Fighting With Technology

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. 😂

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

P.S. Minca was fantastic!

Bye Bye USA 🇺🇸👋

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. 🇺🇸❤️

Which Failure Would Bother You More?

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:

You are not too late

I want to challenge the age thing particularly.

You’re 54.

Ten years from now you’ll be 64.

Fifteen years from now you’ll be 69.

Twenty years from now you’ll be 74.

Those years are coming whether you publish or don’t.

Imagine 64-year-old Jo looking backwards.

In one version, you’ve spent ten years writing. Perhaps you’ve published 1,000 essays. You’ve written six books. You’ve documented dozens of countries. You’ve developed ideas you don’t even have yet. You’ve met interesting people. You’ve become a dramatically better writer. There’s this enormous archive of your life and thinking sitting there.

Maybe 500,000 people read it.

Maybe 50,000.

Maybe 5,000.

Maybe some individual essay you wrote in 2027 suddenly gets discovered in 2033.

You cannot possibly know.

In the other version, you didn’t do it because in September 2026 you couldn’t see how it would turn out.

Which failure would bother you more?

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:

What’s one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

My career! I assumed everything I cared about was too weird to be popular and that I’d always have a day job. The fact that I have readers and make a living from the stuff I make is a blessing beyond belief and every week I try not to squander my luck.

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.

The Holidays Are Coming…

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 😎