It turns out that automating a source of income can take years, but disconnecting your paycheck from your location is fairly easy stuff, particularly if you are willing to take a pay cut.

For two and a half years we’ve been sending weekly news emails to our subscribers. They included links to our favorite reads of the week, and a description of that week’s podcast. Occassionally we’d announce things like events or masterminds at the end of those emails.

Fair warning: what follows is 6,000+ words about road cycling, a hobby I picked up last year. These words poured out of my hands the morning after my first semi-competitive event.

Job opportunities have always been a big part of what we do at TMBA, and I expect we’ll ramp that up in the coming months as Ian and I put together a plan to make investments in the businesses of our readers.

I was at a cafe in London, reading a gossip newspaper (I enjoyed it). My friend, who tries hard to only read paper books, magazines and newspapers (like The Financial Times), was clicking around on his phone most of the morning.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working on building a portable podcast studio. This process has involved ordering a lot of useless equipment (sorry Bossman!) and lots of tinkering around. But, finally, I’ve fixed on a set-up that I’m happy with.

Our podcast is over 6 years old. During that time we’ve produced over 300 episodes. On the whole, I’m proud of the work we’ve done. I’ll be 34 this year, and so far, it’s been the best stuff I could come up with.

I thought about email a lot over the past few weeks. Every morning, I watched messages trickle in and pile up. My replies were sporadic. I scanned the incoming to-dos with a mounting sense of unease.

Episode #183 of Startups For the Rest of Us was one of my favorite podcasts of the year. On it, Dan Norris said some important things. For example– you actually can launch a business in 7 Days.

In 2007, in a beige cubicle in California, I used a spreadsheet to determine that I controlled about 20% of my waking hours. The other 80% were determined by my job and related activities– from commuting, to mending clothes, to checking emails in the evenings.

Because it’s so easy to cut a crappy partnership deal, I have often quipped that “a partnership is a sinking ship.” An arrangement to be avoided if possible, and if undertaken, one to be treated like a marriage.

What I’m about to explain sounds crazy to many (and even me when we first conceived of it), but so far this specific arrangement has worked for 7 young entrepreneurs who have wanted to make a transition to the digital nomad lifestyle.

I was not expecting it, but when I first moved to Asia I found that you could walk into a broad range of establishments— restaurants, pubs, resorts, hotels, guesthouses— first thing in the morning, spread all your stuff out, and start working.

This blog (formerly the “Lifestyle Business Podcast”) was started five years ago. After four or five false starts, I meekly published an episode about the process we used to identify our first valet parking product.

I was watching basketball videos on Youtube the other day and was struck by this documentary of Lebron James’ high school team. In their junior year, they choked and lost to an inferior team in the Ohio state championship. A few things struck me about the way they failed.

I’m more or less obsessed with the idea of writing for a living. Waking up every morning and building something on your own terms, from your own laptop, from anywhere in the world.

For over half a decade, one of my favorite daily rituals is opening up my RSS feed reader (what is RSS?) after my morning working session (along with the DC and Hacker News).

The whole “I’m writing a book” thing has been a huge learning experience. Hundreds of thousands of words, lot’s of helpful advice, tons of hours, and nothing to show for it, except perhaps feeling the force of some entrepreneurial correlate to the Peter Principle.

Many look at digital nomads as entrepreneurish types on a sabbatical from real life. In my mind, however, the fundamentals of the digital nomad movement– earning back your time and mobility first– form the bedrock of a wealth script.

I was fascinated by an article on Marginal Revolution that listed cities “at or near their peak of excellence.” I enjoyed hearing the author’s perspective and comparing it with my own, so I thought I’d do something similar and try and identify “lifestyle design” hot spots.