YouSaid · the spoken record

Rolf Potts

lines on the record: 58
first: 2014-11-04
most recent: 2014-11-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I think that if I completely gave way to self-loathing and pessimism, that I would just throw something horrible out and then I would have something. But I'm just have this blank page anxiety coupled with the optimism that I think I can do good. It just makes it that much harder to get started because I just can't, I know that something is going to be good, but for some reason that first step is somehow at odds with my optimism. So it's a weird thing. And I'm actually relieved to hear that you struggle with the same thing.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, it's actually, and hopefully people in our audience can take heart in this, but I'm the exact same situation that the last third of a story or even a book is the easiest to write because I have the first two thirds to show that I'm not a complete incompetent, you know. And that I have in my office, I have different writing awards and articles about myself to sort of remind me that I'm not a completing competent. But that blank page that generations of writers have talked about is a real kind of anxiety. And getting started. And I have a really bad combination, which is that I'm a basher, but I'm also an optimist.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anne Lamotte's idea of shitty first drafts, of getting the words on the page. Kurt Vonnegut said that there's two types of writers, there's swoopers and bashers.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's an example of it was sort of a pulpy B movie screenplay that I did for fun just because I had this idea. And I would compromise my happiness if I didn't suddenly write this movie that was about zombies and giant dinosaur attacks. And I think that was almost part of resting certain parts of my intellectual brain that it was just delightful to write a really pulpy story. But it was interesting. It's like I keep teaching myself lessons. When I wrote something low stake, when I wrote a B-movie, you know, a monster movie earlier this month, it gave me such an interesting creative perspective on my own processes and the importance of just getting work out there that I was able to write 90 pages in 12 days, whereas sometimes I can be tortured over a 1,500-word article. So I think there's something worthy in the idea of”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's just one of those things where, despite my good intentions, sometimes my monkey brain goes back to the internet and I just have to be my own mother and discipline myself. I wrote a screenplay in 12 days earlier this month.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll have my spot on the white shoes problem. I actually bought the Freedom app. You know the Freedom app that turns off your internet connection?”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my process is possibly even worse. I think because, I don't know, I think there's different neuroses attributed to writer. And mine is maybe a little bit obsessive-compulsive that sometimes I could be the guy who writes two hours before breakfast every day, and sometimes I am. But sometimes I'm the guy who writes for 14 hours. And is it most fruitful at hour 13? And so if I wrote a writer's handbook and I teach writing and I try to instill, you know, discipline and ideas of discipline in my students because that's important because people can over-romanticize writing and think about the muse visiting them. And in fact, you need to be the one who creates this. But in practice, I'm sort of a bad example that there's some days where I'll just sort of be just frustrated with my”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's funny that you mention the Nicholas Cage character and adaptation as something you can relate to, because that's like the least glamorous depiction of a writer, and you're going to compromise people's romantic conception of you as a writer.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess it enables that tortured process to be fruitful in a way that perhaps it wouldn't have been otherwise. I don't know. I know that you have a very, Annie Dillard said that a schedule is a net for catching days, and I think that you're a believer in being very disciplined about having a writing schedule. I'm not very disciplined, but somehow it works anyway.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One beautiful, smooth reading, logical, inspirational paragraph of prose is the process of a day of labor and self-loathing. So just because I have this wonderful place to write and that my creativity is enhanced by marrying my travel mindset to my home doesn't mean that I just am sitting at my desk laughing in glee with my glass of wine writing brilliant prose. It doesn't get easier.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of a quieter sense of discovery, sort of a walking space, neighbor's pace sense of discovery in the place where I live. This is another one of those silver bullet things you were talking about, how you enjoyed my writing. And it is so tortured sometimes to write well.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I think achievement is a linear way of thinking, which is very American and important. And I'm a big believer in that. But appreciation is that more Eastern circular way of thinking of being able to savor what you do have and balancing that with your achievements. And so that goes back and ties into the creativity, the idea of coming back home. And I own a house on 30 acres of land in Kansas, and that's no accident. I'm close to my family, but it's also really, really cheap. And instead of living in a fashionable part of a big city, I can, I mean, what's happening right now is an example of it. I'm doing I'm going to go live in Brooklyn for a week and do a little home exchange. And I have the opportunity.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seven years ago. And I think there's An extent to which ongoing success can be as meaningless as ongoing lack of success and that you have to have a relationship with that to realize that appreciation becomes more important than achievement because there becomes a point at which that you've achieved your goals and now what, you know?”