These are my Momentos, short personal diary entries I write daily – since 2013 – and publish monthly. Some links are affiliate links.
1
How you spend your days is how you spend your life. I gotta start cutting back the work hours, find it creeping into evenings and weekends too often. I tell myself that it’s temporary, just until I get over the hump, but what if there is no hump to get over? Maybe success isn’t a place to get to, but how you spend each day.
2
Last night in Las Palmas, got a bunch of people together at a restaurant for dinner. Nine of us in total. This is one of the things we love about living here. The community. And of course it always helps to have other Irish and Brits at the table. There’s a banter between us that feels like home.
3
Row 22, seat F. Lights of Morocco out the window and a few thousand feet below. Been a long day. Travel days always are, even when they’re short. But I’m the kind of tired that feels like a nice blanket. Helps that we’ve got empty seats around us, and music from 1975 in my ears. “Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast. Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last.”
4
Sometimes you say or do something and you can recall the exact influence of that word, or that gesture. You remember exactly who or what it came from. And you’re reminded how you’re largely a big hodgepodge of everyone you’ve ever met, everything you’ve ever seen, every joke you’ve ever laughed at, every song you’ve ever heard, every place you’ve ever been.
5
Malaga. Originally named Malaka, called Malaca by the Romans, and Malaqah by the Moors. There’s an Islamic fortress overlooking a Roman amphitheater, close to a Catholic Church, a few blocks from the birthplace of Picasso, all built atop Phoenician ruins. We sit in a cafe for a while and look at our phones and talk about stuff we read on the internet.
6
You know you’re privileged when you’re in this fancy town and you want to make a fancy video about how you read so many fancy books but they’re doing construction at the fancy hotel across the street from your fancy Airbnb and so you start sulking and watching YouTube for a few hours instead of getting all kinds of other important shit done.
7
Flying to Thailand early tomorrow morning, so that significantly shortens my workweek, giving me less time than usual to make my weekly YouTube video. But Parkinson’s Law kicked in this afternoon and I shot and edited the whole thing in a few hours. Wouldn’t be surprised either if this one does better than videos I spent 20+ hours creating.
8
Testing an app called Timeshifter to stave off the jet lag. You punch in a few details and it tells you when to go to sleep, when to wake up, when to drink coffee, when to stop. Not sure yet if it works, but it has taken some of the stress out of travel. There’s a tempting comfort in being told what to do and when to do it. Kinda like working an old-fashioned 9-to-5 job.
9
Been in Chiang Mai a few hours and already saw a white dude walking the streets with no shoes on. Not sure what that’s about, or why it bothers me so much. Is it some kind of spiritual thing? Do dirty feet or bleeding heels bring you closer to the divine? Does that chap also walk around barefoot back in Denmark or wherever the hell he’s from?
10
Doing a trial run of a group coaching program for the next few weeks. First call today. I’d never done a proper group coaching thingy before, and it reminded me how everything seems scary and mysterious… until you go and do it. Taking action is a great way to relieve stress and uncertainty.
11
Twice in a few hours this afternoon I had people walk up and say, “Hey, are you Niall?” One told me he’s a big fan (turned out he’d bought my course), the other said he loves my videos. Very nice to hear. Half expecting to check my email now and see someone telling me my videos suck and I should go kill myself.
12
After dark. Plenty of food carts up and down this street. I find a Siamese mammy cooking up a heap of pad thai, get me some on banana leaf and paper plate, sit eating with chopsticks on a plastic stool. There’s an elderly white dude sat chatting with the cook, practicing his Thai, doing himself proud. I listen to Seth Godin talk about the best restaurant in the world, finish my meal, pay the lady $0.91, and go looking for more.
13
My least favorite part of being a digital nomad: trying to get settled in a new town. Well, Chiang Mai isn’t entirely new, but here with my lady this time and looking to stay three months. Gotta figure out accommodation, laundry, where to eat, where to work, SIM cards, etc. All while trying to keep the work plates spinning and dealing with some niggling health issues.
14
Settling in here has been a pain in the ass so far, but the cost of living definitely makes it easier. Went to a couple of nice cafes today and ate two healthy and filling meals at the mall food court, plus a mango and yogurt smoothie for dessert. Total cost was less than $11. Hardly makes sense to cook your own meals in this town.
15
About 2,500 years ago Socrates realized that “while so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all, which, paradoxically, made him the wiser one since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance.” In other words, everyone’s stupid. But not everyone knows it.
