I’m massively fixated on time right now and I wasn’t sure why until it hit me recently during a deep psychological dive with my online life, business, fitness, health, and general agony aunt coach, Bob (otherwise known as ChatGPT).

Up until a few short months ago I was a full time Mum. My daily thoughts consisted of 10% my needs and 90% my daughters (Ok I’m probably exaggerating but you know what I mean Mum’s!).

Plus we generally lived in one place with our routines, friends, commitments and all the normal stuff that fills a life.

But this morning my only thought was about packing my bag, washing my hair, and getting out the door to our next destination.

That and this article I wanted to write, the creatives I need to do for my ecom brand and the fact my trousers felt a bit snug after a few weeks in Canada eating poutine! 🤭

All of a sudden I have time. And I don’t mean hours in the day. It feels like I have less of those now there’s always a bus, train or plane to catch.

I mean time for me. Time to think about what I want.

But also time in the form of years yet to live - to build businesses, write books, travel to amazing places, meet fascinating people, get stronger, try new things, change my mind, start again, and have absolutely no idea what I’m doing on a fairly regular basis.

I’m completely ‘free to do what I want, any old time’ 🎶

And at 53 I’ve suddenly become incredibly excited about what’s ahead.

Because even though I now need glasses to watch the TV and read a book, knee braces when hiking, & a cup of tea before anyone can get a word out of me in the morning, I have absolutely no intention of slowing down.

In fact I kinda feel like I’m just getting started.

And it made me wonder how many of us reach this age and don’t realise what an opportunity we still have in front of us.

Because even though the world increasingly starts treating us as though our most interesting years are behind us, what if we don’t see it that way?

What if, instead of slowly shrinking our lives to fit an outdated idea of what getting older should look like, we decide to expand?

We’ve got decades of experience behind us, less people to please, a much better idea of who we are, and for many of us, more freedom to decide what we want the next chapter of our life to look like.

We could still have 20, 30 or 40 years ahead of us for crying out loud.

That’s a lot of life.

So this isn’t the time to wind down at all.

In fact it’s our time to go bigger with what we believe is possible, bolder about going after it, and braver about trusting ourselves enough to see just how much we’re still capable of.

Let me get a hell yeah! 💪😎

BIGGER

Recently I came across the incredible story of Grandma Moses.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses had spent most of her life working on farms and raising a family. She only began painting seriously in her late seventies when arthritis made embroidery too painful (plus she wanted to give a gift to her postman!)

In 1938, when Grandma Moses was 78, New York art collector Louis Caldor saw her paintings displayed in the window of a drugstore in Hoosick Falls, New York. He bought the paintings and then visited her and bought more.

According to the Smithsonian Mag, some dealers worried about her age, and the wider art world sidelined her for being elderly, female and self-taught.

But Grandma Moses painted for another 23 years.

She became one of America’s most recognised folk artists, appeared on the cover of Time magazine and lived to 101.

What a sensational story, and a great example of what can be achieved at any age!

I’m not saying we should all rush out and become internationally renowned artists in our seventies. Frankly, I’ve got enough on my to-do list (plus I can’t paint).

But it’s proof that we don’t have to start shrinking our lives as we get older, which I think so many of us do almost without noticing.

We don’t consciously say, ‘oh I’m getting older so I’m going to start shrinking my life.’

We just start to stop entertaining certain ideas because we think we’ve missed our chance.

Starting the business. Writing the book. Moving abroad. Learning something new. Travelling somewhere that scares us a little. Changing careers. Falling in love again. Starting over.

‘Bit late for that now.’

Is it?

I’m a spring chicken at 53. If I’m lucky (and eat more salads), I could easily have another 30 years ahead of me.

That’s my whole adult life all over again!

Think back 20 or 30 years and consider everything that’s happened since.

• VHS became Netflix. (Blockbuster anyone?)

• Mixtapes became Spotify playlists.

• Encyclopaedias became Google.

• Maps now talk to us in our cars.

• Phone boxes turned into FaceTime.

• Letters became WhatsApp.

• Travel agents became Booking (dot) com and Airbnb.

• Huge brick sized mobiles (which were revolutionary by the way) became tiny computers in our pockets.

• And these days my therapist is a robot! 😂

30 years isn’t the tail end of something.

It’s enough time to create an entirely new chapter.

And remember big is relative.

For you it might mean travelling the world, starting a business from your kitchen table, writing your first novel, learning Spanish, moving closer to the sea, or simply having enough control over your time to spend Wednesday afternoon reading a book if you damn well please.

What matters is that you choose the size of your life rather than accepting whatever gets handed to you.

BOLDER

You know one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves?

“I’ll do it when…”

• When I feel more confident.

• When I know what I’m doing.

• When I’ve lost some weight.

• When I have more money.

• When the kids are sorted.

• When work calms down.

• When I feel ready.

• When life is less complicated.

There will always be another “when”.

I didn’t feel ready when we moved our family to Cyprus in 2008 with a four-year-old daughter and a recession chewing through our income.

I didn’t feel ready when we started our first online business with very little clue what we were doing.

I didn’t feel ready when we decided to become full-time nomads.

I don’t feel ready to publish this article (it’s not perfect!!! 😳)

I’m doing it anyway.

At some point, you have to accept that feeling ready isn’t a prerequisite.

You can be nervous and do it, have doubts and still do it, have absolutely no idea whether it’ll work and still give it a bloody good go.

That’s what living bolder means to me.

It’s taking action despite your fears.

And the funny thing is, every time you do something that scares you a little and discover you can handle it, your confidence grows.

Then the next thing becomes easier.

You don’t have to blow up your entire life and buy a one-way ticket to Bali to be bold. You just need to do something about the things you keep telling yourself you want.

BRAVER

I always assumed I’d become more confident as I got older.

With age comes wisdom, confidence and self-assurance, right?

You accumulate decades of life experience, survive all sorts of things you thought would finish you off, learn a few lessons, stop caring what other people think, and eventually stride into your fifties with the confidence of someone who has seen and done stuff.

Surely we should all be swaggering around by 50 thinking, “I’ve got this.”

Except it doesn’t seem to work like that.

In fact, for a lot of us, confidence seems to take an absolute battering.

Our bodies are changing, our hormones are all over the place (ladies, you know what I’m talking about), and some of us are dealing with brain fog, low energy, poor sleep and anxiety.

Children who needed us constantly suddenly don’t need us in the same way. Careers we were once ambitious about might not feel as important anymore.

And meanwhile, we’re living in a culture that’s completely obsessed with youth, beauty, money & power.

It’s easy to start questioning yourself.

• Have I still got it?

• Am I still relevant?

• Is it too late?

• Who do I think I am doing this at my age?

I’ve heard various versions of those thoughts from so many women I’ve chatted to recently, and I’ve had plenty of them myself.

Which is why I think being braver after 50 is about learning to trust ourselves again.

We don’t need to suddenly start jumping out of airplanes (which so many of my friends have done for their 50th - me I was bombing down waterslides on my 50th, but that’s another story!)

But we do need to start giving ourselves a little more credit.

You’ve been through some stuff my friend!

Grief, relationship breakdowns, redundancy, financial problems, health scares, family dramas, disappointments, failures, mistakes and all the other curveballs that come with living for 5 or 6 decades.

But you’re still here fighting the good fight!

And you’re definitely far more capable than you’ve been giving yourself credit for.

So when you feel the uncertainty, or the fear, or hear that little voice telling you you’re too old, too late, too inexperienced, too whatever, take the step anyway.

Then take another one.

Because courage is a muscle, and some of us have spent decades using ours on everybody else.

Now we get to use some of it on ourselves.

This is our time.

I’d far rather don the wooden overcoat having made some questionable decisions, tried things that didn’t work, changed my mind repeatedly and occasionally made a complete idiot of myself, than realise I’d spent my last few decades sitting on the sidelines because I was scared.

Your Best Years Might Still Be Ahead

Bigger, bolder and braver aren’t three separate ideas. They feed each other.

You allow yourself to imagine something bigger, then you take a bold step towards it before you feel completely ready, and somewhere along the way you build the courage to keep going.

And perhaps that’s one of the greatest opportunities of getting older.

We’ve spent years being who everybody needed us to be.

Now nobody’s watching.

After decades of worrying about what we look like, what people think, whether we’re doing life properly, whether everybody else is happy and whether we’re meeting whatever ridiculous standards we’ve set for ourselves, we can embrace the obscurity, the world is kindly giving us.

Society might not be terribly interested in people our age anymore.

Fine.

We can get on with doing our own thing.

We can want big things out loud. We can take the steps before we’re completely ready. We can back ourselves after a lifetime of backing everybody else.

And we can stop treating our fifties, sixties and beyond as a long, slow journey towards the beige armchair. (She says writing this article from literally a beige armchair! 😂)

I don’t know about you, but I want to travel further, build businesses, write books, meet fascinating people, have adventures, get stronger, learn new things, make mistakes, change my mind and embarrass my daughter occasionally. 😂

And if I’m lucky enough to still be here at 83, I hope I’m making plans for 93.

“They” might think we’re winding down.

Let them.

Because while they’re not looking, we can build the boldest chapter of our entire lives.

Your next few decades are coming either way.

You may as well make them your best years yet.

Jo 🥰

Howdy my adventurous friends!

I take approximately 4,732 photos every week and then do absolutely nothing with most of them, so this week I thought I’d put them to good use and show you what my week as a nomad looks like. 😂

No deep thoughts on ageing, courage or the meaning of the universe this week, just a little peek into life on the road.

And this week we left Canada, flew into New York, moved into our latest house sit, acquired a dog, a cat and a swimming pool, and I headed into Manhattan for the afternoon where I ate a hot dog, found a book-less library, and made a new friend in Times Square.

Pretty standard week really. 😂

Goodbye Canada, Hello New York

I have a bit of a thing about taking photos out of plane windows, which is why I always choose the window seat and have been known to kick up quite a fuss if a member of my own family thinks they’re getting it instead.

Sorry, but there are some things I’m simply not prepared to compromise on. 😂

Also (little travel tip), I nearly always ask at check-in if they happen to have any extra legroom seats available. My success rate is about 90% so far - for no extra cost!

And the lovely Renata at the WestJet check-in desk in Calgary did not let me down for this trip! (I love how they ask if you’re happy to fling the cabin door open in the event of an emergency, like my top priority while plummeting toward the earth at 500 mph is going to be politely executing step 4 of the laminated safety card! 😳)

Something I was not aware of, but was definitely a bonus, is that when flying from Canada to the US, you clear US immigration in Canada before you get on the plane.

And given this was trip No 2 to the US, plus we’re here for 8 weeks I was a bit nervous for the potential grilling, so even though it took 90 solid minutes in the queue 🙄, it was a relief to get waved through by an easy going guy, and made for a very relaxing flight! 😊

The Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made Of!

We’re staying in a place called White Plains for a couple of weeks so after a quick one night stopover in Jamaica (great name for a neighbourhood), we picked up the car and headed in that direction.

And what a thrill to see the skyline of NYC open up in front of me on route!

So of course, I cranked up Alicia Keys Empire State of Mind & sang my little heart out (to my husbands delight 🤭).

Sometimes you just have to embrace the cliché. 😂

Our Current Home

Here are the lovely little reprobates we’re looking after for the next couple of weeks, while their family head off on hols, and this rather lovely swimming pool is ours to use. All for the grand accommodation price of absolutely nothing.

The joys of house sitting. 😁 Plus they have a housekeeper, so I won’t even need to do any cleaning! (It’s a hard life, but I’ll try my best to embrace it! 😊)

And this is probably my fave thing about nomad life. One week we’re travelling from room to room, even staying in a hostel bed with somebody’s smelly shoes underneath it. The next we’re in a beautiful house with a pool just outside New York City.

It’s nothing if not filled with variety! 😎

Stop Spreading the News

So I popped into the city yesterday on my own for the afternoon, jumped on the train and arrived at Grand Central, which I know is just a train station but GOOD GRIEF.

I’ve seen Grand Central in hundreds of films over the years, so to stand within it myself was a bit of a thrill.

Then I just went wandering.

This is probably my favourite way to explore a city when I’ve got nowhere particularly urgent to be. I had a few places I wanted to see, but mostly I just walked, looked up a lot, took far too many photos and drank in my surroundings.

• New York Public Library - that doesn’t actually have any books (not for public use anyway)

• Bryant Park - people playing chess, bowls, curling, reading books, playing music (it was lovely)

• Hot Dog Cart - after decades of watching people stand on New York pavements in movies, eating hot dogs out of little foil wrappers, my time had finally come!

And after all that anticipation, I can happily report that it tasted…

like a hot dog. 😂

Then I Hit Times Square

Ok, I know Times Square is touristy, crowded, noisy, super commercial and probably somewhere every true New Yorker avoids like the plague, but I bloody love it.

There is SO much going on that I didn’t know where to look. The lights, the people, the noise, the street shows. I wandered up the red steps at Father Duffy Square and just sat for half an hour or so taking in the atmosphere around me.

And then, among all those screens, who should appear…

Gordon bloody Ramsay.

I thought I’d left him in Vegas!

Well, apparently not. 😂

Then this happened…

Eventually I decided I’d walked about enough and stopped for a drink at Buchette Del Vino, right in the middle of Times Square, where you order your drink and they serve it through a little window Italian style (apparently?)

As I sat enjoying a cold Peroni, a lady joined me and we got chatting.

Kristin is originally from Ohio, served in the military, has just turned 50 and we ended up chatting and laughing for about an hour.

And it was probably my favourite part of the whole afternoon.

I’ll never see her again, but that’s not the point.

The point is that for one random hour I got to share a little piece of New York with a complete stranger, hear about a life completely different to mine, and just connect with another human. ❤️

Anyway, that was my week.

