Deryk Makgill

travel

To Tokyo

I’m flying to Tokyo today for the Satoshi’s Vision Conference.

I visited Japan a couple years ago and it quickly became one of my favorite countries in the world. This time I hope to use my better understanding of the train system and the city to see some new stuff I missed out on last time.

I’ll also be creating a ton of blog and Twitter content on the conference, so if you’re interested in Bitcoin Cash at all, check in regularly this week.

I think what sold me most on Japanese culture was how orderly they are in everything they do. It’s common to see people pressed up against glass on the trains going to work, but you don’t see people fighting or screaming or acting otherwise inappropriately on the train. Everyone stands up straight and is polite to the people around them.

The sushi is not even comparable to the majority of US sushi. It’s just perfect. And they have these wonderful standing sushi bars everywhere that are great if you want to eat a good meal quickly.

The ramen is great but you have to be careful with what you’re ordering or you can get something weird. They don’t make the menus in English typically so it;’s mostly guess work. I had a couple odd tasting experiences but for the most part, it was wonderful.

I’ll be in Tokyo from the 22nd to the 27th. The conference is 3 of those days but I’ll have one full day to myself and might try to take a bullet train to see Mount Fuji since I failed last time around.

Writing in Slovenia

In Slovenia last year I did some of the best writing I’ve ever done. That’s at least my own totally unbiased estimation of my work. Moments like the one I experienced are rare in my writing. I blog every single day and yet I’m lucky if I experience that once a month.

I don’t consider it something magical. It’s something you habituate yourself into in a sense, like an Olympic sprinter who runs and incredible time in the 100 meter dash. That sprinter might not equal that time for months. He might never equal that time again. And yet it  was all the lesser times leading up to it that made it possible.

This is how I approach writing. Slovenia Moments, as I’ve started calling them, are made possible by all the head bashing and drudgery you do every other day. I won’t always experience them but when I do it will be worth it.

As a general rule, don’t trust any artist who says their talents or inspirations come out of nowhere. They lack self awareness or they are falsely humble. Trust me, they earned that Slovenia Moment. And if you want it too, start doing your art now.

Slovenia was incidentally one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever visited. I look forward to going back sometime.

I visited on a layover I had after speaking in Sarajevo, Bosnia at OpenFest 2017.

A short but productive time made possible through writing.

Travel won’t make you special by itself

Yesterday I wrote down some thoughts I’ve had about travel as a way to respond to the students and young professionals I meet at conferences, universities, on social media, and here on the blog who list travel as their top priority in life. It’s often I hear questions from the younger people in an audience that imply traveling regularly makes you a sort of hero, and I wanted to respond to that feeling.

One of the points I should have made more clear in the essay is that travel as travel is the easy choice and it doesn’t make you special on its own, particularly in today’s world. This goes contrary to the cheesy lifestyle design ads and blog posts we’ve grown so used to seeing on Facebook and YouTube blogs where travel is made out to be THE thing to do, I know.

I shared the essay on Facebook on a friend of mine, Clark Ruper, commented the following on that point, which I think is brilliant:

Well put. One of things I laugh about most from my bachelor days was scanning OkCupid and seeing 95% of profiles listing Travel as something super important to them. I couldn’t eye roll hard enough. No shit you like to travel, a vast majority of young relatively well off people do. That doesn’t make you special or interesting in the least, and the picture of you with a sedated tiger in Thailand is not helping.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to travel. I want to travel. I did it so much over the last few years I could fly for free on a normal schedule with my points for the next few years. Everyone I know wants to travel and that’s the point. To make it the key thing by which you identify, to act like it’s something unique to you, to use it as a substitute to real world accomplishments, is self indulgent in a bad way and it does not have the positioning power it once might have had. It can be one part of being interesting, but a smaller part than we like to think.

Clark goes on:

You are interesting if you have actually accomplished something in your life, and these days flying around the world is a really low bar.

Travel is not a hard thing to do these days. Overall life mobility is increasing, costs of travel are going down, and the world is becoming more well connected daily. I flew from Iceland to Brazil to Bosnia to Mississippi last year all fairly cheaply and with no hassle besides some jet lag. If you’re choosing travel as the highest bar of achievement you can reach, you’ve chosen a low bar. You aren’t Columbus or Magellen, you’re a 21st century digitally connected person with access to an abundance of wealth, luxury, technology and ease that has never before been seen. And its rare I meet someone in the US who has not left the country at least once.

Travel can bring a ton of excitement and energy to your life. It can be a tool to achieve new personal and professional ends. You can learn a lot. But with rare, rare exception can it to make you special by itself.

I read a great quote about this by Mozart [1] a few years ago that writing this essay has recalled to mind:

A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not…

So where does that leave the would-be-traveler? Travel! Have fun! See the world! But don’t expect it to do all the hard work for you of developing yourself into something capable, competent, interesting, and productive.