16
We should be wary of certainty. It’s a big messy, complex world we live in, and we barely understand our own simple minds, can barely get ourselves to eat right and exercise regularly. We can never be 100% sure of anything, because there’s always more to learn, always alternative explanations and different perspectives to consider.
17
A one-hour massage costs €8 and leaves me floating. It’s an interesting thing, massage. You pay a stranger to touch your body, sometimes intimately, for pleasure and relaxation. But if that stranger crosses an imaginary line and touches your genitals, well then, that’s something other than massage, isn’t it?
18
Down the rabbit hole this morning, looking up examples of straw-manning and steel-manning. There’s a video of Jordan Peterson being interviewed by Cathy Newman where she straw-mans the shit out of him, twisting and misrepresenting pretty much everything he says. Peterson, in return, delivers a masterclass on how to handle that kind of thing.
19
Close to feeling like my best self again, after the last few weeks of back pain and other ailments and no schedule and trying to get settled here in Chiang Mai. Today was like a fresh start, with a set schedule, solid deep work sessions, fasting since breakfast, an hour of reading, a stint on the elliptical, bed before ten. Damn it feels good to be a youngster.
20
Met up with a student of my course today in Chiang Mai. Quite the story he has. Home-schooled in the US by super-religious parents – we’re talking Westboro level – kicked out of the house when he was 19 for losing his faith, now 25 and a self-taught web developer enjoying life in Thailand.
21
Fascinating stuff in this book. I’ve long believed there’s a thin line between good and evil, and that we’d all most likely make the “bad” decisions we see others make if we had their same biology, their same history. And it’s easy for one bad decision to become ten. So yeah, this book is affirming all that. Which either makes me smart, or simply susceptible to the same biases the authors describe.
22
Found a quieter spot here, amidst all the madness. They’ve had to cancel a bunch of flights at the airport. Look up and it’s easy see why. A thousand soft lights floating in the sky. More are constantly being released by people all around. And I’m standing here enjoying the spectacle. The full white moon with all its yellow disciples. And a million smiles down below.
23
Enjoying the group coaching more than I thought I would. Essentially it’s like having a big deep chat with some cool people every two weeks, trying to help them level up or get unstuck. Each session brings new insights, or reminds me of some useful tool or concept I’d forgotten about. Going to try do more of this in 2019, less freelancing.
24
Not happy with my video this week. The topic didn’t test well on Facebook Live but I ran with it anyway, and then I tried to pack way too much in there, resulting in me up until 3am last night trying to get it finished on schedule. Weekend is now shook. Might be worth it if I was happy with how the video itself turned out, but I’m not.
25
The problem with the world today is that people think there’s only one problem with the world today. And usually that problem is “out there.” We think to ourselves, “If only those people knew what I know, believed what I believe, understood what I understand, then we’d all be better off.” This is, of course, completely delusional.
26
Recognized myself running into the upper limit problem again today. Been feeling out of sorts lately and I know what I should do to get back on track: a bit of meditation, some free writing, a touch of gratitude, a little planning. Easy stuff. And yet I resist doing those things. Almost like there’s a part of me that enjoys the suffering, the uncertainty, the sadness.
27
Been sitting here trying to write this for several minutes, nothing coming to mind. Well, that’s not true. Plenty of ideas have come to mind, but they all seem shit. They’re not, of course. They just seem that way. Been going through a phase of negativity lately. Hard to shake. Recognizing the negative thoughts as irrational doesn’t always help.
28
A pattern I’ve noticed when feeling a bit sluggish, going through a downswing: I’m more drawn to things that give me a sense of control, or a sense of comfort. For example, the YouTube channel Rationality Rules. Full of great, thoughtful content, but stuff I’m already predisposed to agree with. Watching those videos makes me feel better, more certain.
29
Regular working folks take vacation. I burn out and spend a week or two feeling lazy and unmotivated. Nah, not really. Just feeling sorry for myself this week, been my least productive for a long while. Definitely needed the rest, and I can take some. The trick is to know which plates to keep spinning, and which to let drop.
30
Closing my course tonight. Not many people have signed up before the deadline, and that’s fine. If anything it confirms that I’m doing the right thing, that it’s time to move on. Been thinking how I spent 3.5 years doing my no-fly RTW trip, and I’ve spent the 3.5 years since that ended building and running this course. Now, on to the next adventure.