Canada to New York, two new furry roommates, a swimming pool, one fairly average hot dog, Gordon Ramsay stalking me across America and a lovely conversation with a stranger in Times Square.

And I’ve got another week in New York yet.

God knows what will be on next week’s camera roll. 😂

Have a fab weekend!

Jo xx ☺️

I’m 53, and I was sharing a dorm with about a dozen women half my age, all of them apparently able to sleep through anything and wake up looking fresh as a daisy.

While I, eye bags and all, peeled an HRT patch off my hip in a shared bathroom, having already taken my levothyroxine just so my thyroid could function!

Ah the joys of ageing. 🫤

I’m not going to lie, there are times I find myself wishing I’d done all this when I was younger. All this backpacking, dorm-sleeping, mountain-chasing, road-tripping-through-the-wild business.

Maybe it was something I should have done at 23, not 53. Like somehow I missed the memo that I was supposed to do all this back then, and now am doing it slightly out of time, estrogen patches and all.

But of course that’s crap. Here’s why.

Believe What’s Useful Not What’s True

Here’s what’s true.

I’m 53, with arthritic knees and an exercise history I’m not particularly proud of. My husband Rhett is newly 50 (going on 90) with a shoulder injury that’s somehow taken over his entire body, and knocked him for six these last few weeks. (We sound like a complete recipe for successful backpacking, right? 😂)

That might be true, but it isn’t very useful.

Because here’s what’s also true. I have never felt more alive, more energised, or frankly more young than I do when I’m travelling. I wrote a whole piece about that a couple of weeks back, about how travel might be the best anti-ageing strategy on earth, and I meant every word of it.

Out here, moving through the world, I feel 20 years younger than my knees would have me believe.

So I get to choose which of those truths I build my life around. The arthritis and the dodgy shoulder, or the aliveness, the energy, and the pull of the next mountain.

I know which one I’m picking.

And that feeling of ‘I wish I’d done it younger’ is one of the most useless feelings there is, because it points backwards at a version of your life that’s no longer available! It’s gone, past, done. Move on.

And I’m not just talking about backpacking or travelling. All of us over 50 know the pang.

• The business you wish you’d started.

• The book you wish you’d written.

• The dream you wish you’d chased.

“I wish I’d started younger.”

Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you didn’t. Neither did I, and no amount of wishing is going to change it.

Climbing Mountains at 53

Interestingly I was recently reading the story of a lady by the name of Junko Tabei.

In 1975, she became the first woman to reach the summit of Everest. She was 35, a mother of two, from a poor farming family, and had spent her life being told women should be raising children, not climbing mountains. 🙄

Days before reaching the summit an avalanche buried her (and her team) unconscious high on the mountain. Her sherpas dug her out. She could barely walk, rested for two days, then carried on and reached the top (on her own).

Then, at the ripe old age of 53 (my age), she became the first woman to complete the Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent! 😳

She had a personal goal to climb the highest mountain in every country, and guess what, she reached the top in more than 70 of them. She wrote seven books in her late fifties and sixties, went back to university at 60, and was still leading expeditions months before she died at 77, climbing with cancer, refusing to stop.

Her motto was simple. “Do not give up. Keep on your quest.”

I mean, wowee. What an attitude.

What I love most about her story is that she just didn’t stop. Age never defined who she was and what she could accomplish. Every goal she achieved became the foundation for the next goal.

And I think we sometimes forget that (at least I do).

I start to feel like a beginner all over again, particularly when navigating new territory, like a new platform, a new hobby, or a whole new chapter.

But we need to remind ourselves we’re not starting from nothing. We’ve got decades of experience behind us, and the foundations of everything we need.

Even when the specific thing we’re looking at feels brand new (like a new summit to climb), we need to draw on what we already know.

Whatever you’ve spent your life doing, whether it was raising a family, running a home, building a career or mastering a craft, none of it has been wasted time. It’s all the foundation your next chapter gets built on.

And right now is younger than we’ll ever be again. Today we are the youngest we’ll ever be for the rest of our lives. So if not now, when?

The Lakes & Canyons of The Rockies

Yesterday we visited Moraine Lake. It’s absolutely stunning, here see for yourself.

As we were walking up to the rockpiles for a better view, we passed two ladies who’d stumbled and fallen (and were being actively aided by friends/family), one on the way up the other on the way down. Both easily in their 70s or 80s.

I had two thoughts at exactly the same time. First - “they’re bloody troopers. Brilliant that they’re up here, still going, not letting unsteady feet stop them from doing what they want”.

Second - “I want to be strong enough, at that age, that I’m not unsteady. That my legs can still carry me confidently up and down uneven steps and pathways.”

There’s no guarantees in life of course, but seeing those women out there doing it despite their frailties, made me think about how much of what we achieve is down to our minds not just our bodies.

These thoughts stayed with me as we walked around Emerald Lake, with views that looked like a painting.

As we hiked up to Lake Louise, because we couldn’t get parking or a shuttle (note to self, be more organised in your planning!).

And as I walked up through Marble Canyon listening to kids moan to their parents - “I don’t want to see another waterfall!” 😂

But it really hit me.

We can ‘think’ about what we want until the cows come home.

But it’s the ‘doing’ that makes things possible.

• Every time I hike, it makes me want to hike more.

• Every walk makes me want to get stronger so I can do the next one better.

• Movement creates the appetite for more movement.

And it isn’t just about hiking, backpacking, travelling or mountains. It’s about life itself.

• Last week I did a Substack Live, loved it, and can’t wait to do more.

• My book is almost finished, and I’m already thinking about the next one.

• Every time I write an article that resonates, I want to write the next one.

Doing begets more doing. Doing creates the hunger to do the next thing, again, further, higher, longer.

It’s a virtuous cycle.

So whatever you’ve been telling yourself you’re too old for, the business, the book, the trip, the course, the move, the change, you’re not too old. You might feel too late sometimes, but that’s just a feeling, not a fact.

Unfortunately, whatever hasn’t been done, can’t be done younger. None of us can go back. But you can decide to do it today, with everything you’ve accumulated behind you as fuel, not baggage.

Over to You

What have you been telling yourself you’re too old for?

What’s the thing you keep filing under “I wish I’d started younger.” Or that you assume the window’s closed on. A version of your life you’ve decided isn’t available anymore.

What if it still is?

What if today, the youngest you’ll ever be again, is exactly the right time to start?

Tell me in the comments. Sometimes saying it out loud is the first step towards doing it.

Right, I’m off. There’s a mountain out there with my name on it. (Well, a gentle, knee-friendly, arthritis-approved trail with my name on it. But you get the idea.) 😉

Jo 🥰

A Few for Fun

Because the last week hasn’t all been profound mountain reflection!

Canada - you’ve been amazing! 🇨🇦 Until next time! 🥰

I’m ‘writing’ this article from the passenger seat of our car.

We’re winding our way through the Rockies in British Columbia, and I put ‘writing’ in inverted comments because as a full time nomad, where time is of the essence, I mainly talk my articles into a cool app called Letterly.

Letterly then transcribes my garbled thoughts into Claude, which takes the thoughts and structures them into something resembling an article.

Once I land wherever we’re going, I can read through my post, edit where appropriate and Bob’s Your Uncle - here’s the result.

But this week I did something even more ambitious. I built a digital product while on the move.

I took a version of this article you’re reading now, (in other words my first draft which was way too long and way too tactical), and turned it into a saleable step by step guide which is now live and on sale on Gumroad.

All from a moving car!

Because that’s the beauty of the world we live in now. You don’t need a business, a website, a warehouse, or even a desk and a chair to start funding your freedom.

What you need is a few small assets, built once and put out into the world, and a growing audience of people you can genuinely help and add value to.

That’s exactly what I’m doing from this car seat. And by the end of this post, I’d like you to see that you could be doing it too.

I Struck Gold!

I still remember the first digital product I ever sold. (I went hunting for it on Dropbox the other day and unfortunately couldn’t find it, though I turned up plenty of others.)

It was a $7 PDF, explaining, with screenshots, how to create a landing page on Aweber - a process I’d watched somebody else do in a video. I wrote up what I’d learned, put a price on it, and made $28.

You’d have thought that I’d struck gold!

Don’t get me wrong, $28 wasn’t going to get me very far, but the realisation that people would pay me money over the internet for something I’d created myself was like rubbing Aladdin’s magic lamp!

I was beside myself!

Later the same year, I made a video course called ‘2000 Fans in 28 Days’ (I was teaching Facebook Fan Pages at the time), which went on to earn around $30,000.

A few months later I launched the Social Networking Academy and did $117k in 7 days (see my origin story below) and the rest as they say is history.

But the key takeaway here is that all of it started with a $7 guide about a landing page hack.

It’s Never Been Easier Than Right Now

When I started out in 2010, creating a digital product, hosting it and telling the world about it was infinitely harder than it is today.

There was no google docs, no YouTube embed, no Claude or ChatGPT, no Canva, no Substack.

I built my audience through forums, literally hand coded landing pages, and have absolutely no memory of how I delivered the PDF (but somehow I did!)

These days we have no such excuse. We can record a video on our phone and upload it in minutes, design a planner in Canva, publish a journal on Amazon, even sell physical products without touching a box thanks to print-on-demand.

Yes that means there’s more noise and competition, but it also means it’s easier than ever to try.

Just to give something a go to see if it’ll fly.

Which is exactly why I love digital products as brilliant little micro hustles. They’re light, flexible, easy to test, and once they’re made, they can keep working for you while you travel, rest, or drive through the Rockies in a car.

Why This Is Made For Us Oldies

Digital products tick every box for a freedom-seeker over 50.

They’re low effort, low cost and low risk, so if one flops you’ve lost a weekend, not your savings. They fit around your lifestyle (case in point I just made this one between Cache Creek, Kamloops & Chase!)

And once they’re made, (provided you tell people about them) they sell again and again, which is about as close to earning while you sleep as it gets.

But the main reason we should all be making digital products is that it’s a fantastic way to package what you already know.

You are a genius my friend, even if you don’t think so yourself.

Why?

Because you’ve spent decades solving problems, building systems, and gathering knowledge that other people would happily pay to shortcut.

• Perhaps you've spent years caring for dogs, and you know exactly how to settle a nervous rescue through its first fortnight at home.

• Maybe you've run the books for small businesses and could walk a panicking sole trader through their first tax return in an afternoon.

• You might have clawed your way out of serious debt and still remember every step that worked.

• Perhaps you've coaxed a glorious cutting garden out of a north-facing plot everyone said was hopeless.

• Maybe you've travelled solo in your fifties and sixties and know how to do it safely, cheaply, and gloriously.

If you’re not sure what to sell, remember, your ordinary is somebody else’s breakthrough.

How To Make A Digital Product

So how do you make one? Here’s how I’m doing it in the car right now, as we drive.

1. Pick a problem you’ve already solved for yourself - Budgeting, meal planning, downsizing, trip-planning, whatever you’ve cracked in your own life. Mine, for this product, is a single question: how do you build a digital product in a weekend? The solution is the guide I’m building right now.

2. Choose a light format - A printable, a mini guide, a checklist, a short recorded workshop. Nothing heavy.

3. Make it small and useful - One problem, one solution beats War and Peace every time.

4. Put it somewhere simple to sell - Gumroad, Payhip, Etsy, Amazon, or straight to your own readers.

5. Tell people it exists - Yes, I know, that’s the bit we all hate. But you have to get it out there and start promoting it, or what’s the point of creating it.

What’s Really Stopping You

Last week I asked my community the biggest obstacles that get in the way of reaching their goals.

The answers came thick and fast: uncertainty, distraction, rabbit holes, procrastination. Some said they didn’t know where to start.

And underneath it all sits the same thing: Fear.

That the idea’s wrong. That no one will buy. That you’ll put it out and hear nothing but crickets, and that the silence will prove you’re a failure, or that you don’t know as much as you think you do.

But that silence is rarely proof of any of that. In fact silence probably means you just haven’t built a big enough audience yet, people don’t quite trust you yet, or you’re not solving the right problem.

And that last one is the best of all. Because if a product only takes a weekend to make, why not get it live and find out?

Nothing on earth will teach you faster what problem needs solving than watching what people actually buy.

So make it, and put it out there. Even in the worst case, where not a single person buys, you’ve lost nothing.

• You’ll have proved you can make and finish a real product.

• You’ll have an asset you can give away as a free lead magnet to grow your email list.

• You’ll have something to welcome new subscribers with, or tuck into your paid tier as a perk.

• You’ll have learned a skill you can use again and again, a little faster each time.

• And you’ll have something real to show for the weekend, instead of another idea ageing in a notebook.

And the blunt truth is that your first product might not fly. Or your second. Plenty of mine haven’t.

The people who sell things aren’t the ones who got it perfect first time. They’re the ones who kept making stuff, learning & improving as they went, until something resonated.

So the only real way to lose is to make nothing at all.

Get it out. Let the world tell you what it thinks. The downside is one weekend. The upside is everything you learn, everything it can grow into, and the proof that you’re someone who makes things and puts them into the world.

Your First $28 Could Be One PDF Away

So here it is, broken down. My step-by-step guide to creating your own simple product this coming weekend.

I’ve just built mine from the car, somewhere between Hope, Cache Creek & Chase, dodging the wildfire smoke on the way out of Vancouver, and recording into my phone as the road wound on.

I've just uploaded it to Gumroad, and it's live right now.