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For what is a great idea, which is taking that beginner's mind, taking that travel mindset, which I talk about at the end of Vagabond and the idea of coming home and treating your neighbors as exotic tribesmen back home. And one thing, and actually one thing I'd love to talk to you about is the idea of appreciation versus achievement, because there's limits to achievement. I mean, you've been, it's been for our work, we came out, what, seven?”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know it's dangerous to cross the street. This is a gift of travel is that it allows you to have the vulnerability of being very young, but also the excitement of being very young and the discovery of being very young. And sometimes for all of the research you do back home, the coolest part of showing up in Bangkok or Buenos Aires or Cape Town is just smelling the place, you know, or going not into a tourist place, but into a supermarket and realizing how different everything is. And it's that beginner's mind. It's that wonder of childhood stuff. And that can become, it can turn into a cheesy metaphor, but it's a real thing. It's the beginner's mind that allows you to engage in a new way. And so I think that ties into the idea of creativity and the staycation, which is a silly word.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we get stuck into being experts and online resources allow us to be sort of dilettant experts in everything. We can suddenly know a little bit about everything, when in fact the beginner's mind is one of the most emotionally daunting and exciting parts of travel where you just allow yourself to be a child again. And in fact, I have some quotes in Vagabonding talking about how you go to a new city and you're as dumb as a five-year-old. You know, you can hardly read, you know.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah. And this goes back to something that we were talking much earlier in the conversation about Decluttering emotionally. You talked about the idea of, I think you used the word portfolio to describe something. But I think vagabonding, the principles of vagabonding apply to life in non-travel ways. And it's been used as a text in social studies class, and it's sort of about another tying into something else you were talking about earlier. You were talking about something that sort of constitutes what some people call the beginner's mind, which is part of the excitement of traffic.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In every sense of the word. And it's hard to break away from, but in the vagabonding sense, it's essential. You're going to be selling yourself short if you can't stop micromanaging and optimizing for efficiency. And the more you think about those phrases in the context of the best parts of travel, the more you realize that you really have to throw the jargon, the efficiency jargon of daily life out the window and just throw yourself open to the travel experience.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's something that is at risk when we can't unplug. And the gifts of serendipity are not just, you know, actually you can stumble into a bad experience as easily as you can stumble into a good experience. But it's the misadventures or the unexpected good experiences that actually change you to the core of your being in a way that those pre-planned experiences don't. And so if you can't unplug, you're robbing yourself of that aspect of your time wealth. You're making, to extend this metaphor, you're making an optimized efficiency out of an Italian meal.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're going to hike for a week in the Andes and the Machu Picchu reason, are you going to want to make sure that that hike is optimized for efficiency? If you're going to be sitting on a beach in Thailand or Brazil, are you going to want to optimize that experience for efficiency? I think that that Italian meal metaphor can apply to so much of travel that, of course, you don't want to make it more efficient. You want to savor every bit of it. You want to be eating tomatoes that were in the ground two nights before and having just these very sensual tactile experiences, not just food experiences, but just ideas of the unexpected, of unplugging yourself from the life that you can predict, life that you can consume and buy, and stumbling into experiences that catch you by complete surprise. And I don't want to overuse the idea, the word serendipity.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there is one more point I was going to make is that it sort of ties into the idea of time wealth. Sometimes these days, this new generation has a way of stealing time wealth. Again, it's not that new. I mean, Plato complained about that written literacy was ruining people's ability to memorize poetry, right? But now this technology is so immersed in our lives that we can steal our own commonwealth by being hooked into virtual experiences, into our social media feeds instead of the experiences that are before us. You used a great phrase, which is optimizing for efficiency. And just think if you're going to sit down to an Italian meal in Italy, are you going to want to optimize that meal for efficiency?”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything is working in a new way. And your brain actually, that obsessive part of your brain is resting, but it's actually working in its own way. And this is actually scientific information. The New York Times reported on it about a week ago, that you actually come back, if you can unplug, if you can actually immerse yourself in a new place and turn off that obsessive part of your business brain, then you can come back and your mind will gift you with creative ideas and insights that it didn't have if you had spent your whole time in the Andes or Amsterdam or Bangkok obsessing on those very business issues.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and this pays off in tangible ways. There's been recent research that having a vacation that is actually a vacation, and this isn't about vagabond. This is about vacations, is important for your creative mind. It's important for your brain that having a cessation of obsessing on your creative life will allow your brain to work in ways that will make you more creative. So even if you go, if you travel to Amsterdam or Bangkok or the Andes for a week and you're constantly attached to your smartphone, in some ways it could be less advantageous to the creative life of your business or your career than if you just let go. Because if you let go of that constant stream to the information and the micromanaging, then your brain is working in the same way that it was back home. And part of the gifts of travel is that your brain and your emotions.