Work or not to Work?

I’ve been thinking some more about my trip, and analyzing the different options that I have and what would be the best. I’ve been thinking more about how to make money on the trip. By going on the trip without money, I’m making the trip a very entrepreneurial venture. I’m forcing myself to be creative, scrappy, and to find ways to make money along the way. Those are things that I really like about that option. But, is that too much to worry about every day? Even if I have enough money in the bank for food every day, that still leaves me plenty of things to worry about. How am I going to get to my next location? Where am I going to stay? etc.

So, the other option, which I’m really liking right now, is trying to do my sales job while I travel. Right now, I’m working 4 hours a day doing phone sales. Everything I use to sell the service, I have access to online. Even the phone calls I make are on a business Skype account. It would be very easy for me to bring my laptop around with me, and to sell remotely. Well, it might still be a struggle because I’d have to find good Wi-Fi in a location where I could talk out loud on my phone. I also don’t even know if this would be a possibility for me. I’m not going to talk to the company about this possibility until I’ve been there for a while, and once I really start doing well with the sales. Once I’m really good, I’m sure they’d be willing to work something out with me.

Anyway, that option appeals to me because money would be something I wouldn’t have to worry about. It would be easier for me to travel more frequently and to see more sites, because I wouldn’t be dependent on my ability to make money. Also, if I have no money on the trip, I might end up getting really crappy jobs that kind of suck to have. I mean, since I graduated, I have kind of been scraping by and doing some random jobs that really haven’t been that great. Although having to use my imagination to find jobs would give me lots of experiences I wouldn’t have otherwise, I’m not sure those are the experiences I want to have. For example, let’s say I get to Cali and I want to go to Hawaii. Although it would interesting to try and find out ways to make enough money to get to Hawaii. What if it takes me a month to get enough money for a plane ticket? Then, I’m in California for a month, and I might get sick of it. Whereas, if I’m working daily, and I have money to travel when I want, it might be more interesting and fun.

I’m not sure which option I would like better. In reality, I’m not even sure doing phone sales remotely is an option. But, there are good and bad things about both options. It really just boils down to what reasons are the most important to me for this trip. If my main reason is to get out of Utah, see and experience as many new places as possible, then it would be better to have a job and money. But, if my main reason is to face all of my fears, learn as much as possible from my experience, then going penniless is the best option.

Another thing I just thought about is how me having to worry about making money every day might actually not be the most entrepreneurial way to go. On this trip, I plan on creating a blog and trying to get as many people to follow it as possible. I can learn a ton from the whole process of creating and maintaining a blog. I’ll want to write good content every day, continue to adapt the blog to meet the wants of my growing number of readers, learn better ways of monetizing it, figure out new ideas to market the blog, etc. If I have to worry about money every day, then I might not be able to spend as much time figuring out how to make my blog a success. Some of the travel blogs I have found have turned into full-time jobs for the writers.

As I was thinking of any new ideas I could use for my blog today, I gained some inspiration from a blog I was visiting called WhereTheHeckIsMatt? The guy does a little jig at all of the different places that he visits. I mean, it’s kind of funny, but the cool thing is how his little jig became viral, and people started telling others to watch the goofy guy dancing. Well, somehow, Stride gum ended up getting a copy of one of his dance videos. So, they paid for him to travel around the world and do dance videos, twice. Anyway, as I was thinking about something unique I could do, I thought of doing music videos. I don’t know exactly what I could do, but I was thinking of just making music videos about different portions of my trip. The would be parodies on existing songs, and then I would just post them on my blog and online. My first idea is to make a parody of the song by Miley Cyrus, Party in the USA:

Instead of Party in the USA, I would make the song be “Couchsurfing in the USA”. And let’s admit it, Miley Cyrus songs and music videos are perfect to do parodies of. So, I’m not exactly sure how my music videos would turn out, but I think it would be fun to do parody music videos about certain aspects of my trip. If I do a somewhat decent job, that might be something that could go viral. So, I might have to learn some video editing skills before I go.