Location Independent Engineering Activities

You should decide on the location independent engineering activities that you want to take part in.  This helps with motivation to start working on your freedom projects, and keeps you going when distractions present themselves.  What makes you tick?  Do you want to travel the world, or just want to spend more time at home with your family?  Do you have goals of building an empire, or do you just want to diversify your income sources?

Personally, three of the location independent engineering activities that motivate me are: travel, building an off-line business, and choosing a specialty that interests me the most.

Travel

Travel is definitely the first of the location independent engineering activities that I plan to enjoy.  Of course I love to travel now too, even though I have a job.  The only difference is I only have two weeks of vacation per year as an employee.  I have to fly somewhere fancy and try to enjoy as much as possible – think expensive resorts and excursions everyday.  My time is limited so I have to throw money at the vacation in order to enjoy it – or so society says.  Also, I tend to leave the laptop at home and never check email, I have to make sure I enjoy that vacation!!

Let’s call that binge travel.  I binge for one week, twice per year, then it’s back to work to clean up the mess.

I definitely prefer to spend one, three, or six months in one location and combine my work with exploring, language learning, exercise, enjoying ethnic foods, and experiencing foreign cultures.  I find travel to be more fulfilling when I interact wit the locals and don’t hide in resort or hotel.  Learn a little bit of their language, then head out into the streets and try to integrate.  Now that’s travel that I enjoy

Build an offline business

I’m sure you’re like me and you come up with new website, product, and business ideas everyday.  But it’s tough to build a major business for yourself when you’re working to build somebody else’s for 50 hours per week (plus commute).  Also, building a off-line business can be a long process, especially if you have to take a salary out of the revenue stream.  My research has shown that leaving as much of your revenue in the business as possible will help the company to grow.  Having active and passive income from an internet business will support you and allow you to enjoy life while building your off-line empire as well.  So there’s my plan, to hack my current job and build my online income to the point of being able to support my basic costs – probably $1.5k per month.  Then leaving the job, moving to a location with a low cost of living, and building the   online income to a consistent $5k per month.  At that point I will be able to fund my lifestyle and put some effort into building an offline business as well.  The current plan is to get into importing or manufacturing industrial equipment.

Choose your specialty

As you grew into your engineering job, you likely went in a direction that had the greatest pay or what your employer had an immediate need for.  It’s very unlikely your area of interest played much of a role in which position you’re in.  Once you’re free of the job, and have enough online income coming in, you can spend your free time studying a specialty that interests you.  I’m interested in vehicle dynamics, hybrid systems, exercise, health, nutrition, languages, and cooking.  Even though I am a trained mechanical engineer, there is nothing stopping me from becoming an expert in any of those fields.  One thing that you have to get out of your head is the idea that somebody has to declare you an expert, and that it first requires a university degree in that discipline.  With a little bit of time and effort, you can become an expert in anything through textbooks and material on the internet.

You decide what you are an expert in!

Choosing a topic unrelated to engineering and becoming an expert is one of the location independent engineering activities that I am looking forward to!  I plan to become an expert in nutrition and exercise to increase mental performance.

What are your desired location independent engineering activities?  Do you plan to travel, farm, become an author, or build a world-changing business, or raise a family?

Please share your goals here as well – it will provide ideas and motivation to myself and others on here trying to engineer an escape.

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Tags: Activities, Study, Travel