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A few weeks ago, I had the honor of interviewing Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Non-Conformity. Chris has made it his mission to travel every country of the world before he turns 35 and he is well on his way of achieving this incredible goal.
Picture taken from Chris' Website
But not only that, he is also an entrepreneur and a blogging superstar who managed to make a living around his values and his idea of living to his own standards. He recently published his second book The $100 Startup, which I am eagerly awaiting to find in my mailbox in the coming days. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you absolutely must grab one here.
Both topics, as you know, are near and dear to my heart, which is why I was extremely excited (and just as nervous) when Chris agreed to be my guest. The interview was great and Chris has this special way of making you feel great and very comfortable. I can’t wait to meet him face-to-face in Portland in July for the World Domination Summit.
But without making you wait much longer, here is the interview.
Tell us why does the topic of living your passion even matter to you, or does it even apply to you?
Well, hopefully it applies. I guess the question is what is the alternative? If you don’t want to live passionately and live out your passion, then what else would you do? And for me, fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t know any other way to do it. I guess once you really start to follow your passion or do something that you are excited about; it’s very hard to go back. If you just have like a regular job and a regular life and you’re going through the motions, and you don’t know any better, then maybe that’s fine you can continue doing that just being discontented. But for me, I’m fortunate enough to have all these different experiences; I just can’t imagine giving them up and doing something else. So I guess, I just find a lot of life in living with a passion that I am excited about.
Absolutely, I have experienced the same and once you do it, you can’t go back. You just can’t because you feel like your incarcerated or in a prison.
Very good word. Yes.
You’re known to be the guy who travels around the world and wants to have visited all countries by the age of 35. How did that idea come about?
It came about in stages, it wasn’t all at once. I started traveling a bit when I was 20 years old. And then I lived overseas in West Africa for about four years. So I did a lot of traveling then. Then I would also travel some in Eastern Europe and then a little bit in Asia. It was after I had been to maybe 50 countries that I just counted all of them up, I made like a list – like “where have I been?” I was curious. And then I started thinking, I was 26 or 27 years old then. I thought maybe I’d like to visit 100 countries. That would be great, that’s my goal. Then I started getting closer to that goal and I realized it was kind of easy because I could choose which countries to go to. So if something was difficult, I just wouldn’t have to go there. So as I got closer, I decided let’s do every country. So it’s 193 of them. I’ve just been working on it. And that’s what I have been doing over the last 8 years now.
How many countries have you visited now?
185 so far, so I just have 8 more to go.
That’s amazing. I love to travel too and you often say that traveling with an agenda is not the same as traveling for fun. But still, it must be amazing to have been all over the world.
It is amazing and like I said in the beginning, I feel very fortunate and very grateful and my life has changed a lot just by meeting people and experiencing so many different cultures. So I feel very glad.
When you say it was a process, did you ever have doubts or fears of the future while you were pursuing your goal? You have made a business out of your passion and your online presence is what supports your mission. So did you ever long for the “security of just being an employee” instead of doing everything on your own?
Yeah, there are a lot of good questions there. I definitely experienced lots of doubt and fear and insecurity and all those things. I think those things are very normal and if you don’t experience them I think that maybe you are not challenging yourself enough. As for making it a business, it wasn’t really my intention, it just kind of happened along the way and I got more serious about it after it started to be successful. In the beginning though, I just wanted to travel and do my own thing. So it’s definitely been an evolution. But as to the point of security, I’m glad you said quote/unquote because security is really a matter of definition, it’s a matter of context. In many parts of the world, especially in the United States but elsewhere too, the recession and high unemployment really causes people to look at this whole question of security and really think about, ‘where is your security and where does it come from?’ Is it better to be an employee and work for someone else? Different people will answer that in different ways, but for me the greatest security is in working for myself and taking responsibility for my own future.
How does your daily life kind of look like other than traveling and how do you implement following your dreams into your daily life?
In some ways, my daily life is quite boring. People have this impression that it’s always super exciting. But really every day I’m doing my rafting that I like to do, I’m doing my connecting, I’m making things, I’m thinking ahead to the future and working on different projects. That’s what my daily life is like, it’s about creating. In terms of following my dreams, I pretty much do what I want to do most of the time. There might be some things that I have to do that I don’t like to do. I just had to pay my taxes here and that was difficult to fill out all of the paperwork and go to the bank and everything. But normally most of the time, my dream is that I am making things, and I’m creating and I’m doing something that matters. So I follow the dream by doing that.
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