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boats that steamships were compromising travel in ways that sailboats didn't in the Roman era, the technology of roads was changing the way travel was experienced. George Orwell talked about how trains were changing the way that travel was experienced in trains. When you think about it, it was a technology that allowed you to travel so quickly compared to how you previously could that you could maintain a business relationship of sorts while you were traveling. I don't think there's a silver bullet that can keep you from being a slave to your smartphone when you travel. It's hard. And as you mentioned, there's some things that you have to maintain back home if you're traveling for more than a couple of weeks. To an extent, it's a lot about self-discipline. There's something to be said for physically not taking your smartphone with you, which is something I don't do when I travel. I use the internet.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, this is an old conversation. The first person to do this in the technological age was actually JP Morgan. When the telegraph was invented, he went to Egypt, and I forget exactly. It was a little over 100 years ago. And his companions talked about how he was in Egypt, but not really, because he was always, he spent his whole time in Egypt attending to business. It was exactly, it was like the turn of the previous century version of what you just explained. It was him in a hotel room, you know, attending to his business. Technology basically, the telegraph, which seems very primitive in retrospect, prevented JP Morgan from actually being in Egypt. He may as well have not left home. And so this is an old problem. In fact, travelers of previous generations have complained that sales”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another way that technology has allowed that old hostel room is actually killed at the literal hostel room where people are now staring at their phones in the hostel room, but it has expanded the virtual hostel room where instead of talking to the six travelers you're with physically, you can be talking to 600 travelers through your networks who might have some good advice for you.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before your eyes and not what's coming across your social media feed. But before one's travels, I'm a big fan of throwing out a tweet or a Facebook post that says, hey, look, I'm going to be in this place. What are some suggestions? And that is something that didn't exist 10 years ago and is not tied to a business or social networking thing like Airbnb and couch surfing, but it could just be that your buddy from high school has a friend who's in the military in Germany and they have an ex-girlfriend who lives in Stockholm and suddenly you have a place to stay through very random circumstances. And so that kind of, it's the old model of sitting in the hostel or sitting in a guest house or a bar in an exotic part of the world talking to the six travelers who are there with you and them giving you advice on points further down the road. That principle has been taken to social media and through networking.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Windmills, and we had our own house to ourselves, and we could just walk down the street and get groceries. And so that was an Airbnb hookup. Couch surfing is similar benefits. It just allows you to break out of not only that old hotel set of assumptions, but also out of the hostile set of assumptions. The idea that the cheapest option in any place is going to be a hostile, especially traveling in groups. For the three of us, if I had been alone, maybe the cottage wouldn't have been as cheap as the hostel. But with three of us, where you're getting hostile one bed at a time, we just got the perfect place to stay through Airbnb. And so those services and even social media, even going on Facebook or Twitter, and I'm not a big believer of tweeting while you travel, I think that that really puts you into this home mindset and it pulls you out of the place where you are. And the point of travel is experiencing what's”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you mentioned Airbnb and couch surfing. I think in places, in more expensive places like Europe, the hostel was your go-to. It was where if you wanted to save money, you would go to the youth hostel. And it was a great place to meet people. You get a cheap bed. You would forgo a few amenities, but you would hang out in the hostel. Well, I went to Amsterdam this summer. I teach a writing course in Paris every summer, and my sister and my nephew came and visited me and we wanted to go see Amsterdam. And using Airbnb, I was able to get a full cottage a 15-minute train ride outside of central Amsterdam for about half the price as a hostel for three people in the center of Amsterdam. So instead of staying at somewhat grungy hostel in the red light district, we were staying in this little town filled with”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They force you to read the local newspaper instead of looking through your Facebook feed. And so that is what we're up against with this technological advances. And I don't want to be the grumpy older traveler because I remember being 20 and listening to these baby boom era hippies sort of lecture me on how travel used to be. Back at a time when telephone answering machines and credit cards were seen as this decadent form of technology. And so I know that there are younger travelers who don't know anything but the constant connectivity of travel. But unplugging is important. And we can talk more about that if you want. And we can also talk about the pluses. And I have many recent examples about how technology have helped. This recent home exchange is just a longtime friend who lives in Brooklyn. She's a writer and she wants a quiet place. I have 30 acres in Kansas. And so I get an awesome.