It was over 4 years in the making, but my girlfriend and I had done it. We had saved $50,000, quit our jobs, sold all of our stuff and bought a 1-way ticket to Hong Kong. It was time for a career break to spend a year in Asia just traveling and enjoying life.
Why was I traveling?
Many people travel to “find themselves” or “figure out what they want with life”. This was never my intention. I thought I had it figured out already. I liked my job (enough), I liked the area that I lived in and I liked the career path I was heading down. I had worked for a large company for over 4-years. I had steadily gained responsibility and earned promotions. When I was finished traveling, I assumed I would join another company and continue down my path. How wrong I was.
The Entrepreneurial Bug
My entrepreneurial bug started as I researched long-term travel. The research led me to people who showed there was a different way to live life. There was Chris Guilleabeau, Brian Armstrong, Kirsty Henderson, Nora Dunn and this was just the beginning. I started exploring what it meant to be an entrepreneur and became fascinated with Andrew Warner’s Mixergy interviews, 37 Signals, Jason Cohen, Dharmesh Shah & This Week in Startups. I was hooked.
My girlfriend and I were seeing new cities, meeting new people and doing a lot of fun things. I was trying to enjoy my time off, but it’s funny – when you no longer have a job, a commute, chores, and obligations, you end up with a lot of free time to think. I couldn’t shut my brain off.
Within a couple months I had an itchy mind (yup, I just made that term up…think itchy feet) and I started looking for problems that I could solve. I realized one of the biggest problems I could solve was one that I was experiencing every day. Figuring out what to do and how to get around in the new cities I was visiting was a huge pain!
Wikitravel gives a nice overview, but after that it was pretty much downhill. I wanted someone to tell me what the best things in the city were and how to specifically get around. I wanted something cheap. I wanted to see the city like a local and I still wanted to do it on my own. Thus spawned Unanchor.
Building Unanchor
The idea was simple. Local experts from around the world would be able to write travel guides and sell them on our site. What I particularly loved about this idea was that if it took off, the writers and the community would keep most of the money. I’d be helping the community of writers while making travelers’ lives easier and more enjoyable. The only question was ‘how do I build it’?
In high school I had built websites and in college I had taken some programming classes. Things had changed a lot since then – that was quite a few years ago. From the interviews I was listening to and the blogs I was reading, I knew the best way to start was to build it myself. So I decided to teach myself to code. I downloaded and read every page of “Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites“. At this point we were settled down in South Korea, giving me more time to learn. Within a couple months I had built the first version. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the trick. I started getting some interest and eventually found a partner who could help me improve it.
What Happened?
Fast forward almost a year and a half. We now have almost 100 itineraries for 75 different cities around the world. Travelers are using the itineraries and saying great things about them.
While I wish I could say that Unanchor took off and it now makes enough money to support me and my wife, that is unfortunately not the case. No matter what anyone says, starting a business is hard and takes a lot of time. Unanchor has grown and I’m proud of how far we’ve come, but it hasn’t grown fast enough. Once again I’ve found myself at a cross-roads trying to figure out what’s next. We’ve decided to move back to the Bay Area and I’m looking for a job now. I now know I want to work for a small company with a big goal. I won’t give up on Unanchor, though, and I’ll continue to work on it during nights and weekends.
It’s funny how things worked out. I never thought I’d be the type of person to “find themselves while traveling”, but that’s exactly what ended up happening.
Unanchor Contest Giveaway!
I’ve worked with the MPG team to create an Unanchor contest giveaway. Just leave a comment below, stating which Unanchor itinerary you’d be interested in having. And at the end of the day February 22nd, we’ll randomly select 2 people and give the itinerary away. Good luck!
Jason Demant finds Will Ferrell to be hilarious, hates the feeling of velvet and has a strange phobia of touching his own belly button. He grew up in Northern California and didn’t really leave. At 23 he got his first passport stamps and has been hooked on travel ever since. Jason and his wife were able to save for 2 years and in October 2009, they quit their Silicon Valley jobs to travel around Asia for a year. It was during that year abroad that he discovered the need for, and launched, Unanchor.
After an epic five-day journey including 4×4, bus, truck, ox cart, wading through rivers, trudging through bogs, and a blissful speedboat, I finally arrived in Andavaodak, Madagascar. I would spend my next three months here, diving, researching, and working in a remote paradise. This was the farthest point on the planet I have ever been, away from civilization and, as I was soon to find out, far away from proper medical care. The trip started out wonderful, diving or boat marshaling in the morning, studying in the early afternoon, capped off by football games on the sandy white beaches.
You’ve just returned from an inspiring career break and are inspired by the experience to write a book. Think it’s not possible? Alexis Grant offers tips on how you can make it happen.
For Richard Yang, it’s not about the destination – it’s the journey that matters most. And he now applies the lessons he’s learned from travel to his life and career goals.
Now that you have returned from your career break and extended honeymoon, how would you describe yourselves?
I always feel more lost upon returning home. It probably doesn’t help that my husband and I live in a camp trailer, but to us wheels are freedom.
Day-to-day cubicle doldrums didn’t motivate me to take my career break, instead it was an inspiring interview for a travel-related job. While I didn’t get the position I still remember what the interviewer said to me: “If you want to travel, then travel.”
Having spent the majority of my twenties studying for my international business degree and climbing my way up the career ladder in a London marketing agency, my opportunities for ‘real travel’ had been limited to a few, weeks in Thailand, India and Morocco with the rest of my trips abroad taking the form of long weekends escaping London to visit European locations like France and Spain.
Jim & Rhonda Delameter reflect on their previous career break as they begin planning for another.
- Why am I giving up such a great job back home?
There are some career breakers who turn their travels into a new career path. But for most, like our Seattle hosts Paul & Christine Milton, they knew they wanted to go back to their careers.
In college, did you feel pressure to pick just the right major in order to start that perfect career path? So did our Las Vegas host, JoAnna Haugen.
Think your career break is the biggest challenge you’ll experience? Re-entry and reverse culture shock is a challenge and journey all unto itself. Just ask our San Francisco Host, Sarah Lavender Smith.
Our Los Angeles host, Lisa Niver Rajna was just a couple of months into dating George when she said yes to joining him on a trip to Fiji. And while in Fiji, he presented the idea of taking a career break together.
Adam Seper, our St. Louis host, also followed someone else’s dream – his wife’s.
Although seven months is a little too long for my liking, I will never stop traveling. It’s not a bug; it’s a disease, but in the most positive sense. I return from my time abroad and see my world with new eyes. Minor irritations are just that: Minor. As for those friends and relatives that keep me at a distance so as not to catch my madness, well, I want to hold them closer than ever. I twist their arms to take weeks off from work, and if they aren’t ready for weeks then just days.
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