Here’s what’s inside:

• How to find the one idea your audience will likely pay for, and how to check before you build a thing

• The exact AI prompts I use to draft it fast, in your own voice

• How to design and package it so it looks like someone was paid to make it (even if that someone is you, on a free Canva plan)

• Where to sell it, what each platform costs, and how to set it up in an afternoon

• How to write a sales page that does the selling for you

• And how to promote it for two months without feeling like a used-car salesman

If you want it, you can grab it right now for a measly $7. That low price is completely deliberate, and it's exactly what I teach inside: start small, gather your first reviews, then put the price up. You're watching the method work in real time. In a couple of weeks it goes to $17.

Get 'The Weekend Product' Here

Or, if you’re a paid subscriber, it’s already waiting for you in the Backpack, free, along with everything else I make.

And if you’re not a paid subscriber yet, come and join us today. You get everything in the Backpack, including this guide and every other PDF in there, because I’m doubling down on micro hustles, my friends. I’ll be adding a whole run of them for paid subscribers, all living in the Backpack. So come and grab it.

Start a 7 Day Free Trial

Either way, please don’t let this be another idea you nod along to and leave on the shelf. Open Canva, sketch something out, make the small thing, put a price on it, and let the world teach you the rest.

Mine was just $7, and I still think about that afternoon, sixteen years on.

Your first one is waiting.

Adventure never retires.

Jo 😊

Fellow Substacker and I only met a few weeks go on the platform. A few notes were shared, some similar viewpoints exchanged, and next thing you know we’re arranging to catch up for coffee as we both pass by Victoria, on Vancouver Island! 🇨🇦

While there, we decided to jump on an impromptu live, and chatted about why Substack feels different to other social platforms, meeting online friends in real life, and Meredith’s brave plan to restore a 74-foot yacht before recreating its original voyage from California to Hawaii.

Have a listen, see just how easy it is to start your own Substack Live, and if Meredith’s boat project sounds as exciting to you as it does to me, make sure you give her a follow and join her on the adventure.

Chris & her husband Steve have been on the road full time for 5 and a half years, so as a full time ‘newbie’, I was keen to hear about her lifestyle, how they manage their relationship and all her tips and tricks!

If you’ve ever wondered what life as a full-time nomad after 50, is really like, this conversation is for you.

We chat about everything from house sitting and hiking to budgeting, relationships on the road, building community, and why travel might just be one of the best ways to stay young.

As a published author, YouTuber and creator behind Eat Walk Learn, we also chat about her books, building a community on the road, growing a travel brand, and how creating content fits into her nomadic lifestyle.

Also…

🎁 Stay until the end to find out how you can win our Ultimate Adventure Bundle!

(Scroll to the bottom of these show notes to discover how to enter and answer the competition question for your chance to win.)

What You’ll Learn

• Why house sitting can save thousands of dollars every year

• The biggest mistakes new house sitters make

• Slow travel vs fast travel (and why there’s no right answer)

• Why walking is one of the best ways to experience a destination

• How long-term travel changes your mindset

• Budgeting realistically for a nomadic lifestyle

• How Chris and Steve travel full-time without a permanent home

• Building friendships and community while travelling

• Keeping a relationship strong while living together 24/7

• Why writing books and sharing your journey can become part of the adventure

Time Stamps

00:00 Welcome + introducing Chris Englert

03:00 House sitting: the reality, the benefits and the challenges

10:45 How Chris became a full-time nomad

17:00 Why walking changes the way you experience a destination

27:00 Slow travel vs fast travel

33:30 Budgeting for life on the road

36:00 Chris’s books and writing journey

44:00 Building community as a nomad

52:00 Travelling full-time as a couple

56:45 Chris’s Substack, YouTube and resources

58:30 Ultimate Adventure Bundle giveaway

Resources Mentioned

Chris Englert

• Eat Walk Learn

• Two Carry-Ons and a Plan

• The Nomad Life

• Wanderlust Wisdom

• Kindling (serial novel on Substack)

• YouTube Channel

• Facebook Group

Jo Barnes

• The 50+ Nomad

• This Big Travel Challenge Cards

🎁 WIN THE ULTIMATE ADVENTURE BUNDLE

One lucky winner will receive:

📚 Chris Englert’s complete Nomad book collection

• Two Carry-Ons and a Plan

• Nomad Life

• Wanderlust Wisdom

PLUS

🌍 Jo Barnes’ This Big Travel Challenge scratch-off travel cards.

Everything you need for your next adventure.

To Enter

Listen to the interview, particularly towards the end where we talk about how to enter, and then answer this question in the comments below:

Aside from money, what’s the biggest thing stopping you from creating your own freedom or nomadic lifestyle?

Bonus points if you also include your biggest takeaway from the interview with Chris!

We’ll read every entry and choose one winner at random.

Competition closes: 8 August

The winner will be selected by Chris and Jo and contacted shortly afterwards.

(Prize can only be shipped to a US mailing address.)

Answer below for a chance of winning this amazing bundle!

I didn’t suffer from empty nest syndrome when my daughter went off to college.

Mainly because we didn’t really have a nest. We’d left our house in Phuket, Thailand back in 2024 after she’d graduated, did a stint in Brisbane, and then stayed in London over the 25/26 Christmas period while she got settled.

When we left in February to pursue our nomadic dreams, Cerys (my daughter) was fully ensconced in her life as a college student, and I was biting my nails wrapped up in my apprehension of backpacking through South America.

I didn’t have time to miss her.

Until…

Then, she holidayed with us for 4 weeks in Vegas & Cabo & flew home 3 weeks ago as we made our way to Canada.

A new country, a new city to explore, I should have been beside myself with excitement.

But I wasn’t. I was sad.

I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me through the first week. I just kept waking up feeling a bit low and teary.

I thought maybe it was because we’d left the sun, sea, sand & margaritas behind in Cabo (probably a bit of that 😉), but then I realised, I was finally suffering from empty nest syndrome. With no nest!

Over the month she’d stayed with us I’d had a glimpse of our little family unit back together again, until suddenly it wasn’t.

She went her way, we went ours, and it’s hit me that she probably won’t ever live with us again.

It’s a blessing and a curse of course. I no longer have to do her washing, pay for her ridiculously expensive Vanilla Iced Lattes, or go hunting for my brush or shampoo because she’s nabbed them. 🙄

But I also miss us singing at the tops of our lungs in the car, weekly cinema visits to see whatever’s on (we’d literally go & see anything), & girly duvet days.

A Dog to Keep Me Company

But I had the lovely Bailey to keep me company while here, who licked the tears off my face a couple of times, along with eating my bottle of antihistamines, a chunk of cheese I left on the side, half of Rhett’s bolognaise, & most of my sausage roll this morning when my back was turned. 😂

Nothing like a food crazed dog to lighten the mood!

As I write this we’re leaving the city of Vancouver on a ferry headed to Victoria.

Despite feeling a touch sad, we’ve had a great time exploring the area.

Rhett and I did a gorgeous walk around Stanley Park, with beautiful views across the water. We even spotted a few seals.

We had a great day out at Granville Island, and came away from the market with some maple syrup sausages, and a pot of vegemite! (Purchase of the trip 😂)

We also caught the little boat around to Kitsilano Beach and ate fish and chips overlooking the ocean.

Then yesterday we took a few cold ones over to the Shipyards & enjoyed an afternoon of sunshine & live music, with perfect views of Canada Place & downtown Vancouver.

Plus we had a whole week of sunshine and at one point it hit 28°. (Though the breeze is still a bit chilly so the hoodie is always to hand!)

Then yesterday I did my first ever solo Substack live, talking about getting over the fear of jumping on camera or hitting publish on your writing, (and to demonstrate I procrastinated for 3 hours before I hit ‘Go Live’) but it was great fun.

Check it out here:

More to come!

So that’s been Vancouver!

By the time you read this my good friend Ed who I’ve never met in person will have toured us around Victoria for the day and I can’t wait to meet him.

Ed is a park runner and posted a motivational message while running for 1214 days consecutively, on his Instagram channel before having to break his streak due to an eye operation.

He’s the living proof of consistently showing up, which is what my solo live was about yesterday - but that’s not why I’m buying him dinner.

Back in 2021/2022 when my Mum was super poorly, we discovered she had COPD. (60 years of smoking will do that to you.)

Ed was on the end of the phone whenever I needed him. He knew what to expect, what to ask the doctors, and how to interpret what they said. And mum was so much more comfortable at the end because of his advice.

That’s something I’ll be forever grateful for. So to finally meet him in person & give him a huge hug has been a long time coming! ❤️

Why Connection Is the Name of My Game Now

And that’s what I love about the connected world we live in today.

You can build a friendship that starts with a comment or a message and ends with you flying across a continent to give someone a hug you’ve owed them for years.

You can stay in touch with family as if they’re in the same room, and never really mourn the nest you don’t have. Cerys and I might not be under the same roof anymore, but we’re only ever a video chat away, and our talks are just as daft as they’ve ever been.

And you can jump on a live video call, talk with like-minded people, answer questions, and get to know a whole new set of future friends. And I’ll be doing plenty more of them, because every single one means I get to meet a few more of you.

If there’s one thing these past few weeks have highlighted to me, it’s this. You can leave home, lose the nest altogether, and travel to the far side of the planet, and still end up more connected to the people who matter than you’ve ever been.

That’s the gift of this crazy online nomadic life, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.

More from the island next week.

Jo (on the very windy ferry on route to Victoria) 😊

Don’t forget you have just one day left to grab annual membership plus full access to The Backpack - over $500 of courses and guides for just $50!

See all the courses & guides you get access to here

Offer ends tomorrow morning!

Get 50% Off Annual Membership Today

After telling others to just ‘start showing up’, I finally took my own advice yesterday and did my first-ever solo live.

I didn’t send an email, warn anyone, or promo it before I started. I put my lippy on at 9am all ready to go, then spent the next three hours doing every other job on my laptop to avoid it, and eventually just pressed “live” and started before I could talk myself out of it! (Which I did the day before 🤭)

This one’s about why we freeze before we feel “ready”, and why “ready” is just a story we tell ourselves that stops us starting.

In this live:

• Why the thing holding you back isn’t fear of failing, it’s a craving for certainty that never actually turns up

• The absolutely mad stats on how much content floods the internet every single minute! And why they’re the most freeing thing you’ll hear all week (spoiler: nobody’s watching your early stuff)

• Simon Squibb’s first Instagram videos vs. the ones he makes now. I scrolled all the way back to the beginning because I’m a bit of a nerd, but it was worth it!

• “Get it done, then get it right”. The line from my old mentor Jason Fladlien I keep coming back to

• Why you can’t know what your audience actually wants until you show up and let them tell you

Takeaway quote:

Over to you:

What’s the one thing you’ve been sitting on waiting until you feel ready?

The half-written post, the note, the video.

Tell me in the comments. Then go and publish the imperfect version this week. I did mine. Your turn. 👇

I started my first online business in 2010.

Some friends of ours were living in Cyprus making a living from their lovely apartment through something called ‘internet marketing’.

Being the ‘nosy’ action takers we were, we quickly booked a holiday, picked their brains, devoured Tim Ferris’s 4 Hour Workweek book (on their recommendation) & volunteered to house sit for them when they went galavanting off around Europe!

(We don’t do things by halves! 😂)

16 years on, I’ve built and exited multiple businesses, scaled an Amazon brand to seven figures (and trying to do the same again now), lived in multiple countries, raised a daughter in Phuket, Thailand, and watched the online business world transform from a few of us figuring it out in spare bedrooms (or balconies in Cyprus), to the industry it is today.

Along the way, I’ve made every mistake going and then some.

So I thought I’d share some of the biggest lessons I wish I’d known before I started, in the hope some of them save you a few of the years I lost learning them the hard way.

Unfortunately reading the list doesn’t replace doing the work, but it might shorten the curve a bit.

Let’s go.

1. There Is No Magic Button

I spent thousands in my first year on courses and programmes that promised quick results.

Webinars where someone told me that something worth $25,000 was mine for $97, today only, payment plan available. (Remember them?)

Magic-button systems where you just followed the formula and magically the money appeared. 💸

None of them worked. (Of course not!!!)

And it wasn’t because the people teaching them were inherently dishonest (though some were), but because there is no formula that bypasses rolling your sleeves up and doing the actual work.

What became my biggest money making secret was in fact a repeatable, boring system.

• Building my own audience.

• Showing up.

• Writing, recording, posting, replying, being visible.

It took time, focus, and repeatedly doing things outside my comfort zone.

There’s no shortcut around that, unless you have huge ad budgets. Even then you still have to put the work in to grow the trust.

Anyone selling you a shortcut, is usually teaching a course about shortcuts.

The work is the work and nothing replaces it.

(Incidently, it’s exactly the same today. Show up, write, publish, help people, grow your audience. That’s still the closest thing I’ve found to a magic formula.)

2. Let People Get To Know You

When I first got going, my main platform was Facebook. I did webinars, posted videos, chatted on forums, and was pretty much in people’s faces daily.

But I was also 16 years younger, had masses of energy & had no fear of jumping on camera.

These days I don’t want to be on social media 24/7, and I don’t have the same energy for video that I had 16 years ago.

But the good news is, nowadays you can record podcasts, or do faceless reels, or connect through writing.

The medium is less important than the message.

Tell stories, and let readers see who you are. Mention the dog, the husband, the bad day, your dodgy knees. People don’t subscribe to ideas, they subscribe to people.

Whatever format you choose, the principle is the same: trust builds when people feel like they actually know you.

Find the way that works for you, and lean into it.

3. Collaboration Compounds Faster Than Going It Alone

In my early Facebook days I ran an interview series called Money and Marketing, where I sat down with other creators and entrepreneurs and chatted all things online business.

The series itself did fine. But what it really did was open doors.

I started doing joint ventures. Other people promoted me to their audiences. I promoted them to mine. My list grew faster in the months I was actively collaborating than in any of the months I was working alone.

One day, a fellow business owner (love you Steve), mentioned me from the stage at an event I wasn’t at. The audience apparently gave a round of applause for me, even though I wasn’t in the room. The collaboration had carried me there in my absence.

It’s impossible for us to reach every opportunity on our own. But the people we've helped and connected with can open doors long before we arrive.

Here’s how to ‘build the well before you’re thirsty’ (as Jordan Harbinger says):

• Restack or share other people’s work.

• Reply thoughtfully to their notes.

• Send the email that says I loved this.

• Suggest joint posts, lives or interviews.

• Offer to be useful before you ask for anything.

• Build real relationships, not transactional ones.

To be honest, this is something I’ve just started to do more consciously myself. It’s so easy to slip into doing everything alone, but it’s lonely and you won’t grow as fast.

Plus collabs can lead to the best friendships!

4. You Don’t Have To Build It Yourself

About a year into my first business, I made an extremely expensive mistake.

I’d built a simple piece of software for Facebook fan pages which I’d paid about $100 to a developer to create.

I gave it away free, (anyone remember ‘Free Fan Page Templates - you know who you are oldie! 😂) and it helped me grow a huge email list. Brilliant first move.

Then I decided I should turn it into a paid product. I spent thousands working with developers across multiple time zones. The result was buggy, slow, and not as good as what bigger competitors were already making with bigger budgets.

Meanwhile, one clever bloke had taken someone else’s superior software (that did what I was trying to build), put his branding on it, and was outselling everyone without writing a line of code.

He’d worked out something I hadn’t.

You don’t have to build everything from scratch.

If someone else has already created something brilliant, you can often partner with them, license their software, recommend their work, or sell it as their affiliate and earn a commission.

You can run a course around someone else’s tool, teach a method built around an existing product, and be the person who explains, recommends, or pairs with what already exists.

I was so focused on making my own thing that I missed the option to collaborate on something that already worked. That mistake cost me a lot of time and a lot of money I didn’t need to spend.

5. Don’t Keep Restarting

This has cost me more years, more money & more stress than I care to admit.

For 16 years, my underlying message has been roughly the same: build a business you can run from anywhere in the world.

Travel & Business. Pretty clear.

That’s what I was teaching in 2010 from a balcony in Cyprus, and it’s what I’m writing about now from a cafe in Vancouver.

The thread hasn’t changed. What I kept changing was the wrapper.

I started with Free Fan Page Templates. Then I became the Social Networking Academy. Then Sell With A Smile, Online Marketing Addicts, Your Lifestyle Business, The Working Traveller & then I looked up recently and realised I was doing exactly the same thing with The 50+ Nomad.

My newsletter is The 50+ Nomad, so surely my socials, my branding, everything must be The 50+ Nomad too?

And that’s when it dawned on me that for years I’ve been making the model I’ve been running at the time, my whole brand.

I was building an app, so I called it Free Fan Page Templates. I built a membership site, so I became the Social Networking Academy. I started blogs, so I was Your Lifestyle Business, then The Working Traveller. I launched a Substack, so I became The 50+ Nomad. Every time the model changed, the brand had to change with it.

No wonder I felt like each one boxed me into a corner.

If I could go back, I’d call myself Jo Barnes from day one, build everything under that name, and let the projects come and go underneath the same umbrella.

The lesson: if you’re building a personal brand, brand the products and keep the umbrella as you.

Your name is broad enough to carry every model you’ll ever run and everything you’ll still be doing in 20 years.

If you’re building a company around a product, that’s a different discussion. Virgin Atlantic was never going to be called Richard Branson.

But if the plan is you at the top, with digital products, a newsletter, books and whatever else underneath, then the umbrella is better off being broad, and there’s nothing more flexible than just naming it you!

6. Your Audience Is Your Greatest Asset

Luckily, this is one lesson I learned early.

When I started online in 2010 I joined a forum of people all on a similar journey of building a business online.

As I was deep in learning mode I naturally showed up, asked questions, learned new things, shared what I was learning, built a lead magnet and started growing my audience.

I was posting on Facebook every day, running webinars, interviewing other entrepreneurs and helping anyone who came my way.

That audience became the foundation of my first six-figure launch and the businesses that followed.

Here’s why that model still works today:

• Platforms come and go.

• Business models evolve.

• Markets change.

But an audience of people who know, like and trust you is an asset you can build on for years.

As a creator you need to spend less time worrying about logos, websites and finding the perfect niche, and more time consistently creating content that helps people.

Whether you eventually sell books, guides, courses, coaching, physical products or something you haven’t even thought of yet, your audience is what gives every new idea its best chance of succeeding.

If there’s one thread running through almost everything I’ve written in this article, it’s this:

Build your audience.

Everything else becomes easier when you’ve got people waiting to hear what you create next.

7. Outsource Where You’re The Bottleneck (But Only When You Can Afford To)

Don’t mistake the word solopreneur for having to do everything solo.

The beauty of building a business today is that you don’t need employees to get help. No payroll, no holiday pay, no pension contributions, no long-term commitment.

You can hire contractors from Upwork, Fiverr or OnlineJobs for a single project, a few hours a week, or a short stint while you get something over the line.

So when should you? When you’re the bottleneck.

Where you personally are holding up the work: because the task takes you longer, drains your energy, you don’t know how to do the thing, or stops you focusing on what you should be doing.

Maybe you’ve spent three weeks trying to design your own book cover, format your guide in Canva, build your website, edit your YouTube videos, or figure out why your email signup isn’t working.

If your business has stalled and you know exactly which job is causing it, do yourself a favour and hire someone to do that job.

For me in the early years, it was tech. Right now, with my ecom brand - This Big World - it’s creator outreach & Amazon PPC. It’s such a new business I can’t really afford to outsource, but I also realised I couldn’t afford not to, I was the bottleneck and the business was growing too slowly.

And yes, when you’re bootstrapping, money is tight. But do the maths: what could you achieve if someone came in and finished the project you’ve been stalling on for three months, versus the cost of it staying stalled?

Every month a project sits unfinished is another month it isn't earning you money. That has a cost too.

Just Start

Looking back over these lessons, there are dozens more I could have added.

Some I’ve forgotten. Some I’m probably still learning. And there are lessons waiting for me around corners I haven’t reached yet.

That’s the funny thing about building a business. You never really finish learning.

You can read posts like this one, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos and take courses, and I genuinely hope you do because they can save you years of frustration. But they can never replace experience.

At some point you have to press publish, launch the product, make the offer, spend the money, get it wrong, adjust, and do it again.

That’s how every business is built.

So don’t wait until you think you know enough, because you never will. (I still don’t after 16 years!)

Start before you feel ready, learn the lessons as they arrive, and keep moving forward.

If this article helps you avoid one or two of the mistakes that cost me years and thousands of pounds, then it’s done its job.

The rest of the lessons are waiting for you to discover for yourself.

Have fun!

Jo 😎

Happy Sunday Friends!

I’m still here in a very rainy Vancouver today! 🇨🇦 (We’ve had beautiful sunshine all week though, so have been super lucky with gorgeous weather).

We’re off to Victoria on Vancouver Island later this week and I’m excited to meet a friend I’ve known for years online and have never met in person!

It’s an extra special meeting as he’s a specialist in COPD and was at the end of FB messenger throughout the last months of my Mum’s time on this earth, helping me ask the right questions, get the right treatment, and ensure her final days were as comfortable as possible.

I’m looking forward to giving him a huge hug, plus he’s going to be showing us around Victoria, which I’m looking forward to exploring! 🥰

So on to today’s 6 Notes Sunday, my weekly roundup for chilled Sundays when all we want to do is skim headlines and drink coffee (or tea in my case).

Here are 5 of my favourite Substack Notes from the week, plus my own most popular one.

If any resonate, don’t forget to support the creator with a like, a restack or a comment!

Let’s get into it.

#1

I grabbed this note from Claudia’s recent article ‘The Notes Playbook for Your First 1000 Subs’. The article is excellent and worth reading (and actioning), but I absolutely LOVED the note for the line about the street musician.

Played like it was a sold-out stadium.

Let that sink in. ❤️

#2

Personal integrity is highly underrated.

Keeping the promises you make to yourself is the ultimate life hack. 💪

#3

This is such a beautiful story, and a reminder that all the morning routines, self help strategies, and goal plans can’t beat just living every day the best you possibly can. ❤️

#4

This note slipped by unnoticed on Substack this week, but I think it’s the perfect metaphor for building your online business.

I’ve built businesses on sand and sure enough they’re currently at the bottom of the ocean.

Products aren’t your foundation. Your website isn’t your foundation. Your logo isn’t your foundation.

Your audience is.

Grow that first and your business has foundations that last. 💪

#5

I’m a bit obsessed with churches, cathedrals, temples etc, and this one is now firmly on my list.

Great pic Meghan! It looks huge!

#6 - My Most Popular Note This Week

💪

What did you think of today’s note choices? Which was your favourite and why? Let me know in the comments below.

Remember to head over and support the creator with a like, a restack or a comment!

This Weeks Posts Roundup

If you missed any of my posts this week, here they are…

The next 20 years will go by anyway. The only question is what you’ll fill them with! (A practical exercise with a downloadable PDF)

A step by step breakdown of how I created a book from a blog post. (I look forward to sharing it when it’s live on KDP)

A bit of a personal reveal of how I’ve suddenly found myself travelling at a pace I didn’t choose, and a look at what happens when we take our hands off the wheel.

Just a quick reminder that in celebration of my husband’s 50th birthday, for the month of July you get an annual subscription and everything in the backpack for just $50!

(Only 5 days left to grab all of this!)

Here’s what’s inside:

Funding Freedom: Building Portable Income

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s and Beyond - (Video Course - $197)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (Video Course - $47)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (The Self Guided Workbook Edition - $17)

• 30 Day Product Launch Playbook - (Video & Written Daily Actions - $47)

• Email List Building for Grown Ups - (Video Course - $47)

• Substack for Beginners - (Video Course - $97)

• 51 Actionable Tips to Start an Online Business - Guide/Workbook

• The 50+ Solopreneur Starter Kit - Guide/Checklist/Resources

• 200+ Side Hustle Ideas for 50+ Nomads - Guide/Ebook

Life on the Road: Practical Travel Tools

• How to House Sit Your Way Around the World - (Video & Written Guide - $17)

• The Smart Traveller Bundle incl - How We Live in Five Star Resorts for Less Than $500 a Week (Ebook) / Flying Smarter: How to Pay Less Without the Stress (Ebook) / The Smart Travellers Guide to Owning Your Freedom (Ebook - $27)

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s & Beyond - Guide/Workbook

• The Nomad Goal Planner - Digital Journal

• The 50+ Bucket List Journal - Digital Journal

Join Today for Just $50

I hope you’ve enjoyed todays roundup.

Have a fab Sunday! 😎

“What’s that?” I said out loud to myself as I plucked a half-eaten plastic bottle top from under Bailey’s leg.

Bailey is the gorgeous 3-year-old German Shepherd–Husky cross we’re currently house sitting in Vancouver.

She was laying across my bed looking slightly sheepish.

I walked out to the kitchen to see if I could find what the lid belonged to, left it on the counter and went to get dressed.

As I walked back into the bedroom, I suddenly spotted the chewed-up white bottle of my antihistamine stash.

Approximately 10 x 10mg tabs were no longer in the bottle, or anywhere on the bed.

I looked in horror at Bailey. I knew exactly where they were!

Two hours later, a visit to the emergency vet and some induced vomiting had averted disaster, and Bailey was, and is, absolutely fine.

NB: She’s a clever sod, as she’d seen me take one the night before and had a sniff, but I said no and screwed the child-locked (evidently not dog-locked) lid back on. Sneaky girl... 🐶

But thems’ the joys of house sitting!

Thankfully, that’s been the most dramatic event here in Vancouver (other than losing the Wifi for a couple of days).

The rest of it has been really fun actually, and mostly because the house we’re in is minutes from downtown.

Every morning I get up, make a cuppa, and get out.

I’ve wandered Gastown and Chinatown, caught the Seabus to work from a table beside the water at the Shipyards, mooched around Granville Island, spent 4 hours wandering around Capilano (and recorded a couple of articles on my phone while there!), and had fish & chips on Kitsilano beach.

There’s also a good coffee shop 20 minutes’ walk away that now knows my order.

And somewhere between the ferry rides and the coffee runs, I finally admitted something to myself that’s been brewing for months.

I’m Not a Slow Traveller (Yet)

If you read anything about travel for the over-50s right now, slow travel is the darling of the movement.

Stay a month. Stay three. Live like a local, learn the market stalls, let the days stretch out.

Sip your coffee slowly while the rushing tourists miss the “real” place.

It sounds idyllic, and I thought I’d naturally start to slip into that rhythm the longer we were on the road.

However it hasn’t happened yet. In fact the opposite is true.

When I get asked about nomadic life, it seems that everyone assumes the hard part is the moving. The packing, the flights, the journeys, the constant goodbyes.

It turns out, that for me, the hard part is the stopping.

When we’re in motion, I feel truly alive! I’m excited, my energy is high & anything is possible.

When we ‘bed down’ as my husband likes to call it, we quickly fall back into years old expat routines & my energy & motivation go out the window.

One of my favourite recent memories was the journey to Jericoacoara in Brazil.

We’d done a long bus ride from Fortaleza, and when the bus stopped, the journey wasn’t over: everyone piled off and into 4x4s for a wild, bumpy ride across sand dunes to reach the town.

Rhett was beside himself with grumpiness, while I had to stop myself from whooping & cheering.

When we got there we found sand for streets, donkeys wandering about like they owned the place, and one of the most beautiful little towns I’ve ever seen.

And that’s me at full charge. 🔋

Buses, vans, a new place every few days, no idea what’s around the corner.

