Jo Barnes Online

Nomad Day #257

I opened Substack this morning looking for something to read and restack. Instead I found Kylie Jenner’s $50 million bra, ICE agents surrounding a man carrying two children, a tearful Zelensky, and Google ripping up 250,000 trees in Finland to build a new data centre.

And for the first time in my 54 years on this planet, I felt genuinely scared for humanity.

I don’t mean the ‘Terminator’s-coming end of world’ kind of fear. What scares me is how much control sits in so few hands, and I’m not at all confident those hands have humanities best interests at heart.

Think about it. We have, at our fingertips, incredible technology that could, over the coming decades, help wipe out disease, eradicate poverty, ease loneliness and create more opportunities for more people than ever before.

We’re sitting on a goldmine of potential good!

But it’s controlled by a small handful of people far more interested in profit. 

We have astonishing, ridiculously concentrated wealth sitting right alongside parents who can’t feed their children, and somehow we’ve all got used to that crazy contrast. Me included.

I’m still jet-lagged and slept badly, which won’t have helped. But the fear was real, and it brought me to tears.

Then I turned the light on myself. 

I write about building businesses on beaches for goodness sake, while there’s so much pain & suffering in the world. Should I be tackling more important topics?

For years I’ve had my own philanthropic goals. I’ve dreamt about starting a VC fund for women in developing countries, and I’d love to build a not-for-profit store where I buy a mountain village’s entire stock of handmade goods as I travel, then sell it on at cost. 

But they keep getting put off until I have a bit more money behind me. 

This morning I started to think what a smaller start might look like, because I’ve been talking about them for years and done nothing.

In the meantime, I know what I want my writing to do. I want people in their 50s, 60s & beyond to stay excited about what they can still create. I want to shine a light on the places, people and cultures I meet along the way. And I’m building This Big World because I want to make people smile, the way Kikki.K’s journals have made me smile and dream bigger for years.

And when I’m standing in front of something natural & beautiful as I’m traveling, I’m reminded how much there is to love about this world. On mornings like this, that feels more important than ever.

I don’t know what the answer is, and I’ve reached no conclusions, but I’m taking one thought into my day.

If each of us cared a little more about the person sitting next to us, that would be 8 billion people caring about 8 billion people.

Simplistic, I know. But it’s a start.

Be the reason someone smiles today. 😁

Nomad Day #256

I remember my very first night in Thailand (back in 2010). I stepped off the plane and the heat hit me like a warm hug.

A couple of hours later I was sat in a beach restaurant in Surin, toes dug into the cool sand, tasting real Thai food for the first time. It was love at first sight. ❤️

I had no idea we’d end up living here for more than 12 years, or that my daughter would grow up calling Phuket home.

So when I walked out of Chiang Mai airport this week, it felt like coming home. The broken pavements, the tangled cables drooping over the street, the lawless traffic and the swarms of mopeds. Everything that might horrify a first-timer felt like a welcome mat.

Then I nipped into a 7-Eleven, and that little taped sing-song voice chirped “Hello, welcome!” as the door opened, just like it does in every 7-Eleven in the country. If you’ve been to Thailand, you’re hearing it right now.

I’m here for 8 weeks to get my head down on This Big World. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving and Christmas are all bearing down, and my travel cards are about as giftable as it gets. Chiang Mai is cheap, warm and full of other nomad entrepreneurs to swap notes with.

Meanwhile, I’ve left my poor husband in a chilly England, selling our investment properties, while I write this by the pool in the sun.

And yes, before you ask, that’s part of my working strategy.

📍Chiang Mai, Thailand 🇹🇭

Ask me to imagine living in one place for the next 10 years and I feel a cold sweat coming on. I picture the same days on repeat, my world slowly shrinking and a list of places I’ll get to “one day”.

Yet tomorrow I fly to Chiang Mai for 8 weeks on my own, and what I’m most excited about is a routine. Work, exercise, good food, a few new friends and the same rhythm most days.

So do I hate routine or not?

