8 Ways to Earn a Living While Traveling Abroad

Via Refine the Mind:

People tend to believe that traveling abroad will cost them a fortune, or else deep down they haven’t overcome a fear of entering the unknown. Well, I’m here to tell you that traveling abroad doesn’t have to break the bank. I mean, sure, if you want to live a 5-star lifestyle in a foreign country it will cost a pretty penny, but you shouldn’t want to do that. You should want to live with the people and experience the culture because that’s where the magic happens. 

Jordan at Refine the Mind shows us eight ways to earn a living while traveling abroad:

One Example: WWOOF

This is something I’m probably going to do within the next few years. Through the World Wide Organization of Organic Farms (WWOOF), you can travel to many different countries and work on organic farms. Basically, you work for 4-6 hours per day in exchange for food and housing with a host family. This leaves the majority of your day open for exploring and other activities. With the necessities covered, you only need to pay for travel expenses. I have friends who “WWOOFed” for 6 months in Japan, and some friends of a friend did the same for about 6 months in South America.

Click to see seven more interesting ways to earn a living while traveling abroad.

Via Big Think:

What’s the Latest Development?

Researchers at Harvard Business School have found that small mobile devices which close off your posture to the world also close your attention, weakening your ability to engage the world around you. In an experiment, “researchers paid 75 participants to use one of a range of devices–iPod Touch (a handy iPhone stand-in), iPad, laptop, and desktop–to play the same gambling game.” The researcher monitoring them then said: “I will get some forms ready for you to sign so I can pay you and you can leave. If I am not here in five minutes, please come get me at the front desk.”

What’s the Big Idea?

The real aim of the experiment was to time which individuals took the longest to find the wandering experimenter and determine if waiting time correlated to device used. “94% of the desktop users worked up the nerve to leave the room, while only 50% of the Touch users gave chase. In a fit of device-behavior parallelism, the larger (and more expansive posture-promoting) the device a person used, the more quickly they sought out the experimenter. As HBS Working Knowledge writer Carmen Nobel notes, desktop users waited 341 seconds before grabbing the experimenter, Touch users waited an average of 493 seconds.”

We posted a song from this awesome documentary earlier today, “Here’s to Now.”

We enjoyed watching the doc and highly suggest watching it when you get an opportunity. Its streaming on Netflix!

Hat tip to Jason Kottke:

Lex Friedman details how to use DNS services (like AdFree Time) to route around region-specific content locks, so you can do things like watch all NFL games in HD from anywhere, change Netflix regions (for access to different content), etc.

Third-party services like AdFree Time offer up a DNS-based solution: Pay a monthly fee and use their DNS services, and the NFL’s website treats you as if you’re coming from Europe. You thus get to watch every NFL game streaming online in high definition, since the league offers that option to folks in Europe at no charge. Americans, usually, miss out. I could pay for DirecTV’s insanely overpriced Sunday Ticket, but I think it’s a ripoff when I’m only looking to watch about six to eight Eagles games that won’t show here.

This beats hate-reading the NFL TV maps every weekend.

Via Intent Blog

1. Clean out the clutter both mental and physical. Clutter obscures goals and confuses problem-solving.
2. Make up your mind to be aware. When you find your mind wandering, observe it and don’t judge. Simply bring yourself back to the moment.
3. Bring your attention back to your breath when you feel distracted. Relax your breathing into deeper, slower and shallower breaths. Breathing deeper oxygenates your brain to improve focus.
4. Words are very powerful. They can trigger stress by bringing on a negative mindset, or calm you down and remind you to be present to the task at hand.
5. Have a phrase prepared in advance which accomplishes this relaxation response for you.
6. For most people some sort of exercise triggers mindfulness which then transfers to activities of daily living. Exercising is like a moving meditation and promotes focused attention to all other tasks.
7. When you are involved in conversations, start to really listen. Listening attentively is great training for a sharper focus.
8. No matter how mundane, reinvent the task at hand with enthusiasm to make it new. Imagine how the task is a step to accomplishing a major goal, can heal a nagging thought, or promote a pathway of discipline.
9. Cluster all the single tasks that are in proximity of each other – either physically like in the same neighborhood or mentally because they require the same kind of analytics to achieve them. This is the antidote to multi-tasking.
10. Don’t gobble your food or eat on the run. Practice eating mindfully. Live in greater awareness regarding all things.
11. Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. Distraction begins in the land of shame and guilt.
12. If you daydream a lot when you drive, attend class, or do your work, set aside daily time for daydreaming. If your daydreams are distracting you, maybe they are trying to tell you something. Once you identify the message or see a pattern, your focus will quickly improve.