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This technologically enhanced micromanaging cuts into that serendipity in a certain way. And it also connects us to home. And again, it's a two-edged thing. Social media and the constant connectivity that comes with smartphones, for example, allows us to really find things that we couldn't find before, but it cuts into the idea of wandering around and finding things by surprise, finding things organically, and letting a destination reveal itself to us on its own terms instead of sort of finding that place as a consumer before we get there. And a lot of technologies have eliminated things like loneliness and boredom, which sounds good and is good to a certain extent, but loneliness and boredom can lead you to those moments that sort of force you into a new version of yourself. They force you to be more extroverted.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That people just assume that the best deals to be had are the ones online. And then pretty soon you've locked in, you're traveling for six weeks and you know where you're sleeping every night in advance. And it really compromises the flexibility of travel and the serendipity of being inspired by a place and thinking, I'm going to stay here for a few days. Wow, I just met this traveler who told me about this great place up in the mountains and I'm not going to go to Varanasi. I'm going to go up into the Himalayas and spend my time there.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I'll start with the negative. The travel culture which I started in, which was 20 years ago, but really my more international travels are more like 15 years ago. It's about showing up in town and knowing that when you get there, the unexpected awaits you, that you're going to walk to the hotel district. You may have a guidebook with some hotel recommendations, but you're going to shop for your hotel. You're not going to find a deal online. You're going to walk in there. You're going to see the room. You're going to haggle because all throughout Asia, basically any place outside of the industrial world, prices are up for grabs and haggling in person is so much more, gives you so much more leverage than haggling online because you can go in, look at the room, and physically leave if the owner doesn't give you a price that you're into. And so these days, it has become so convenient, not always a bad thing, but it has become so convenient.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, it's shifted the way the travel world works in some ways that are delightfully convenient and in some ways that are a little bit strange. I think that technology is one of these double-edged swords that in some ways has turned us into insufferable micromanagers on the road”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, B-O-T-S-N-A-L. com. And they've been operating out of Portland, Oregon for years and have just quietly been doing very nice work of reassurance and saying, oh, so you're worried about it and around the world flight. Well, here's around the world flights look. You're worried about a certain situation. Here are some resources for that. And they're not alone. I'm most familiar with them because we've sort of shared a similar mission for a long time. But there are big communities of travelers who are happy to help and sort of help newbies feel better about these prospects of long-term travel.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Google, for one, I mean, if you just Google, 35 year old years old, two kids one year of travel, then odds are you'll find 20 blogs of people in that demographic. So, really be unabashed and very specific about Googling your fears or your demographic and just see who like you is out traveling the world. There's a lot of great traveler communities. I've been affiliated with Bootsanol.com since the very beginning of Vagabonding. And part of their MO is just sort of creating community and support for people. And they have blogs and resources on their site. And there's other travel communities as well.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's people who are blind, who are traveling for years at a time. There are people with major impediments. And if you're able-bodied and you have a little money socked away, there's really nothing stopping you except your own fear, which is sometimes tied to your ideas of money or your ideas of what the world is like, which is pegged to information.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was just taking a minivan from five blocks away from where they live. And so that information, realizing that the big picture news media information is always going to be panic driven. It's always going to be man by its dog. And so the more you get to the specific information and think, hmm, you know, I'm 37 years old. I'm looking to take a sabbatical from my job. I live in Virginia and I like to drink beer. Well, within 30 minutes, you can find somebody who's from a very similar life situation who's doing what you're doing. And again, even if, I mean, there's.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you can look past the panic driven man bites dog tenor of media and realize that Mexico is actually a giant country and that the drug violence is very isolated and that there are ways to travel in a very safe way, in a very inexpensive way, then suddenly Mexico becomes this amazing and very close way to travel. My sister is a college professor in north-central Kansas, and she and her family took a little, there's a big Mexican-American community in Kansas and they just took the local Mexican minivan down to Fresnio, Mexico, and just a family of four. And they've traveled for next to nothing in an amazing way for their teenage sons to a part of the world that people assume is full of drug violence.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, because Americans are so insular, our international understanding is really pegged to major world events that don't really represent day-to-day life in the towns of these towns around the world.