It sounds exhausting but for me right now it’s exhilarating!

The Pace I Didn’t Consciously Choose

But then something interesting happened. Despite knowing what sets me on fire, I looked up somewhere around week 20 and realised I was neck-deep in a slow-travel year I never remembered choosing.

I’m not sure how it happened. There hadn’t been an argument. Nobody was forcing me to do anything. There wasn’t some grand compromise I’d reluctantly agreed to.

I’d just taken my hands off the wheel.

When we first set off on our nomadic journey, I left first with my sister for a couple of weeks in Rio, before my husband joined me, and so I set the initial pace.

Up the coast of Brazil, into Colombia, buses and vans and let’s-see-where-we-end-up. I can literally hear myself saying to Rhett before we left: “Don’t plan so much hun. Let’s just let the wind take us.”

Well, knowing my husband, I should have known the wind didn’t stand a chance.

Before I could blink, he’d planned Costa Rica, San Diego, Cabo, Canada, White Plains, Richmond, and pretty much the rest of the year.

House sits, longer stays, slower travel, more routine, more “bedding down” (his phrase) to get stuff done. If he had his way, we’d stop moving altogether next year and settle somewhere for 3 to 6 months minimum.

The silly thing is, he didn’t do it surreptitiously. He would ask, and suggest, and say this looks like a good idea - and because none of the plans sounded bad, I just went along with it.

Which is exactly how so many of us end up living lives we never consciously design.

It’s not that someone else made us, or forced us into situations we didn’t or don’t want.

We just stopped checking in with ourselves.

What Gives You Energy?

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last few months of nomadic life, interestingly has nothing to do with travel.

It’s what travel has revealed. And for me that’s about paying attention to energy.

Not what you think you should enjoy, or what everyone tells you is “right” or sensible, or even what your partner enjoys.

Simply…

What genuinely lights you up?

For me it’s movement.

• New bus stations.

• Different coffee shops.

• Unexpected conversations.

• Ferry rides.

• Changing landscapes.

• The feeling that tomorrow could be completely different from today.

Other people crave familiarity or stability.

• The same café.

• The same walking route.

• Knowing where everything is.

• Routine.

Neither is right or wrong.

They’re just different.

We Don’t Always Notice We’re Living Someone Else’s Script

This doesn’t just happen in travel of course.

It happens in careers, relationships, retirement, even how we spend our free time. Nobody sits us down and takes our life plan away. We just drift onto autopilot, and other people’s perfectly reasonable preferences fill in the gaps.

Some people spend decades following a script they never actually chose.

• Go to university because that’s what people do.

• Stay in the job because it pays well.

• Keep working because everyone expects you to.

• Retire because that’s the age you’re supposed to.

• Buy the bigger house.

• Move nearer the grandchildren.

• Slow down.

None of those choices are wrong.

They just shouldn’t be automatic.

Sometimes we become so busy meeting expectations that we forget to ask one very simple question:

“When do I actually feel most alive?”

Because your energy knows the answer long before your brain does.

Your Body Knows Before Your Brain

If you can’t answer that question off the top of your head, the good news is you don’t have to figure it out by thinking too hard.

Your energy is constantly answering the question. You just have to start listening.

It reminds me of a note I shared a few Sundays ago.

I couldn’t have told you why it hit me so hard at the time. Now I can

That meh feeling I get by week two of a house sit, or the restlessness I start to feel at beach resorts? For ages I’ve been having a go at myself for being ungrateful. (I mean, who doesn’t appreciate a lovely house with a gorgeous dog, or gets bored sitting next to a pool?).

But it’s not ingratitude. It’s information. It’s my body telling me the pace is wrong for me. And the buzz I feel bouncing over sand dunes in a 4x4? Same source, opposite message.

Your version will look different. Maybe you light up in your garden, or teaching someone, or building something, or on a stage, or in a room full of strangers, or in a room containing absolutely nobody. Doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is noticing.

And you might need to experiment to find your energy sources, because autopilot doesn’t announce itself.

When I deign to do a yoga session (not as often as I should) I always choose “Yoga with Adriene”, because of her philosophy of ‘finding what feels good’. Choose you, your pace, your movement, not the perfect yoga pose.

Don’t judge yourself or take any massive action (unless you want to), just collect data.

Knowing Is Great, But Choice Is What You Need.

There is a catch, though. Knowing what lights you up is only useful if you’re able to act on it.

Which is why I’m so passionate about building portable income, or an online business or a side hustle or whatever you want to call it. It all amounts to the same thing.

A regular monthly income you can generate from anywhere in the world, whether that’s a beach in Bali or your kitchen table, doesn’t equal world domination.

It equals choice.

Choice to travel fast or slow. Choice to spend three months in Tuscany if that’s your dream, or jump on a bus every three days through South America.

It lets you design a life around who you are rather than fitting yourself into a life you just kind of arrived at.

It gives you the option that when your energy tells you something, you’re free to listen.

Taking Back the Wheel

So that’s where week 24 leaves me: with a clear answer to the question, and some redesigning to do.

Or perhaps more accurately, some conversations to have.

Because this year has reminded me that I come alive in motion.

Maybe one day I’ll become that person happily spending six months in one village, chatting to the baker every morning and knowing every neighbour by name.

Maybe. But not yet.

Right now I’m still the girl who gets excited by overnight buses, ferry crossings and wondering what’s around the next corner.

So, over to you: when do YOU feel most alive? I’d love to hear it in the comments, and if you don’t know yet, your two-week assignment starts today.

Recently I wrote a short post about practising brevity. Specifically about being someone who writes 25,000-word blog posts when 2,000 would do (or 2000 word posts when 500 would do!).

While writing it, I mentioned one of those old leviathans in passing. A 25,000-word blog post I’d written years ago about how to start a blog.

That’s a book, I thought, mid-sentence.

I scribbled it down as a note-to-self, finished the post, then immediately opened the old draft in Claude Cowork and started turning it into an actual book.

A 25,000-word blog post that’s been sitting quietly on my hard drive for years is now a 90-page book, waiting to go live.

And then I remembered something else.

A couple of years ago I recorded a video course. It’s been sitting ignored on my hard drive, completely unloved, since I finished it.

I immediately pulled the transcripts, dropped them into Cowork, and I’m now nearly finished turning that too into a book. Currently sitting at over 30,000 words.

Two books, from two things I’d already made, in under a week.

Earlier that same morning, I’d had a call with a lovely lady who’s recently started building on Substack (and is doing very well by the way). Halfway through our chat she suddenly went quiet and said, “Oh — I’ve got hours of podcast episodes from years ago. Could I just... upload them?”

Yes. Yes she could. And probably should.

She has a back catalogue. She just hadn’t seen it as one.

What Are You Sitting On?

Most of us have spent years making things.

Blog posts. Voice notes. Workshop recordings. Old courses. Half-finished drafts. Random documents. Podcast episodes. Webinars we ran once and forgot about. Email newsletters from a previous life.

Most of it is sitting on hard drives, in dusty Google Drive folders, on old blogs you haven’t logged into in five years, in voice memo apps you haven’t opened.

And almost all of it is more useful than you remember.

The trap most creators fall into is assuming the next valuable thing they make has to be made from scratch. New idea, new draft, new product, new everything. Meanwhile they’re standing on top of years of perfectly good material they’ve already created.

AI Has Made This Almost Too Easy

Two years ago, turning an old blog post into a book would have taken months of manual work. Turning an old video course into a book would have been almost impossible without paying someone to transcribe it and someone else to edit it.

Today, with AI tools like Claude Cowork, you can drop hours of transcripts, decades of blog posts, or a folder of half-finished drafts into a project, and get to a first-draft book or course in a matter of days.

I’m not exaggerating. I’ve done it twice this week.

The friction that used to stop us from repurposing old work has collapsed. Which means the biggest bottleneck now isn’t the work. It’s deciding what to look for and what to turn it into.

Which is exactly what I’m going to walk you through today.

How to Turn Your Half Finished Info Into a Sellable Asset

Below the paywall, I’ve put together a full step-by-step guide for turning something you’ve already made into a published book, course, guide, or digital product.

You’ll get:

• Step 1 — how to audit what you’ve already created (with a checklist of every place to look)

• Step 2 — how to sort your material into what’s usable, what’s mineable, and what’s not worth the effort

• Step 3 — how to decide what form your material wants to become (book / course / guide / paid resource)

• Step 4 — how to use Claude Cowork to do the heavy lifting, including the exact prompts I’ve used this week

• Step 5 — the specific tools I’d use to actually publish each format

• Step 6 — how to build a rhythm so your back catalogue keeps compounding into new work every quarter

It’s the exact process I’ve used this week to turn two dormant assets into two publishable books.

If you’re paying for this Substack (thank you 🙏), scroll on.

If you’re not, this is the kind of post you’ll find in the paid tier. Come and join us. It’s worth it.

Read more

My daughter Cerys has just spent four weeks with us: 2 in Vegas, 2 in Cabo.

Last week she flew back to London 😢, and shortly she’s off to Paris with her friends to celebrate her 20th birthday, because at 20, Paris with your mates beats Cabo with your parents right?

20 years old. 😳

Which means twenty years ago I didn’t have a child. I hadn’t met Rhett. I didn’t know what an online business was, I hadn’t started travelling, and I was living a completely different life in a different country, doing work I can now barely remember doing.

If you’d shown that woman a photo of me today, writing this from Vancouver while Rhett conducts his daily audit of the room temperature, she’d have thought - a) jeez dye those grey hairs Jo, and b) - wow that was a crazy ride!

20 years, gone in what feels like a long afternoon.

We’re Not Getting Any Younger

Here’s the cheerful part. Every year that passes, statistically, we have slightly less runway ahead of us than behind. I’m not being morbid; it’s just maths, and maths doesn’t care how morbid that is.

I’m 53. If the actuarial tables are in a good mood, I’ve got 30 decent years left. Maybe 40 if I keep up the walking and go easier on the margaritas, which, having just spent two weeks in Cabo, I can confirm I have not. 🍸🤭

You know your rough number too. We all do, even if we keep it filed in the same mental drawer as the pension paperwork.

How much time you have is largely out of your hands. What you do with it, though, is wide open.

Look Back 20 Years. Then Look Forward 20.

Where were you 20 years ago? What city, what job, what people around your kitchen table? What did your average Tuesday look like, and what were you worrying about that turned out not to matter at all?

I’d bet you can barely recognise that person.

Twenty years is enormous: whole marriages happen inside it, along with whole careers, whole houses bought and sold and bought again, whole children raised from newborn to adult and released into Paris with their friends. In our case, whole countries are explored and lived in.

You’ve likely done far more with the last 20 years than you give yourself credit for.

Now turn it round. If things go reasonably well, you get to do all of that again: another 20 years of a life you can barely predict from where you’re sitting today.

The only real question is whether the version of you at the end of them, looking back at today, thinks you made decent use of the time.

You’ll Never Be Ready

I didn’t feel ready when Rhett and I moved the family to Cyprus in 2010, with a four-year-old, no plan, and a recession chewing through our income. We went anyway.

I didn’t feel ready when we started our first online business. I had no idea what I was doing. Neither did Rhett, although he had plenty of opinions about it, which at the time we both mistook for expertise. We figured it out.

I didn’t feel ready when we finally took to the road in February and became full-time nomads at 53 and 49. Five months and three countries later, I’m writing this from Vancouver, Rhett’s now 50, and we’re still working out what this life is.

I didn’t feel ready when I started this Substack, I don’t feel ready to publish my book, I won’t feel ready to start making YouTube videos, or to launch the next stage of This Big World, or to tackle most of what’s sitting on my one day list.

But I will do them all anyway.

Because here’s what I now know at my age: you don’t get more ready. The moment doesn’t arrive, the window doesn’t widen, the savings don’t build fast enough, and the plan never clarifies itself into a shape you can act on.

Waiting doesn’t make you readier. It just makes you older.

Your Age Is Fuel. Use It.

When you’re 20 you can afford to be gung-ho, because you’ve got 60 years to clean up after yourself.

At 45, 55, 65, you don’t have that luxury. But what you do have instead is better!

Because you have knowledge, pattern recognition, mistakes already made and paid for, resilience already built, and a well-worn “I’ve survived worse than this” muscle that only comes with time.

You know things now that the 20-year-old version of you couldn’t have imagined. What matters and what doesn’t. What you’re capable of. Who to trust. What deserves your fear and what you can walk straight past.

That’s your unfair advantage, and every day you don’t use it is a day it sits in the garage under a dust sheet.

So Let’s Do Something With This

Reading this and nodding along is the easy part. But don’t just sigh, close the tab and go back to your ‘one day’ list.

Let’s take massive action!

Below is an exercise I recommend you sit down and do in full: The 20-Year Audit.

And if 20 years feels like the wrong horizon from where you’re sitting, make it 10, or 5, or 30. The number matters far less than the honesty.

3 sections, 13 questions, about an hour of honest reflection. Get out a notebook and a decent pen, find a quiet corner, and turn your phone off.

It's too easy to muse on what life could look like. ‘One day’ stays a daydream right up until you write down what it is, when it starts, and what's been stopping you. This is that exercise.

NB: If you’d rather work on paper, I’ve turned the whole thing into a printable PDF: you’ll find the download at the bottom of this post.

The 20-Year Audit

A framework for taking your next two decades seriously.

Answer honestly: this isn’t for anyone but you, and the questions are deliberately uncomfortable to make you dig deep so you feel emotionally attached to your future plans.

Part 1: Look Back — Where Have You Been?

1. Where were you 20 years ago?

Be specific: what city, what home, what job, what relationships? Reconstruct that year in as much texture as you can manage. Vague answers produce vague insights.

