesson: “Never give up” is bad advice. Real winners don’t hesitate to walk away from an unsuccessful venture.

Contrary to popular belief, if you want to win, you shouldn’t always just keep going. You should regroup and try something totally different. “Winners never quit, and quitters never win” is a lie. To win, sometimes you need to find a new game to...

If Everyone Becomes a Non-Conformist, Won’t We All Be Conforming?

I used to get this question a lot, sometimes framed in skepticism but other times just curiosity. The simple answer is that not everyone wants to become a non-conformist, or any other particular means of self-identification. Plenty of people are happy with the way things are, which is the definition of conformity. It’s not always a bad thing.

It’s also like asking, what if everyone wanted world peace? It would be wonderful If everyone wanted world peace, but not everyone does. People general...

Awareness, Empathy, and Action: Turning a Decade Old Lesson into Reality

This is a reader profile. ( Read others or nominate someone to be featured. )

How do you translate your travel experiences into something meaningful for those that aren’t on the road with you? Stormy Sweitzer drew on two powerful experiences to write an inspiring adventure book for young adults.

Here’s her story:

It was 1988 and I was mortified. I was on a tour of Soviet Eastern Europe and I had just seen my grandmother sneak food from a hotel buffet, wrap it in a cloth napkin and tuck it i...

4 Things You Can Do Now to Have More Opportunities in the Future

Take action now so that you’ll have more opportunities later.

Plan for the future every day.

Set yourself up for success.

It all sounds great. But how do you do it? Here are four ideas. As always, it’s your life, so feel free to modify as you see fit.

Start a side hustle.

Even if you love your job, you should have more than one source of income. And even if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur, you should learn to think entrepreneurially.

A great way to do that is through a side hustle—a pr...

Limited Time: Earn Up to 170,000 Delta SkyMiles through Improved Signup Offers

Link: New Delta Offers Earning 50,000-60,000 Miles Each

As part of a limited-time offer, American Express has increased the bonus for several of their Delta Airlines cards. There are now three different options, each with a higher signup bonus than usual.

Gold Delta SkyMilesCredit Card Platinum Delta SkyMiles Credit Card Gold Delta SkyMiles Business Credit Card

For the next few weeks (or less, depending on when you’re reading this), you can earn an improved signup bonus on any of them.

In...

The Anti-Nomad: How one Woman Created a Home Base while Opening Up to Life on the Road

This is a reader profile. ( Read others or nominate someone to be featured. )

How do you preserve that special feeling you get from travel? For Sofie Couwenbergh, keeping the magic alive meant not turning traveling into a full-time pursuit. Learn how she forges her own path.

Here’s her story:

I was born and raised in Belgium. I’ve always known that I wanted to do “something with writing,” so I studied literature and got a job as a copywriter and marketing coordinator. I’d even picked up an...

This Summer: Hack Your Book, Learn the Science of Happiness, & Become a Financial Badass

Link: WDS 2016 Academy Registration Is Now Open to Everyone!

Every year since 2011, I’ve produced and hosted an global gathering known modestly as the World Domination Summit (WDS). More than 10,000 people have participated in WDS main stage events, and starting in 2014 we expanded to feature half-day workshops known as Academies.

Registration for Academies is now open to the general public, and this year we have something special: an all-new experience called WDS Connect.

When you regis...

Improve the Right Kind of Skills (They Probably Aren’t What You Think)

*My brand-new book, Born for This, is all about helping you find the work you were meant to do. This series explores some of these lessons.

Lesson: Improving “soft skills” can increase your value no matter what kind of career you have.

Hard skills are things you learned through technical or academic training: how to make architectural drawings with certain software, how to properly administer medication as a nurse, and so on.

Soft skills are just as important—if not more—but aren’t usually...