Chris Guillebeau's Blog

Do you find yourself dreading the holiday season, or just not excited about it? If so, I promise you’re not the only one.

One report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness suggests that 64% of people with mental health issues feel worse during the holidays.

Whether you have a diagnosed mental illness or not, you might just be sad, depressed, or anxious during this time. This is … normal.

To be clear, if you’re a person who loves the holidays, awesome! I don’t begrudge your ...

Highlights: in the year 2050, we still haven’t met any aliens, Zoom is like Myspace, and American football goes away. There’s much more in the post below.
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Last year I read Remembrance of Earth’s Past, a science fiction trilogy by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The total length runs to more than 1,300 pages, but I loved it so much I would have kept reading if there was another book in the series.

The story has several themes and takes place across tens of thousands of years. Repeatedly, ...

TLDR: An asymmetrical risk is one where the potential reward greatly outweighs the potential loss. Identify and take more of these risks.

Every so often, a news article that offers “expert advice” on getting upgraded at the airport makes the rounds. Inevitably, the advice includes something about how you should “dress well and ask nicely.”

Real travel experts always roll their eyes at such advice. These days, almost all upgrades are handled through computer systems based on elite st...

Hey there, would you like some money?

Would you like free money?

Would you like money you can pick up from the ground and put in your pocket, at least metaphorically speaking?

If so, maybe you should read this post.

As the world has been spinning off its axis over the past year or two, many people have decided to make some changes. They’ve quit their jobs, sometimes without a safety net. Even investment bankers, typically paid large sums to...

One time, Will Smith was working on a film set in Toronto. It was the middle of winter and they were shooting night scenes, so the actors and crew worked 6pm to 6am. Brrr!

During breaks, Smith could have huddled in his trailer, complaining about the bitter cold. Instead, he ran around making jokes and delivering hot chocolate to crew members. He acted on a question that he later explained is constantly on his mind: “How can I make this experience more magical?“

Working in the cold s...

Strategy: To increase your risk tolerance, remind yourself of risky decisions that have turned out well.

As with the list of things you’ve done that few other people have, this is not merely a list of accomplishments. The key point is to identify risks you’ve taken, bold moves, and other decisions you made that could have gone south but ended up paying off.

Of course, what’s “bold” for you may be different from me, and vice versa. But here are a few of mine:

Among other things, the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was known for an outrageous mustache that frightened away potential soulmates. He also said a lot of outrageous things, which caused him to be shunned by much of society at the time.

Before publishing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his best known work in which he proclaimed “God is dead,” he wrote a book titled The Joyful Wisdom (originally: The Gay Science).

In that book, he posed a question that may be even more intere...

You know how there’s something you’ve been putting off? I don’t just mean for a couple of days; I mean for a long time. Maybe you’ve had it on your to-do list every day for the past fifteen days. Every morning, you think, “I’ll finally do that thing today” … but you don’t. The next day, you dutifully carry it over again … and you still don’t complete the task.

I speak from experience, of course. And ...

TLDR: Being uncomfortable is not the same as being unsafe. Avoid things that are fundamentally unsafe, but move in the direction of your discomfort.

When I think about my early years of world travel, there are a few times where I genuinely felt unsafe. Those aren’t memories I care to relive, and overall I feel very fortunate to have been to all sorts of places that most travelers avoid: Libya, Syria, Somaliland, Afghanistan, and so on.

Most of the time—by an enormous margin—I felt sa...

In what now feels like a previous life, I used to travel around the world almost every month. I slowed down a bit two years before the pandemic started, but I still took time for an international trip every six weeks at most.

I was also involved in the early days of the “travel hacking” world. I founded a service, the Travel Hacking Cartel, that served 12,000 members over nearly a decade. I also blogged regularly about credit card deals and other interesting opportunities: getting a hai...