People didn’t read Christopher Hitchens because he was well-traveled, but because he had something they thought was worth saying. People don’t look at Steve Jobs as a technology hero because he took a guru trip to India, but because of the products he helped build and market. Ayn Rand, one of my favorite authors and thinkers, never traveled out the US after she escaped Soviet Russia. She’s remembered for writing some of the most influential novels in American literature.

And that should be where you set your sights. Let travel be a backdrop to an otherwise interesting and productive life, not an end all be all, but a means to something bigger.

These days my priorities focus exclusively on making new things, managing existing things, and developing myself intellectually and financially. Travel often factors into that but not always, and if I had to give it up for all that I would.

[1] I unfortunately cannot source this quote. It could be apocryphal.

3 thoughts on travel

A good friend and I were joking recently about why it is almost a law of nature that young people today will list travel as their top priority, far above things like financial success for example. He then turned the joke back around on me and said that I have no right to talk and that my travels probably set a bad example for some.

It’s partly true. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling over the last couple years. I’ve got over 386,000 “butt-in-seat” flying miles on Delta alone. I’ve spoken in Ukraine, Czech Republic, Iceland, Serbia, Brazil, Bosnia, Poland, and visited dozens of other places in the last two years. I’ll be visiting Tokyo later this month as well as New York City, Chicago, and Washington D.C. I understand the desire to travel, especially when you’ve been pent up in school you’re entire life like most of us were.

But I was also fortunate to learn some lessons very early on and to develop a healthier relationship to the travel question that allowed me to avoid some of the mistakes I see too many students make these days: inability to commit to jobs, FOMO, chronic lack of meaning, and general unreliability.

1. Travel alone will not fix your problems. There’s a good story I learned from Montaigne’s essay On Solitude about a traveler who complains to Socrates that his friend was “unchanged by his travels.” Socrates laughs knowingly and tells the traveler “of course he was unchanged. He took himself along with him.” [1]

As comforting as it can be to blame our problems on external circumstance, the truth is that we are often far more to blame than we think. Young people think they can escape the challenges at home by traveling but they underestimate the degree to which they themselves, by being themselves, create those challenges.

The Roman poet Horace asked the question when remarking on people who seem compelled to travel,

Why do we leave for lands warmed by a foreign sun? What fugitive from his own land can flee from himself?

And Emerson wrote,

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting identical that I fled from.

Travel can remove you from a bad situation, true, but unless you remove those parts of the bad situation that are inside of you, nothing will change. Travel will not save you if you cannot save yourself.

And even if you aren’t running away from anything, you just want “more” than what you are now, travel cannot help you by itself. Whether you are in Rome, Italy or Rome, Georgia you will find that you are fundamentally the same person and that only you can change that.

2. Travel is a tool, not an end. 80% or more of the travel I do these days is related directly to work or some intellectual/financial goal. Besides the big tax write-offs, there’s a reason for this: unfocused travel leads to unfocused results. I’ve done the whole “let’s just show up in Paris!” thing before and it works far less often than people pretend it does.

When I was in my brief “travel for travel’s sake” stage that all the teen movies tell you is what life is about, I would almost always come home disappointed in myself. I would feel like I should have gotten something more out of the trip.

Once I realigned my expectations so that travel became a means to accomplishing very specific, very deliverable ends like giving a talk, meeting a client or friend, seeing a speaker, learning, or experiencing something, the quality of my traveling improved and so did the rest of my life.

As Ryan Holiday, the author and marketer wrote,

Travel…should be part of your life, no better or no worse than the rest of your life.

I didn’t have to make the terrible choice many young people have to make between having a serious career and traveling because I found opportunities to travel for work. In Prague, I met with customers and potential customers. In Iceland, I spoke at the University of Reykjavik. And in Tokyo, I’ll be meeting with some of my readers on this blog, potential clients and becoming more knowledgable about the Bitcoin Cash industry. You can do this too if you’re creative.

I suggest to anyone who wants to travel but has no definite plans of any kind: wait a bit. Find a way to make your travel productive and you can have the best of both worlds with far less downside than your average hostel hopper. It will be so much better.

3. Meaning is created, not experienced. As I look back over the last few years about the things that really gave my life meaning, very little of it has to do with travel directly.

I’ve had some incredible experiences to be sure: hot springing at midnight in Iceland, renting a house with my friends/colleagues on a private beach in Ecuador, and making friends with wonderful host family in Poland are a few.

But the experiences alone can’t give you meaning. You create meaning through the process of taking an abstract vision and making it real, over and over again. For me, that’s my work at Praxis and with the business clients I work with. It’s the talks I’ve been fortunate to be able to give around the world and the writing I do.