2. What did you spend most of your days doing?

Work, family, hobbies, worries, routines. The shape of your average Tuesday, 20 years back.

3. What did that version of you think you’d have achieved by now?

Career, family, financial, personal. What was on the mental list?

4. What have you done with those 20 years in reality?

Count everything, including the things you think are irrelevant: the family you raised, the relationships you kept alive, the losses you survived, the person you became.

5. What did you almost do 20 years ago (or along the way) that you didn’t?

The move you nearly made. The business you nearly started. The relationship you nearly left or nearly began. The version of your life you almost picked instead of the one you got.

6. What would 20-years-ago you say about you now?

Proud? Confused? Relieved? Disappointed? Sit with the honest answer, whatever it turns out to be.

Part 2: Look At Now — Where Are You Standing?

7. What are you currently telling yourself you’ll do ‘one day’?

Write all of it down. The book, the business, the move, the pivot, the learning, the thing you don’t say out loud. Every single one goes on the page.

8. What would need to be true for you to start any of them this year?

Be specific. Money? Time? Permission? A push? Someone to do it with? Name the real truth, and dig deeper if it sounds vague.

9. What are you afraid of, really?

Being seen wanting more. Failing publicly. Succeeding and having to sustain it. Being judged. Being wrong. Name the one you don’t say out loud to anyone. No one has to ever see this but you.

10. What is it costing you to keep waiting?

In money, yes. But also in energy, in confidence, in relationships, in the version of yourself you’re becoming while you postpone. What does another year of one day honestly cost?

Part 3: Look Forward — Which Version Gets Written?

11. What does life look like in 20 years if you don’t go for it?

This is a hard one, so don’t rush it. The book stays unwritten, the business unstarted, the move never made. Same routines, same one day list, twenty years older.

Who did you spend those years watching do the things you wanted to do?

And what did the people watching you, (your children, your grandchildren, your friends), learn from you about what’s possible after 50 (60,70)?

Sit with that version for a while. How does it feel?

12. And what does life look like in 20 years if you do go for it?

Same 20 years, other path. What have you built? Who have you become? What stories do you have that you don’t have now?

What do the people who love you say about you, and what did you show them was possible at 50, 60, 70?

What’s the legacy: the money, the work, the example, the proof that it wasn’t too late? Write this one in as much detail as the last one (if not more. You need both pictures side by side.)

Now sit with that version for a while. How does it feel?

13. Which of those two versions are you going to write into being?

One of them is coming either way; the 20 years pass at the same speed whether you use them or not. If your answer is the second version, the follow-up is simple: what one thing are you going to do in the next 30 days to start it?

Download Printable PDF Here

What To Do Next

Answer all 13 in one sitting if you can, and don’t worry about being tidy or profound. Honest beats both.

When you’re done, do three things:

1. Circle the one thing on your ‘one day’ list you'd regret most if you never did it. That's your big goal for the next 20 years. Your BHAG. (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)

2. Underline the answer that explains why you haven't started it yet. It's probably sitting in question 9 or 10. That's your obstacle, and it has far less power now you’ve named it.

3. Write down one small action you can take this week towards your BHAG. Not the whole plan. Just one action this week - obstacle be damned.

Then put the notebook somewhere you can keep reading and reviewing. In six months, do the whole thing again and see how the answers have shifted, what you’ve started, and what you’ve stopped telling yourself.

Wherever you're standing right now, the last twenty years put you there. The good news is that the next twenty are yours to point in any direction you like.

So let’s make them our best years yet! 🥳

Jo 😊

Greetings from Vancouver! 🇨🇦

I’m writing this from our house sit here, which is awesome as it’s minutes into downtown. So there’s already been plenty of exploring, plus an unexpected trip to the emergency animal hospital after Bailey (the dog we’re looking after) decided my antihistamines looked edible. 🙄

(Thankfully she’s absolutely fine!), however I wasn’t on Wednesday when I, along with all my countrymen, felt the familiar heartbreak of watching England crash out of the World Cup yet again. ☹️

(Seriously, did you see their performance yesterday? Why didn’t we do that on Wednesday? - Don’t get me started and I’m not even a football fan)

Never a dull moment.

Moving rapidly on to today’s 6 Notes Sunday, my weekly roundup for chilled Sundays when all we want to do is skim headlines and drink coffee (or tea in my case).

Here are 5 of my favourite Substack Notes from the week, plus my own most popular one.

If any resonate, don’t forget to support the creator with a like, a restack or a comment!

Let’s get into it.

#1

I LOVE this ladies story. She has laid out in great detail her entire journey through writing personal stories, to healing in public, to finding her voice and her groove, and reaching 10k subscribers and hundreds of paid subs.

Her writing is fresh and honest, and shows what can be achieved by just continuing to show up, noticing what’s working and doing more of that!

Huge congratulations to on a fantastic journey. 😊

#2

Following on from note No 1, this might be just where you are right now. In what I call ‘The Quiet Place’. If that’s so, get out and find communities of writers supporting writers.

There’s nothing more powerful than being surrounded by like minded people. 💪

#3

Ooh! Chew on this. I love notes that make you stop and say Yes! ❤️

#4

Exactly! I love me a bit of inspiration! 😎

#5

This was me with Thailand. I never really wanted to go. The very uneducated me in my 30’s thought it was just a country that sold fake designer labels and gave ‘happy endings’ to dissatisfied men. (Which to be fair it does do 😉).

But also about a thousand other wonderful things I never knew existed. I ended up living there for over 15 years and it’s probably my favourite country on the planet. 🇹🇭

#6 - My Most Popular Note This Week

😂

What did you think of today’s note choices? Which was your favourite and why? Let me know in the comments below.

Remember to head over and support the creator with a like, a restack or a comment!

This Weeks Posts Roundup

If you missed any of my posts this week, here they are…

And they’re not intelligence, strategy, charisma, or natural talent. (Although I’m sure I have my fair share of those too! 😉)

My new ‘Unretired Creator’ series, where I’m exploring creativity, purpose, publishing, storytelling, and what it means to keep growing, contributing, and creating at any age.

Is travel the anti-ageing secret no-one’s talking about?

Just a quick reminder that in celebration of my husband’s 50th birthday, for the month of July you get an annual subscription and everything in the backpack for just $50!

Here’s what’s inside:

Funding Freedom: Building Portable Income

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s and Beyond - (Video Course - $197)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (Video Course - $47)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (The Self Guided Workbook Edition - $17)

• 30 Day Product Launch Playbook - (Video & Written Daily Actions - $47)

• Email List Building for Grown Ups - (Video Course - $47)

• Substack for Beginners - (Video Course - $97)

• 51 Actionable Tips to Start an Online Business - Guide/Workbook

• The 50+ Solopreneur Starter Kit - Guide/Checklist/Resources

• 200+ Side Hustle Ideas for 50+ Nomads - Guide/Ebook

Life on the Road: Practical Travel Tools

• How to House Sit Your Way Around the World - (Video & Written Guide - $17)

• The Smart Traveller Bundle incl - How We Live in Five Star Resorts for Less Than $500 a Week (Ebook) / Flying Smarter: How to Pay Less Without the Stress (Ebook) / The Smart Travellers Guide to Owning Your Freedom (Ebook - $27)

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s & Beyond - Guide/Workbook

• The Nomad Goal Planner - Digital Journal

• The 50+ Bucket List Journal - Digital Journal

Join Today for Just $50

I hope you’ve enjoyed todays roundup.

Have a fab Sunday! 😎

In the last few months I’ve:

• Navigated a 16-hour overnight bus ride with a broken toilet on a Brazilian highway

• Shared my dinner with a donkey in a village with sand for floors

• Ended up in a backstreet hospital in Cartagena at 2am

• Followed that with a gallbladder operation in a hospital in Costa Rica

• Had glitter in my backpack for three weeks after Carnival in Rio

• Ridden a rollercoaster on top of a hotel in Vegas

• Won $90 playing blackjack (and lost quite a bit more)

• Drunk cachaça with locals in Salvador

• Stood in a Portuguese supermarket trying to work out if the block in my hand was washing powder or furniture polish

• Almost got robbed in San Jose

And I’m currently sitting on a pier in North Vancouver, having caught the Seabus this morning from downtown to work at a table beside the water.

And it dawned on me, that travel really forces your brain to wake up! Not too gently either, more like a splash of cold water followed by 10 pushups (not that I can do 10 pushups…yet).

Which might be why I’m increasingly convinced that travelling the world could be one of the best anti-ageing strategies on earth.

And you may be thinking, well yes that’s what sunshine and cocktails will for for you Jo. And I agree those things are nice, but I’m talking about what travelling does to your mind.

The Brain Likes New Things

Most of our life tends to run on autopilot.

We wake up in the same bed. Walk into the same kitchen. Drive the same roads. Shop in the same supermarket. Speak the same language. See the same people.

I remember on more than one occasion driving to work and forgetting how I got there (and no I wasn’t drinking).

It’s because when we’re in daily habit mode our brains don’t have to work very hard. They already know the script (and the way apparently).

Which is efficient, of course. But not particularly stimulating.

Travel changes that instantly.

Suddenly your brain is doing things like:

• reading unfamiliar signs

• learning new words

• navigating strange streets

• working out transport systems

• interpreting cultural cues

• deciding what on earth to order from a menu

• and deciphering washing machine instructions in a foreign launderette. 🙄

All of that requires active thinking. Your brain switches from cruise control to alert mode. (Which leads to some very deep sleeps, let me tell you!)

Neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg (author of The Wisdom Paradox) has spent years studying how the brain changes as we age, and one of his key ideas is that novelty matters.

When we try new things, visit unfamiliar places, or learn new skills, the brain can’t rely on autopilot. It has to pay attention, adapt, and create new connections, which helps to keep us mentally flexible and sharp.

In other words, novelty is like pushups for the brain. 💪

And let’s face it. Travel serves up novelty by the bucketload.

Curiosity Is Youthful Energy

Ooh I love that phrase! From the first moment my good friend Graeme Clemett referred to it on one of my FB posts.

(Which is poignant because he is loaded with youthful energy! He’s the Australian National Pickleball champ - age 60 something! - You rock Graeme 🤘)

And something I’ve noticed in life and on the road, is that the people who seem most alive are the ones who stay curious and want to keep learning and growing as a person.

They’re the ones wandering down random streets just to see what’s there. Trying food they can’t pronounce. Talking to strangers. Signing up for a hike or a cooking class simply because it sounds interesting. Or desperately trying to add up the cards on the blackjack table.

Curiosity keeps life expansive.

The moment we stop being curious is the moment life starts shrinking. And of course, travel makes curiosity almost unavoidable.

You’re constantly arriving somewhere new and everything around you is different. The smells, the sounds, the pace of life. It wakes your sense up!

And that sense of “ooh what’s around the corner?” is the exact opposite of feeling old.

Movement Happens Naturally

Another accidental benefit of travel is how much more you move without really trying.

At home it’s easy to become sedentary without noticing. (Hours and hours in front of a computer is not anti-ageing compatible - she says eating a bag of chips sitting at a table on her computer 😂)

But when you’re exploring a new city you naturally:

• walk more

• climb stairs

• wander through markets

• hike viewpoints

• swim in the sea

• stroll neighbourhoods just to see what’s there

Movement stops being a chore and becomes part of the adventure.

Just this week as an example, I’ve walked 20+ minutes down to the local coffee shop every morning to write my articles or run my ecom business. Monday I walked all over downtown Vancouver exploring Gastown, Chinatown and the surrounding area.

Wednesday we walked bloody miles to find somewhere to watch the (disastrous) England game, and today I’ve explored all around the shipyard here in North Vancouver, plus walking to and from the skytrain, seabus and surrounding area.

I don’t have my fitbit anymore, but I guarantee I’m doing well over 10k steps a day, but not for the step count. For curiosity (there’s that word again), exploration, fresh air and the distinct lack of a car! 😂

And when your body is moving, your energy shifts. I can literally feel my synapses firing when I get outside, suck in the air, put my music on and start walking.

Connection Keeps Us Alive

I don’t want to get morbid, but did you know that loneliness is one of the biggest silent health risks of later life?

Research has linked chronic loneliness to higher rates of dementia, heart disease, depression, and early death. Some studies have compared its impact to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.1

So as we get older, staying connected to other people isn’t a nice-to-have - it’s a health strategy.

And yet as we age, most of us shrink our worlds.

The workplace social circles fade. Many of us now work from home, behind a laptop all day on our own. The kids move away. Friends move, retire, get ill, some of them pass away. Nights out slow down. Daily conversations thin out to the same few people, or in some cases, no one at all. (Crikey Jo, thanks for that. 🫣)

Good news! Travel does the opposite.

You end up in conversation with strangers constantly.

Taxi drivers telling you about the local area. The couple next to you on the plane who’ve just done the same trip in reverse. Baristas who want to know why you’re in town. Hotel receptionists who remember you by day three. Locals in queues. Other travellers at breakfast or in the pool. The old man in the market who insists you try his fruit.

None of these are deep, lifelong friendships (although some can turn out to be), but it means your brain and your heart stay in regular contact with other humans, which is exactly what they need to do to stay healthy.

And Not Just People

Travelling also means a closer connection to nature, to the world, and to something bigger than your daily routine.

Walking along a beach with pounding waves at sunset. Standing on a rooftop in Cartagena feeling the pulse of the city below. Looking out at the expanse of a rainforest canopy stretching to the horizon, or floating along the Amazon listening to Howler monkeys in the trees.

For me personally, I’ve never felt more connected to the world than when I’m moving through it. (Queue Avatar and the Tree of Life….)

And if loneliness and disconnection are quietly ageing us, this might be one of the strongest arguments for adventure over settling down.

The Confidence Effect

Travel also does something super powerful to your sense of capability.

• When you figure out a new metro system in a language you barely understand…

• When you navigate a city you’ve never been to…

• When you manage a massive ascent with dodgy knees and get a round of applause at the bottom… 🥳

Your confidence starts to build.

Your brain registers: I can handle this.

Rhett asked me this week if I felt safe walking about the city on my own, as very sadly there is a drug and homeless issue here in Vancouver (and in most big cities we’ve visited to be honest 😢).

My answer was an instant yes. “I’ve traveled across Brazil & Colombia” I said indignantly - Vancouver certainly doesn’t scare me”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very aware, but my confidence in dealing with any potential situations has risen dramatically, just by navigating countries, cities and areas I felt a little less comfortable in.

And the great news is, that feeling spills into the rest of life.

Running a business. Starting a project. Trying something new. Making a big decision.

If you can land in a foreign country with a suitcase and figure stuff out as you go, a lot of other challenges start to feel more manageable.

Travel Interrupts the “Getting Older” Story

There’s a strange narrative society pushes once we pass 50.

I wasn’t sure I believed it was true, but it’s there.

The subtle messages that we should start slowing down. Take less risks, engage in less adventure, have more caution and wear more beige cardigans. 😳

But travel interrupts that script, abruptly.

You find yourself doing things that don’t feel remotely “old”:

• hiking mountains (even with dodgy knees)

• learning new languages (110 day streak on Duolingo and counting)

• making friends from different countries

• navigating strange cities

• trying food you’ve never heard of

• riding roller coasters on hotel roofs after a few too many beers 🤭

You’re not sitting still waiting for life to happen. You’re immersed in it.

And when you’re actively engaging with the world, the idea that life is somehow winding down starts to feel a million miles in the opposite direction.

Aging Disgracefully

This is one of the reasons I’m a fan of what I call aging disgracefully.

One of my close friends (who’s in her 60’s, is a downhill extreme skier and paraglided alongside her husband into their wedding when they were both in their 50’s), has said to me on numerous occasions;

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been an extreme sports person. I once did a bungy jump in my early 20’s, and I’ve parasailed off the back of a boat a couple of times, but that’s about it (and personally skiing terrifies me!)

But I want to age in a curious, adventurous, slightly rebellious way.

The kind of aging where you refuse to shrink your life just because the calendar says you should, and instead you keep doing things that stretch you.

Things that make you think, and that make you feel alive.

Travel happens to be one of the easiest ways to do that.

You don’t need to move abroad or become a full-time nomad (although that’s certainly an option), even small trips can wake your brain up.

A different city. A different country. A different culture.

Every new experience gives your mind something fresh to chew on.

A Different Way to Think About Staying Young

Most conversations about aging focus on the usual things:

• diet

• exercise

• supplements

• skincare

All useful, of course.

But rarely do people talk about adventure as part of the equation.

But as I’ve discovered personally the brain loves stimulation, novelty, curiosity, learning & connecting.

Travel delivers all of these in generous doses.

Which might explain why some of the most vibrant people you meet on the road are well into their 60s, 70s, and beyond. They didn’t stop exploring and don a pair of fluffy slippers and a nightgown.

They kept showing up and grabbing life!

The Real Secret

In the end, retaining your youthful energy has less to do with birthdays and more to do with how engaged you remain with life.

The moment we stop exploring, learning, and experiencing new things, life starts to feel smaller.

Travel pushes against that, and keeps the world big, interesting, fun and awe inspiring.

And when the world feels like that, life does too.

Personally, I intend to stay as young as possible for as long as possible and travel is lending me a great big helping hand to achieve that goal.

How about you? What's your version of ageing disgracefully? What are you doing (or planning to do) that refuses to fit the calendar? I'd love to hear about it!

Right gotta run, sadly no rollercoasters nearby, but there’s a chocolatier round the corner with my name on it!

Thanks for reading… 😊

Last week I bought a subscription to ‘Hello Writer’ by Linda Carroll.

She’s one of favourite writers on Substack and I’ve been meaning to upgrade for ages.

A friend Linda Jackson kindly gifted me a subscription months ago which introduced me to Linda Carroll, but at the time I wasn’t ready to upgrade. (This is important, I’ll come back to this point).

But I was reading her article about how to write great post titles which was paywalled and I wanted to read the rest. So I took the 7 day trial to access the whole post.

However I already know that I’ll become a paid member at the end of the 7 days because I read pretty much everything she sends out and I want to support her writing. (Another very important point I’ll come back to.)

Right now, on a personal note, my reach is all over the place. Some notes & posts go mad, some get crickets, but few are having a massive effect on my subscribers.

In fact if you’re reading this right now you’re in a fairly small minority & I appreciate you. ❤️🙏

But I’m not surprised. I’ve changed my bio (a hundred times), changed my messaging, experimented with different topics, different publishing cadences and probably confused Substack, you & myself in the process. 🤯

Except I’m actually not confused at all.

I know exactly what I want. I’ve just been too chicken shit to take action on it.

And I don't think I'm alone.

Here’s a note I posted this week;

Whoa, that’s pretty deep.

But I posted it because half the time we’ve convinced ourselves we’ve named it. We convince ourselves we know exactly what we want, and then wonder why we pivot, or are indecisive, or just don’t actually take any action.

This is literally my favourite quote in the whole world…

It’s so full of energy & light & love.

And when I tell stories, about a violinist in Cartagena who taught me about practicing in public, or how the movie Hook made me reassess my dreams at 53 years old, or how I fought with Claude on a bus in Colombia, that’s how I feel.

Lit up! Shooting sunbeams. Hopefully lighting up those around me.

But then fear kicks in. The fog of the comfort zone closes in and I go back to - ‘7 Ways to Build an Online Business’, or ‘How to Make Your First $1000.’

Useful and valuable posts no doubt. But safe, tangible, & somewhere for me to hide behind.

Because what if we reveal our true selves?

What if we tell the stories, share the observations, offer the opinions, put our thoughts out there for months on end, and no one cares?

No one listens.

No one likes, shares, or restacks.

The safe content we can always put down to a changing market, a noisy internet, maybe our refusal to go meta. (Substack about Substack, Insta about Insta - if you’re goal is simply to make money, go meta, it’s the fastest route).

But when it’s truly us on the page - our voice, our perspective, our take on the world - there’s nowhere left to hide. And what if we do the brave thing, and it turns out we’re just not interesting enough?

Well now that’s a different story altogether isn’t it.

…

Enter stage left - Linda Caroll.

Here’s what she’s doing that the rest of us could learn a thing or two from.

Read more

I’m not the sharpest tool in the box.

That sounds harsher than I mean it to, but I’ve never been the person who walks into a room and instantly sees opportunities, strategies, or clever shortcuts that everyone else seems to spot.

I struggle to think several moves ahead, I write plenty of terrible headlines, my hooks often need work, and maths has never exactly been my strong suit. (Just ask the croupiers in Vegas.)

I can enter the same space as another entrepreneur and take twice as long to gain traction because I simply don’t see things the way they do.

One of my goals is to become a bestselling author one day, but if that happens it’ll be because people find value in what I write, not because I’ve produced some literary masterpiece.

And if we’re talking weaknesses, my people radar isn’t much better.

I tend to see the best in everyone. I trust easily, assume good intentions, and occasionally learn the hard way that not everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt.

My Dad used to say it when I was younger, and my 20-year-old daughter has been telling me for years. (She’s incredibly good at reading people. I, on the other hand, tend to wander through life wearing rose-tinted glasses.)

…

I’m not being mean to myself I promise. The reason I’m telling you all this is because the skills that have shaped my life aren’t the ones most people talk about.

They’re not intelligence, strategy, charisma, or natural talent. (Although I’m sure I have my fair share of those too! ☺️)

But the skills I do have are the ones that have led me to the lifestyle I live today.

Because when I look back over the last 20 years, from raising my daughter in Phuket, to building several six-figure businesses, selling a seven-figure company, and now travelling the world as a full-time nomad, I can see the patterns.

None of it happened because I was the smartest person in the room.

It happened because of 3 key skills that have shaped almost every major decision I’ve made.

And at 53, they’re still helping me chase some pretty big goals.

Read more

Sitting in Cabo airport gulping back the tears as I write this.

Our daughter’s plane has just taken off bound for London Heathrow, while we’re waiting for the WestJet desk to open so we can check in for our flight to Vancouver. 🇨🇦

A very bittersweet end to a fabulous few weeks. I’m so excited to visit Canada as I’ve never been before and I bloody love maple syrup! 😂 But also desperately sad to say goodbye to my little girl. 😢

That’s the circle of life, though right? She’s off building her own life, we’re heading into our next adventure, and beneath the tears I’m incredibly proud of her. 😊

So, while I sit here waiting to check in and trying to pull myself together, let’s move on to today’s 6 Notes Sunday picks.

A weekly roundup for chilled Sundays when all we want to do is skim headlines and drink coffee (or airplane tea in my case).

Here are 5 of my favourite Substack Notes from the week, plus my own most popular one.

If any resonate, don’t forget to support the creator with a like, a restack or a comment!

Let’s get into it.

#1

Amen sister! This is exactly what The 50+ Nomad is all about. ❤️

Not building a business for the sake of having a business.

Building a business that supports your dream lifestyle.

#2

I’ve been thinking about something very similar over the last few weeks, particularly when it comes to building a creator business.

The more you write, publish, share, connect, and put yourself out there, the larger your surface area for luck becomes.

Most “overnight successes” are years in the making.

#3

Yes we can ! And we absolutely should. 😎

#4

I’m still processing this one…

#5

❤️❤️❤️

#6 - My Most Popular Note This Week

😂

What did you think of today’s note choices? Which was your favourite and why? Let me know in the comments below.

Remember to head over and support the creator with a like, a restack or a comment!

This Weeks Posts Roundup

Only one post to roundup this week as I was happily distracted by my husband’s 50th birthday (Happy Birthday, love! 🥳) and spending time with my daughter.

But it’s a goodie! 😁

From broken bus toilets to the magic of sandwich bags, here’s my top lessons from 5 months on the road.

Just a quick reminder that in celebration of my husband’s 50th birthday, for the month of July you get an annual subscription and everything in the backpack for just $50!

Here’s what’s inside:

Funding Freedom: Building Portable Income

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s and Beyond - (Video Course - $197)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (Video Course - $47)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (The Self Guided Workbook Edition - $17)

• 30 Day Product Launch Playbook - (Video & Written Daily Actions - $47)

• Email List Building for Grown Ups - (Video Course - $47)

• Substack for Beginners - (Video Course - $97)

• 51 Actionable Tips to Start an Online Business - Guide/Workbook

• The 50+ Solopreneur Starter Kit - Guide/Checklist/Resources

• 200+ Side Hustle Ideas for 50+ Nomads - Guide/Ebook

Life on the Road: Practical Travel Tools

• How to House Sit Your Way Around the World - (Video & Written Guide - $17)

• The Smart Traveller Bundle incl - How We Live in Five Star Resorts for Less Than $500 a Week (Ebook) / Flying Smarter: How to Pay Less Without the Stress (Ebook) / The Smart Travellers Guide to Owning Your Freedom (Ebook - $27)

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s & Beyond - Guide/Workbook

• The Nomad Goal Planner - Digital Journal

• The 50+ Bucket List Journal - Digital Journal

Join Today for Just $50

I hope you’ve enjoyed todays roundup.

Have a fab Sunday! 😎

“Honey, I really need to go to the loo.”

The bus lurched and I nearly fell back into my seat.

“So go,” he mumbled, pulling his mask over his eyes.

“I can’t. It’s blocked, and spilling everywhere.”

My husband grunted, as he hauled himself out of his seat, squeezed past me, and disappeared down the dark aisle towards the back of the bus.

A minute later he was back, sleeve rolled up to the elbow, face like thunder.

“Hand sanitiser.”

I passed him the bottle. He squirted, settled back into his seat, pulled the mask back over his eyes, and was asleep again within about ninety seconds.

This was 3am, somewhere on a Brazilian highway, hour twelve of sixteen.

18 years of marriage, right there. 😂

…

150 days ago, my husband and I squeezed what was left of our lives into two backpacks and set off with no fixed abode, no return ticket, and no true plans, other than we were travelling around South America.

I’m 53, he’s just turned 50 and we’ve been living overseas, as expats and semi nomads, for 16 years.

Between us we have years of travel experience, and yet full-time nomad life has still managed to teach us a whole new curriculum.

So here is approximately 5 months of lessons from the road, in no particular order, with all the embarrassing bits left in.

1. Pack light. Then pack lighter.

My backpack is still too heavy! I’ve been throwing stuff out as we go, but it’s not enough.

Somewhere in there I am carrying: a spare pair of glasses for emergencies, 30 packs of disposable contact lenses that have never been opened and a podcast microphone that’s 365g (yep I weighed it & yes that’s a lot when you’re trying to get down to 9kg).

The truth is I wear the same things every day. Just one look at my travel photos and you’ll see my black t-shirt and denim shorts on every single one. And before you tell me about the denim shorts - yes I get it, but I love them, they’re my fave shorts and they’re actually very light.

So I haven’t solved this one yet. I’m using most of what I have in my bag, and what I’m not using is going home with my daughter this weekend, so we’ll see how much of a difference that makes!

This leads nicely to:

2. Pick a colour and stick to it

For 5 months I’ve been carrying around a pair of lovely white trousers, a white T-shirt and a cheerful yellow dress. They’re all going home with my daughter, and here’s why.

When you’re living out of a backpack, laundry isn’t a quick spin in your own machine. It’s a mission involving laundrettes, timing, carrying bags around and shoving everything in one load.

Not a beautifully separated lights wash and a darks wash. Everything together.

