If you send a rocket towards the moon, about 90% of the time it’s off course – it fails its way to the moon by continually making mistakes and correcting them” ~ Price Pritchett, You Squared.
I’ve loved this quote, ever since I read it way back when we were just starting out on our own location independent journey. I love it because, as a recovering perfectionist, it reminds me that failure is an option and that it usually isn’t half as bad as you expect it to be.
In fact, just to prove that point, when it comes to our overall experience as location independent entrepreneurs, we’ve failed. Totally.
From the outside looking in, it’s easy to think we live the life so many people want to live. We run our own successful business online, we can choose to live anywhere and we get to stay at home every single day and raise our daughter the way we want. No compromises. We count ourselves as blessed and are grateful every single day for the life we lead.
What you may not know however is that we’ve have totally and utterly failed in our mission. Let me explain…
We initially set out on this journey to find ourselves a home. A place that wasn’t the UK, where we could settle down, build our lives, make lasting friendships and call home. On that journey we’ve lived in and run our business from Panama, Buenos Aires, the West Indies, Toronto, Thailand, South Africa, Turkey, HK, Italy and more. But we didn’t find what we were looking for.
We came close. Achingly close. We loved Cape Town & the Western Cape – we even had a way to stay and make it our home in the form of a high paying job, offered to me on a plate should I choose to accept it. And we loved the island lifestyle of the Caribbean – floating in the azure blue ocean, relaxing into the slow pace of life and thinking we could live that way forever – but we still didn’t find anything which felt like home. Until now, that is.
You may wonder – after all the exotic places we’ve been – where exactly this place we now call home is and here’s the irony…it is right back where we started, in the UK, in the house we’ve been renting out for the past 4 years.
And so we failed.
If you’d asked me 4 years ago, this is the very last place I expected to be living right now and yet it feels right. For now, at least. Some people have questioned whether that still makes us location independent.
My answer to this – and whenever anyone asks me whether they’re location independent because they don’t fit into the ‘conventional’ view most people have of location independent nomads who have no base and travel constantly – is this: If you feel you are, then you are. And I still feel like I am.
For the past few years, I’ve emphasised the fluid definition of what it means to be location independent. Maybe you…
- Travel permanently with no base to call home
- Move between 2-3 bases in different countries throughout the year
- Have a permanent base but take extended trips away
- Have a permanent base and stay there 100% of the time working from local coffee shops when you want
All of the above can be location independent; it’s the *ability* to live and work from anywhere you choose which makes you location independent, not whether you actually do or not.
And so yes, we’ve failed.
But we’re ok with that because in the grand scheme of things, we’ve also succeeded. We’ve never felt happier than we do now. Our business has never generated more income and made more of an impact on other people as it is doing now and there is nothing we want, nor anywhere we feel a burning need to go right now.
Of course there are plenty of places we’d still like to go – and yep, we’re definitely feeling that itch right now but it’s not the burning need we’ve experienced before.
And the biggest lesson we’ve learned and journey we’ve been on is this…
Learning to appreciate what you have right now, to be happy with where you are right now and to be open to and ok with failing, whatever your goal is…that’s the kind of failure/success worth striving for.
Because you never know what failure lies around the corner, that might be even better than the success you had planned.