When I look closer, the routine I’m looking forward to has 4 things going for it. I chose it, it feels good, I can change my mind, and it ends. The routine I dread has none of those. The days might look identical, but they’d feel completely different.

I suspect a lot of what we dread works this way. The thing itself is often fine. What frightens us is the idea that we can’t get out of it.

A job feels heavier when you can’t imagine leaving. A house, a town, even a hobby can start to feel like a cage once the door seems to disappear. The reverse is true too. Plenty of hard things become bearable, even enjoyable, once they come with an end date. Most of us can do almost anything for eight weeks.

What’s interesting is that the life I dread is one I’ve never actually lived. I’ve moved more times than I can count since I was 11, so change is familiar and staying put is the unknown. Perhaps for you it’s the other way round, and the thing you fear is simply the thing you’ve never tried.

If something in your life fills you with dread, try this. Give it an end date, even an imaginary one, and notice whether the feeling shifts. “I’ll try this for three months.” “I’ll stay one more year, then review.”

If the dread fades, you’ve learned something useful. You may not need to change the thing at all, you just need to know where the door is. And if it doesn’t fade, that’s worth knowing too.

As for me, I’m off to put my bags down in Chiang Mai and decide how I’d like to spend the following morning. Knowing I’m free to leave is exactly what will make me happy to stay.

Nomad Day #239

I spent all day inside Meta Ads again yesterday, creating ads for my This Big Travel Challenge cards.

I’m working on getting more people to my own store, partly because Amazon has been such a frustrating platform to work with this year, but also because I want to build relationships with my customers.

Attracting customers is only one part of building a business. Giving them a reason to come back matters just as much, and that’s difficult when you don’t know who they are in the first place.

So I’m building traffic to my Shopify store through a mix of organic content and paid ads, which means spending more time wrestling with Meta’s seemingly endless settings, dashboards and buttons that never seem to be where I last left them.

By the end of yesterday, I felt like I’d spent the day fighting with my computer, which reminded me of this post I wrote on the way to Minca in Colombia.

Different country, same bloody battle. 😂

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My FB Ad Fight 

Nomad Day #52

So I had a massive fight with Facebook Ads this morning. Ever since I started using them (& teaching how to use them back in the day), we’ve had a love hate relationship.

When they work they’re without fail the best advertising strategy alive today. The granularity with which they can target your ideal avatar is unsurpassed by any other advertising medium.

However the setup, dashboard, settings, access and all operational mechanisms to set the darn things up continue to be the most frustrating process ever! 🤬

With all their billions of dollars, it beggars belief that they can’t create a user friendly ad creation system that would undoubtedly encourage more people to buy FB Ads & therefore more money in their pockets!

But No, they are intent to keep it (and keep changing it) to make it as complicated and user unfriendly as possible.

A job this morning which should have taken 20 mins, and which I really wanted to finish before heading out to Minca to explore the foothills of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (the highest coastal mountain range in the world), took well over an hour and still isn’t complete.

In the end realising we had to go, I closed my laptop in frustration, ran downstairs to the hotel breakfast area, & angrily berated my husband for not ordering my breakfast along with his as we were running late (which was my fault). 

Poor guy. Believe me he gave as good as he got! 😂

My shoulders have now loosened & we’re on a crazily cramped, hot, little van to Minca, squashed in with 9 others for an hour, which I’ll take over doing FB Ads! 🥵😎😂

📍On route to Minca, Santa Marta, Colombia

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P.S. Minca was fantastic!

Nomad Day #234

Today marks the end of our little jaunt down the East Coast of the US.

New York, to Philadelphia to Washington DC, to Richmond to Williamsburg.

I’ve gone from the vibrant, energetic modernity of NYC, to learn about the Declaration of Independence and the true birthplace of Independent America in Philly (I thought I was just going to climb the Rocky steps!).

To learn about the founding fathers and their hopes and dreams for the country in Washington DC. To get a better understanding of the Civil War in the old capital of the Confederacy – Richmond, and to walk through the American Revolution and the stories of the first English settlers here in Williamsburg some 400 years ago.

