Follow my friend Mike as he travels the world. It started with a 6 week road+trip across the US. Now Mike’s absolutely crushing it in Asia. He’s depicting the trip through breathtaking photos like the one below.
Here’s the link to his blog: http://thefieldblog.tumblr.com
“Age considers; youth ventures.”
~Rabindranath Tagore
“Singapore is doing a good job. Income taxes are low, incentives to save are high, savings rates are high, and they do their best to attract capital and labor. There is a bit of a backlash now, with some of the problems immigrants are bringing here, but that has happened to all nations at some point in history. Overall, Singapore is doing well. Singapore is becoming the new Switzerland as its sits right next to China and has been helped by problems with offshore havens like Switzerland and Cyprus. It will be the fastest growing money center in the next 10 years.”
-Jim Rogers
Jim Rogers was a farm hand from Demopolis, Alabama. He went on to study history at Yale and PPE (political Science, philosophy, and economics) at Oxford. Rogers then moved to New York and co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros.
After a successful career, he realized that making money was not his main goal. He retired at age 37 to take a trip around the world on his motorcycle. He wrote about the trip in his book Investment Biker (a good read).
Today, after traveling basically everywhere (3 trips around the world, the last one in 2000 lasted over 3 years) and understanding many of the worlds cultures and markets, he is one of the most trusted minds in investing.
I posted this quote on Lucid Practice to ponder the question, “Where is the best place in the world to live?” Jim was from the US but realized that incentives to live here, especially economic incentives, are low.
Globalization and The Global Mind (the internet) has made living anywhere in the world possible for anyone. Jim moved his family to Singapore because as he says, “If you were smart in 1807 you moved to London, if you were smart in 1907 you moved to New York City, and if you are smart in 2007 you move to Asia.”
So my questions to you are: Where is the best place to live right now? Culturally? Economically? What country has the nicest people? Smartest people? People most in touch with Faith?
“Being happy, that’s the main thing I’m trying to help with. If you’re happy, not much else matters in life, at least in my experience. There’s various ways to be happy, of course. I’m trying to tell people the things that I have learned.
I’m trying to teach them to be curious, independent. It’s very hard to think independently, as you probably know. Extremely hard. Most people are not very curious, If they see it on TV, that’s what they accept instead of thinking, what’s really going on here? I’m teaching readers to be curious, skeptical, independent thinkers.”
~Jim Rogers in Business Insider
Hyperlapse video travel has to be one of the more bad ass things Google has brought to the consumer to date. It allows anyone, anywhere, to travel from a specific point to another specific point in a hyper lapse video recorded by Google Maps and the Google street view teams.
I constantly find myself on Google Earth for hours looking at satellite images and pictures of places I want to travel to. This app now gets you on the ground and lets you journey through different countries and cities that you may potentially want to see in person one day.
-BL
