Firstgiving (www.firstgiving.com)
Firstgiving.com allows you to create an online fund-raising page. Donations can be made through your personal URL. I have used Firstgiving in coordination with a nonprofit called Room to Read to build schools in both Nepal and Vietnam, with more countries pending: www.firstgiving.com/timferriss and www.firstgiving.com/timferriss2. If you specifically want to help animals, for example, you can click on a related link and access websites for hundreds of different animal charities, and then decide which one you want to donate to. The UK version of the website is http://www.justgiving.com.
Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org)
Visitors to this website will find links to charities in need of donations as well as opportunities to do volunteer work. They can also set up an automated credit card donation online.
3. Take a learning mini-retirement in combination with local volunteering.
Take a mini-retirement—six months or more if possible—to focus on learning and serving. The longer duration will permit a language focus, which in turn enables more meaningful interaction and contribution through volunteering.
For the duration of this trip, note self-criticisms and negative self-talk in a journal. Whenever upset or anxious, ask “why” at least three times and put the answers down on paper. Describing these doubts in writing reduces their impact twofold. First, it’s often the ambiguous nature of self-doubt that hurts most. Defining and exploring it in writing—just as with forcing colleagues to e-mail—demands clarity of thought, after which most concerns are found to be baseless. Second, recording these concerns seems to somehow remove them from your head.
But where to go and what to do? There is no one right answer to either. Use the following questions and resources to brainstorm:
What makes you most angry about the state of the world?
What are you most afraid of for the next generation, whether you have children or not?
What makes you happiest in your life? How can you help others have the same?
There is no need to limit yourself to one location. Remember Robin, who traveled through South America for a year with her husband and seven-year-old son? The three of them spent one to two months doing volunteer work in each location, including building wheelchairs in Banos, Ecuador, rehabilitating exotic animals in the Bolivian rain forest, and shepherding leather-back sea turtles in Suriname.
How about doing archaeological excavation in Jordan or tsunami relief on the islands of Thailand? These are just two of the dozens of foreign relocation and volunteering case studies in each issue of
Hands on Disaster Response: www.hodr.org
Project Hope: www.projecthope.org
Relief International: www.ri.org
International Relief Teams: www.irteams.org
Airline Ambassadors International: www.airlineamb.org
Ambassadors for Children:
www.ambassadorsforchildren.org
Relief Riders International:
www.reliefridersinternational.com
Habitat for Humanity Global Village Program:
www.habitat.org
Planeta: Global Listings for Practical Ecotourism:
www.planeta.com
4. Revisit and reset dreamlines.
Following the mini-retirement, revisit the dreamlines set in Definition and reset them as needed. The following questions will help:
What are you good at?
What could you be the best at?
What makes you happy?
What excites you?
What makes you feel accomplished and good about yourself?
What are you most proud of having accomplished in your life? Can you repeat this or further develop it?
What do you enjoy sharing or experiencing with other people?
5. Based on the outcomes of steps 1–4, consider testing new part- or full-time vocations.
Full-time work isn’t bad if it’s what you’d rather be doing. This is where we distinguish “work” from a “vocation.”
If you have created a muse or cut your hours down to next to nothing, consider testing a part-time or full- time vocation: a true calling or dream occupation. This is what I did with this book. I can now tell people I’m a writer rather than giving them the two-hour drug dealer explanation. What did you dream of being when you were a kid? Perhaps it’s time to sign up for Space Camp or intern as an assistant to a marine biologist.
Recapturing the excitement of childhood isn’t impossible. In fact, it’s required. There are no more chains—or excuses—to hold you back.
81. Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist famous for proposing “Mas-low’s Hierarchy of Needs,” would term this goal a “peak experience.”
82. There is a place for koans and rhetorical meditative questions, but these tools are optional and outside the scope of this book. Most questions without answers are just poorly worded.
83. Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta,
16. The Top 13 New Rich Mistakes
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.
—FRANK WILCZEK, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics
Ho imparato che niente e impossibile, e anche che quasi niente e facile … (I’ve learned that nothing is impossible, and that almost nothing is easy …)
—ARTICOLO 31 (Italian rap group), “Un Urlo”
Mistake are the name of the game in lifestyle design. It requires fighting impulse after impulse from the old world of retirement-based life deferral. Here are the slipups you will make. Don’t get frustrated. It’s all part of the