So my entire wardrobe is now navy, grey and black. A bit sombre, but great, both for washing and for hiding the dirt. 😮

Fashion is for people with washing machines. 😂

3. Detergent sheets are tiny miracles

One of the more unexpected challenges of nomad life is standing in a supermarket trying to work out which bottle contains washing liquid.

The labels are in Spanish or Portuguese, the pictures aren’t helping and Google Translate is telling you the product is either fabric softener or furniture polish.

At one point Rhett & I were shaving off bits of what we hoped was a washing ‘block’ and melting it in hot water to add to the machine. We’re not 100% certain that what it was, but the clothes came out ok. 😎

Detergent sheets solve all of that. They’re light, take up virtually no room and mean I can do laundry anywhere without trying to decipher an aisle of mystery liquids.

In fairness, a lot of South American laundrettes include detergent in the machines, but when they don’t the sheets are gold.

It’s not glamorous travel advice, but neither is running out of clean knickers.

4. On that note: the launderette is a day out

Alright last one about washing I promise. (It’s amazing how things you take for granted at home become major topics of conversation on the road!)

I love launderettes.

Call me mad but from the minute I started travelling years ago, a launderette represented freedom to me.

Instead of being shackled to the kitchen or washroom doing weekly washes, here I am at a launderette, randomly doing my washing because I’ve run out of clean underwear, chatting with the locals at the coffee shop next door while I wait for the dryer to finish.

Its an event!

In Sao Luis in Brazil we found a launderette directly next door to a shop selling cold beer.

So we sat there, beers in hand, watching our entire wardrobe go round and round, having what I can only describe as a small party. One wash, two beers, immaculate afternoon.

5. Always pay in the local currency

I learned this one years ago, but it bears repeating because it costs people money every single day.

At the ATM, when it asks whether you’d like to be charged in pounds or pesos: pesos.

At the card machine in the shop, when it offers to helpfully convert to your home currency: decline.

Choose local, every time. Otherwise the exchange rate is set by the machine, and the machine does not have your best interests at heart.

Choosing locally means the exchange rate is set by your bank so no unexpected surprises.

Side note: Wise has been a game changer for us. Real currency exchange & cheap fees.

6. Bring a hoodie, even to the tropics.

Here’s a fun fact about menopause: most women get hot flushes. I got the opposite.

I was already a cold person, and menopause turned the dial down further, so I now travel with a husband and, when she visits, a daughter, who both sleep with the sheets kicked off while I lie beside them freezing like something out of Oliver Twist.

(Bonus: 104° in Vegas to me was super comfy 🤷‍♀️)

So my hoodie has been the single most valuable item in my backpack.

Air-conditioned shopping centres are set to arctic. Aeroplanes are flying fridges. Overnight buses double as meat lockers.

Do not let the words “hot country” fool you: the buildings and vehicles of hot countries are the coldest places on earth.

There’s been many a time when we’ve made an impromptu cinema stop & I’ve been snug as a bug in a rug while the air-con runs to freezing.

7. Never board anything without snacks, especially with a grumpy husband

If I attempt to buy crisps before 10am, Rhett will have a small meltdown about standards, and decency, and what has become of us.

He will then sit on the plane two hours later eating those crisps while slowly decompressing from his ‘travel dad’ (a name our daughter gave him) stressed to the eyeballs persona.

The lesson is: always have snacks. Sandwiches, crisps, fruit, whatever you can get.

Delays happen, buses run long, and a hungry husband is a public safety issue.

Buy the crisps. Absorb the lecture. You’ll both be glad by cruising altitude.

8. The Booking (dot)com 8.5 Rule

After five months of booking accommodation on the move, I’ve learned not to book anything on booking (dot) com under an 8.5.

And even then, I remain suspicious because some people would happily give five stars to a garden shed with a fan.

There are also four things I always check before I book:

• Air conditioning. Non-negotiable in the heat. (Clearly less important in colder environments)

• Somewhere to make a cup of tea, whether that’s a kettle or a tiny kitchen.

• Private bathroom. At my age having our own bathroom is a non negotiable.

• A window! You’d be surprised at the amount of rooms without natural light and I can’t stand it. I need light, even if we’re overlooking a car park.

And one final rule: never book accommodation when you’re tired. That’s how you end up booking the wrong dates, the wrong month, or occasionally the wrong country.

Check it once. Check it twice. Then hand it to your wife because by god if you get it wrong you’re in trouble, but if she does, it’s just a minor snafu. ☺️

9. English breakfast tea bags are currency

(This one is for the Brit tea lovers. Clearly apply to whatever is your favourite beverage if it’s not usually supplied where you’re travelling.)

If you like a proper cup of tea, pack plenty of English breakfast tea bags, because in South America they are gold dust. What passes for black tea in some places would make my nan weep.

It’s also why having a kettle matters when booking a room.

There are few nomad pleasures greater than a decent cuppa in the evening in your own room, and few disappointments sharper than realising your room has no kettle and you’re holding a tea bag with nowhere to go.

10. Seven to ten days is the sweet spot when house sitting

House sitting is a serious travel hack. Live somewhere free? For weeks on end? In a place not unlike your own home? And all you have to do is take care of a dog or a cat or two?

Almost too good to be true.

But it’s not. We stayed in a house in Dulwich Village just outside of London (which is a very la-di-da area) for 7 weeks across Christmas for free. It would have cost us thousands.

Same in San Diego, Vancouver next week, Richmond later in the year & so on.

But even though it’s free & lovely to live in a home for a while, I start to get itchy feet after about 10 days.

Pets are lovely, but a commitment. And if you want to explore the area without worrying that’s something you need to consider.

If you want to know more about house sitting see my post here:

11. Build in rest days, because your body is keeping score

I’ve always been a very energetic person so I was surprised to find that travel tiredness sneaks up on you.

A few bus journeys here, a couple of walking tours there, some early starts, a few late nights, and suddenly you’re wondering why you’re grumpy and exhausted.

We’ve learned to build in recovery time.

If we’ve been moving quickly, we’ll stay somewhere for a week and do very little.

If we’ve spent several days exploring, we’ll happily dedicate the next couple to reading, working, drinking tea and generally behaving like pensioners.

Choose a rhythm that suits you and never apologise for slowing down to catch your breath.

We ain’t getting any younger! 😂

12. Wear comfy shoes. Nuff’ said.

13. A sarong is the most versatile thing you will ever pack

A towel on the beach, a blanket at a picnic, a scarf on a cold bus, a shoulder cover at a temple in Asia, a dress over your swimmers, or a pillow, folded up, on a long journey.

I had one from Thailand that I loved so much I gave it to my sister, replaced it in Rio, and have used the Rio one so hard it’s already wearing out.

And if you’re considering a microfibre travel towels instead: they’re heavier than you think, and in a hot country a sarong does the same job while weighing about as much as the rumour of how great they are.

Guys - there are manly ones too 😂

14. On arrival, do a free walking tour

One of the first things we do in a new city is look for a free walking tour. Most big cities have them.

You get your bearings, learn a bit of history, and suddenly you’re seeing the place through different eyes because you know what happened on that square and why that building matters.

The guides will also tell you what to do, what to skip, and crucially, in parts of South America, which areas to avoid: information worth far more than the tip you’ll give at the end.

I also love hop-on hop-off bus tours for similar reasons. In a very short space of time you know which areas you want to see more of and which to skip. Super handy if you’re only there a couple of days.

15. The small heroes: sandwich bags, eye mask, earplugs

Nobody writes Instagram posts about sandwich bags, but I think they’re missing a trick.

Sandwich bags are invaluable. A leaky shampoo bottle, a bar of soap, the precious tea bags: everything goes in a sandwich bag. Plus they’re super light and small, so I always have a stash in the bottom of my bag.

An eye mask, because hotel rooms are designed by people who hate sleep. There’s the standby light on the telly, the light on the aircon, the light on the smoke alarm, the mystery light that cannot be traced to any appliance known to science.

And earplugs, for everything else: the street noise, the dodgy plumbing, the neighbours, and occasionally the husband.

16. Get away from your husband (or spouse)

I say this with love.

5 months in each other’s pockets, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, will produce some interesting scenarios and what diplomats might call “frank exchanges of views.”

The fix is simple: whenever possible, get up in the morning, find a little cafe, do some work, and have some you time.

An hour or two apart works wonders. You come back with things to tell each other, which is a small miracle after 5 months of shared everything.

17. Get Insurance

We would be over $10k poorer if we didn’t have travel insurance.

After an unfortunate 2am stint in a dodgy backstreet hospital in Cartagena, I ended up having my gallbladder removed in a (very lovely) hospital in Costa Rica.

Very unexpected and extremely expensive (and painful).

Our excess was $75. That’s pretty much all that experience cost is (well that and the extra night hubby had to book in a hotel & $250 for a cab to our hotel on the other side of the country as I couldn’t travel by bus).

Still, much cheaper than the $10k plus they charged the insurance company!

18. Have Fun

Traveling on its own merit is stressful. Booking, packing, buses, planes, trains, & automobiles.

Nomadism kicks it up several levels and it’s not for the faint hearted.

Which is why I think the number 1 personality trait you need as a nomad is a good sense of humour & a laid back attitude.

Com si com sa, as my Mother used to say.

It is what is it, Kay sera sera. You get the point! 😂

150 days down. The backpack is still too heavy, I’m down an organ, I’ve just clocked 100 consecutive days learning Spanish on Duolingo & I need to get more teabags.

And I wouldn’t swap a day of it (well maybe the op & stint in Hosp. But you know what I mean).

Here’s to the next 150 days!

Adventure never retires ✈️

What would your lessons be? If you’ve travelled long term, drop yours in the comments: I’m always looking for reasons to throw something else out of my backpack. 😎

Happy 4th July to all my American friends for yesterday! I hope you had a fantastic celebration, whether it involved fireworks, family, friends, a barbecue, or all of the above.

We had a fab Michael Jackson tribute band, a limbo competition I was nowhere near flexible enough to enter, and a bit of conga to finish off the night. Sounds a bit cheesy, right? But actually, the entertainment team were fantastic and it was a super fun evening. 🥳

If you’re moving a little slower than usual today, here are your 6 Notes Sunday picks. A weekly roundup for chilled Sundays when all we want to do is skim headlines and drink coffee (or tea in my case).

(Although UK play Mexico tonight so the tea will likely be replaced by beer and a party blower 🥳)

Here are 5 of my favourite Substack Notes from the week, plus my own most popular one.

If any resonate, don’t forget to support the creator with a like, a restack or a comment!

Let’s get into it.

#1

Happy Birthday from The Frugal Traveler! 🥳 Pam has done so well growing her publication and is prepping to go full time nomad very soon! 😎

Pam & I started working together at the beginning of the year & it wasn’t long before the student became the teacher.

She’s consistently posted articles and notes, has grown to over 11k subscribers, & has started creating digital products. I can’t wait to see where she takes this over the next year.

If you get a chance please send her a like or birthday wish & I’m sure she’d be happy to answer any SS growth or budget travel questions you have. 😁

I can’t wait to meet her in person in August when we’ll be traveling through the New York area! 🇺🇸

Have an amazing day Pam! 🎉

#2

I love this story & this publication. We all need a bit of positivity in our lives & some of the stories on this page will bring tears to your eyes! ❤️

#3

Yes we’re posting. Yes we’re unraveling! I’m not sure I’ve got to the rebuilding bit yet, still unraveling over here! 😂

#4

Yes this is so true. The best moments are unplanned. 😮

And that’s what the ‘This Big World Travel Challenge Cards’ are for - creating fun and unplanned moments!

I’ll definitely be reaching out to Allen and Jodie to send them a pack to try on their travels.

Check them out here! Grab a pack to ‘see what’s over there’ as you travel or in your hometown, or grab a pack as a gift for the travel lover in your life.

Check Out the Cards Here! 👉

#5

😂😂😂

#6 - My Most Popular Note This Week

What did you think of today’s note choices? Let me know in the comments below!

This Weeks Posts Roundup

Also, in case you missed any of this weeks articles, here they are:

Grab your FREE adventures PDF for July and have some fun!

What wealth of experience are you already sitting on which could earn you $1000 a month or more?

What happens when the thing you love becomes the thing you measure?

Don’t forget this week is my husband’s 50th birthday (welcome to the club hun! 🥳). That means for the month of July only you get everything in the backpack for just $50!

Here’s what’s inside:

Funding Freedom: Building Portable Income

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s and Beyond - (Video Course - $197)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (Video Course - $47)

• Start the Right Side Hustle After 50 - (The Self Guided Workbook Edition - $17)

• 30 Day Product Launch Playbook - (Video & Written Daily Actions - $47)

• Email List Building for Grown Ups - (Video Course - $47)

• Substack for Beginners - (Video Course - $97)

• 51 Actionable Tips to Start an Online Business - Guide/Workbook

• The 50+ Solopreneur Starter Kit - Guide/Checklist/Resources

• 200+ Side Hustle Ideas for 50+ Nomads - Guide/Ebook

Life on the Road: Practical Travel Tools

• How to House Sit Your Way Around the World - (Video & Written Guide - $17)

• The Smart Traveller Bundle incl - How We Live in Five Star Resorts for Less Than $500 a Week (Ebook) / Flying Smarter: How to Pay Less Without the Stress (Ebook) / The Smart Travellers Guide to Owning Your Freedom (Ebook - $27)

• How to Become a Digital Nomad in Your 50s & Beyond - Guide/Workbook

• The Nomad Goal Planner - Digital Journal

• The 50+ Bucket List Journal - Digital Journal

Join Today for Just $50

I hope you’ve enjoyed todays roundup.

Have a fab Sunday! 😎

Come on England! 🇬🇧