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dog world. They're going to talk about explosions and revolutions and bad things around the world. And so much of what we understand, in fact, there's that famous phrase, you know, war is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't really have anything to compare to. Now, if you're a successful person with the money to do it and the physical capacity to do it, you can go online. And not only can you realize that people are traveling in Mexico, they're traveling in Colombia, they're traveling in Egypt and Israel and other parts of the world where you think that might be dangerous. You realize that there's family bloggers out there who are traveling with five kids to these places or traveling with a diabetes problem or with physical handicaps or with money that they've made on a job that has a fraction of what most people make. People who've simply decided to become wealthy in time, regardless of the fact that they work as park rangers or exotic dancers or maintenance men. And so that information, you can, if you get past, I guess media exists in a man by”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, well, this is where the fear factor comes in. You were talking about Medellin, you know, there's Mexico that has a lot of drug war violence going on. Of course, the Middle East is a perennially a bad reputation place to travel to. But keep in mind that information is something that can work against you or work for you. And these days, information is everywhere. When I left to travel in the United States 20 years ago, I was actually more afraid of the United States than in 1994, then I'm afraid of any place in 2014 simply because pre-worldwide web, I didn't know what to expect. I had no examples in Kansas, which is not in sort of bullseye middle class circles. I didn't have a lot of friends traveling full-time.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There to actualize your experience and to enhance your life meaning. And the moment that it becomes parasitical, the moment that you're a billionaire who has 36 hours to go to a conference, and I'd love to know how much money is spent flying to the conference, catering it, you know, because I know people who could travel probably for five years on what one billionaire spends to go to that 36-hour conference. And I'm sure you know people who could do the same. So that's just such an important thing to keep in mind is to I have nothing against success or material success, but really know where the line is, the point at which the success you've achieved is actually getting into the way of actualizing a good and meaningful and option-filled life.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a mindset thing, which is why I'm sort of answering your question, your earlier question in big picture way, that it's really a mindset about your relationship to money and your relationship to information, which I'll get to in a second. But you were talking about the billionaire who's sort of become a slave to his own parasitical wealth. That's an old idea too. I have a quote from the ancient Sanskrit scriptures in Vagabonding, which is about the king in his palace only has half a bed and the food on his plate for all the grain in his fields. Does he own the rest? At the end of the day, even the kings, and I knew this 3,000 years ago, even kings only eat one meal at a time. They only sleep in one bed at a time. And at the end of the day, the substance of your life is through experience. And if you're suddenly compromised, your material wealth and your money is.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the thing if you live in an expensive city like San Francisco, New York, there's probably a half dozen other examples in the United States alone, you're going to be living on fewer dollars per day by far if you're traveling in Southeast Asia or South America or the Middle East, then you would just be paying your bills and paying your rent and buying your groceries at home, that you're traveling in a completely different economic zone, which was sort of the point of pointing out this Wall Street example. In China, that movie was from the 80s. Certainly China has more expensive since then. You might not have to clean toilets. You might have to clean something else now to ride your motorcycle across China. But the point is that all this importance is placed upon conspicuous consumption, a romantic ideas of what we can do. And oftentimes it's not money that's in the way.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of success, but it's a tool for allowing you to live a time rich and experience rich life and really live in ways that allow you to not only follow but discover passions that you never realized you had.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bible and the old Hindu scriptures, which talk about these golden chains with under which we sink, we're bound to our possessions. And through success, there's a very old philosophical idea. Through success, we lose perspective on the good life because we tie success so closely with money and possessions and material splendor. And so if you can just redefine your relationship with what success is and really goes back to the idea of time wealth, that success is being able to do what you want whenever you want. And there's billionaires out there who are compromised in ways that you or I or your plumber or your local park ranger are not because just realizing that money is a tool. It's not a metric for success. It's a nice side product.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The advice that I have, there's a couple of big picture ones, big picture advice that I have for this. And one is to, they're both sort of mental. They're about redefining your relationship or just how you think about things. One is your relationship to money and what it represents and one is your relationship to information and what it represents. You mentioned success, you know, the idea of the American puritanical idea of what success is. And money is a great metric for success, but it's not the only metric for success. And I think people fixate on money to their own detriment. Because as I mentioned before, it doesn't take that much money to travel the world. Travel isn't a consumer experience. And I think you said you weren't sure the reference. I think you were quoting Thoreau when you're sort of talking about these rich people who were sort of bound by their own riches. And he's actually stealing that from the”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, no, the drug lords moved out in the plastic surgeons moved in. It's a beautiful city, but that was just, it was a strange, like physical attribute that it's obviously a surgeons had been hard at work. Wonderful city.”
2014-11-04 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 41: Rolf Potts on Travel Tactics, Creating Time Wealth, and Lateral Thinking · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT