If you want to put yourself on the map,
publish your own map.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant
There may have been a time when I didn’t want to travel, but my memory doesn’t go back that far. In the small Minnesota town where I grew up, nobody I knew traveled farther than the State Fair. However, my father had serious wanderlust which he passed down to his five children. We all grew up assuming that regular and frequent travel to interesting places would be a part of our lives.
Although I did take a trip to Europe (my one and only organized tour) a year after graduating from college, decades would pass before I needed a passport again. During those years when travel seemed a far off dream, I tried to change that—with absolutely no success. Neither saving money nor entering contests got me any closer to frequent flyer status.
Besides my frustration at being homebound, I was also having doubts about my career choice. I had spent five years teaching high school English and speech, another year as an employment counselor and yet another as an interior decorator. With each of these jobs, I would quickly grow bored. I was afraid something was terribly wrong with me, that I might be a perpetual malcontent. What I know now is that a bigger dream was trying to be born—a dream of a creative, passion-filled business.
What I didn’t anticipate was that becoming Joyfully Jobless was a passport to the adventurous life of my childhood dreams. As a gypsy teacher and seminar leader, I’ve acquired more than a million miles of travel on a single airline. My business has led me to wonderful cities and towns in the US, Canada and Europe where I’ve met fascinating people I never would have known had I stayed home. My world continues to get bigger every day.
Barbara and her siblings in Venice
Through my own funky business I’ve discovered that the Joyfully Jobless spirit knows no national boundaries and is flourishing throughout the world. Subscribers to my newsletter, Winning Ways, come from all over the planet and my book, Making a Living Without a Job , has been discovered by entrepreneurial folks from many countries. And, of course, writing is the most portable of businesses. I can write in my cozy home office—or a sidewalk cafe in Paris.
Being Joyfully Jobless has also made it possible for me to live in diverse places—another childhood dream of mine. Today World Headquarters is Las Vegas, Nevada, a wildly entrepreneurial hothouse. Living here has been an astonishment. I smile every time I hear my granddaughter call me Grandma Vegas.
Like all journeys, mine has had its share of delays, detours and disappointments, but it’s also led me know Paulo Coehlo was right when he wrote, “Too often, we decide to follow a path that is not really our own, one that others have set for us. We forget that, whichever way we go, the price is the same: in both cases we will pass through both difficult and happy moments. But when we are living our dream, the difficulties we encounter make sense.”