Travel could never replace that. “All travel, no work would make Derek a dull boy,” so to speak, or as Ayn Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values.

So by all means travel, but don’t make the mistake most young people make and forget that if you want meaning, you’re going to have to create it, and it’s probably going to be a lot of work.

To me, there is more to admire in the person (and more meaning to be found) writing their novel from Jackson, Mississippi than the person taking mindless photos at a museum somewhere or hopping from country to country because they want to “find themselves.”

Remember that during your travels, and enjoy. [2]

Photo: Isaac Morehouse, me, and Cameron Sorsby at a beachside kitchen near Manta, Ecuador.

[1] This general idea can be found everywhere in ancient literature. From Confucius: “Wherever you go, there you are.” From Lucretius: “Thus each man flees himself.” From Seneca: “And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves.”

[2] For a followup to this essay, read Travel doesn’t make you special.

I’ll be at the Satoshi’s Vision Conference in Tokyo

I just registered for the Satoshi’s Vision Conference in Tokyo this coming March! I was unsure I was going to be able to attend but I decided to just register anyways and force it into my schedule. Here’s the description:

Satoshi’s Vision Conference Tokyo will bring together developers, researchers, businesses, and Bitcoin Cash and other cryptocurrency enthusiasts from around the world.

If you’ve been reading this blog recently or you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I’ve been writing a good bit about Bitcoin Cash, and I’m incredibly excited for the event. It’ll be the first time I get to meet in person many of the people I’ve been engaging with online these past few month.

It will also be my second time in Japan, which I’ve been wanting to return to since my first trip in 2016.

If you’re planning to attend and want to connect in Tokyo, send me an email or Tweet. If you can’t attend, don’t worry, I’m planning to share my notes, photos, thoughts, interviews and video footage from the conference live on this blog throughout the course of the conference. I’ll make sure to get you everything you need to know.

It’s the most exciting time ever for Bitcoin (BCH) and I’m thrilled to have the optionality to go deep into it.

Iceland instead of college classes

Suggested listening while reading: Dirty Paws by Of Monsters and Men

Two years ago today, after dropping out of college and during what would have been my 4th year at the University of Michigan, I went to Iceland for the first time after watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

I’d planned to go alone but on the night before the flight, my friend Katie Reed called me to ask if I could go skiing that weekend. I told her my plans, and she and a friend, Maya Serkin, booked their tickets last minute. Sometimes the best laid plans were never laid at all.

The trip ended up being the start of almost two years of non-stop travel that would take me all over the world and see my flying over 125,000 miles per year while I would have been in school.

I’m taking a “break” from travel for the most part, but the trip to Iceland and the other trips I would end up taking were some of the most fun experiences of my life. I made amazing new friends, worked remotely on Praxis, spoke at dozens of events, learned to love and appreciate America in a way I had never done before, and cured myself of the insufferable travel bug that infects so many of today’s youth.

And I did it all debt free while paying less than college tuition before most of my peers graduated and while skipping boring, soul sucking classes.

I meet students regularly nowadays who are bored in college and want to travel but who will ultimately shackle themselves with debt and find themselves unable to afford to do what I did. I spoke with a young girl a few years ago who told me she had so much debt that she would be lucky at her current salary to be able to start traveling when she was in her mid-30s.

This is tragic. Young people go to school because they’re told it’s the only way to achieve a particular goal only to find that the debt and lost time prevents them from achieving that goal.

This is of course not to say that you should skip college just to travel. If I had to choose between traveling and working during those few years, I would have chosen work every time. There is nothing that will help you find out what you’re made of more than being accountable to creating value on a job. I was simply fortunate that I was able to build a career working remotely and had the income to afford to do whatever I wanted to do and to excuse to visit places as a speaker.

But if you are in college now and you do want to travel when you graduate, why wait? Too often the goals we put off become goals we never achieve. For a fraction of the cost of tuition, you can have now the thing you think you want after you graduate.

Tim Ferriss has a great question he asks in The 4-Hour Workweek that helped me make the decision to leave school:

What is it costing you — financially, emotionally and physically — to postpone action? If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in one year, five years, and ten years?

The answer for me was a dark one, so I made the jump and it’s made all the difference.

Funny enough, if you do this, you’ll find like I did that doing something different, doing anything different than your average young adult, speaks magnitudes more about you as a person and a professional than a college degree does. If you learn to speak about your experiences like a salesman, people will see what you did, like they see my years of travel, as an asset.

Our trip Iceland ended up as one of the more memorable ones of my life. We spent two days exploring Reykjavik, driving the Golden Circle, eating good food, trying to find the Northern lights, and growing enamored with the strange beauty of the island in winter.

To think I could have been in a fluorescent lightbulb lit classroom taking classes I hated with a professor who didn’t want to be there…