I’ve also met up with friends old and new and had a blast!

America is a great and beautiful country because of it’s people, who have greeted us with warmth and kindness throughout (both West Coast & East).

There is still SO much of this enormous country I want to see, and I can’t wait to come back and explore more.

In the meantime, I’ll leave with one of my favourite American phrases ringing in my ears…

“I got you.”

Every time I hear it, whether from a barista, a server, a hotel receptionist, a shop attendant – it makes me feel like they’re giving me a warm hug. 🤗

Til next time, America. 🇺🇸❤️

Nomad Day #233

I spent the bulk of yesterday building this little site and woke this morning having an existential crisis over why.

• What if I write every day for the next 10 years and no one ever reads?
• Why am I even doing this – what’s the end goal here?
• What’s the point doing this with AI about to drastically change the landscape? Is everything about to change forever and content will be a thing of the past? Will people even read blogs, books, newsletters anymore in a few years?
• Haven’t we reached the point of content saturation, so why create more?
• Why do I think my point of view about life, travel, business and aging (disgracefully) is of any interest to anyone else anyway? (This last one has come from a few years of evidence pointing to the opposite).
• And most importantly – have I just left this too late? (I wish I’d started 20 years ago – now there’s a clue!)

So like any normal rational mature independent and intelligent individual, I meditated on this for a bit, asked ChatGPT.

But here’s how that actually works. I talk into my GPT and just the act of talking my problems out loud, means I usually answer them before the GPT confirms what I was thinking anyway.

And as I was mid soliloquy I remembered a quote from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, “Big Magic,” where she said: 

“What’s something you would do if you knew you could fail?” 

Now, read that again because it’s not the old self-development quote, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” 

That quote makes us think, “Yes, I’m going to go out and run that marathon tomorrow with absolutely no training whatsoever,” or, “I’m going to go and start that business,” or, “I’m going to go and do this thing because I know I can’t fail, so I’m going to take that massive leap of faith to do it.” 

No, this is a different question entirely. What would you do even if you knew you could fail? In other words, what is something you are compelled or called to do, and that even if it never worked out, you’d still do it because you love it?

For me, it’s not writing for the sake of writing. I don’t have dreams of being some great literary writer or winning a Pulitzer Prize. What I feel compelled to do is communicate.

I want to share ideas, observations and experiences that might make someone stop for a moment and think, Huh. I’ve never looked at it like that before.

I’m not interested in being a guru. I don’t want to tell people how to live their lives or pretend I’ve figured everything out, because I most certainly haven’t.

But I travel a lot. I see different places and cultures, meet interesting people, learn about history, build businesses, try experiments, make mistakes and spend an unhealthy amount of time questioning how I’m living my own life.

And for some unknown reason that I haven’t quite got to the bottom of yet I feel compelled to share my experiences and learnings (with the faint hope I might make a positive difference to someone else’s day).

But most importantly here’s what Goggins my lovingly named GPT said to me:

I was coincidently reading an interview with Austin Kleon, speaker, author, artist and the line that stood out to me (and clearly the interviewer as she named the article after it) was:

We have no clue what’s going to happen. Not one single one of us can predict tomorrow, how things will play out and where our obsessions, callings or projects will take us.

But here’s what I’m going to hold on to. “I wish I’d started 20 years ago”.

If that little sentence is rattling around in your head, maybe it’s time to start now.

Nomad Day #232

As a lover of the Christmas season, I always like to photograph the first Christmas Tree I see each year. And this year the winner was in Yorktown, Williamsburg on 25th September! 🇺🇸

My birthday is on 13th September and from as early as I can remember straight afterwards everything would start to get Xmassy.

It would start to get dark earlier in the day, shops would hang Xmas decs, colourful lights would start to pop up everywhere and before long, jingle bells was playing on the radio. 🎄

As of today I have no idea where I’ll be for Christmas, but you can bet I have Now That’s What They Call Xmas Volumes 1-4 ready to go! 🎄🤶🥳

The holidays are coming 😎