Whether you are seeking a break for a much-needed vacation, or working face-to-face with colleagues in another office, or stretching your mind to embrace food and cultures you never see, you are caught up in the joy of travel.
Travel brings people together, opens up closed minds, and changes the perspective of the traveler to understand a broader world.
Paron Lake, Peru: photo credit: Willian Justen de Vasconcelles found at unsplash.com
If you are seeking to be a business owner who equates lifestyle freedom with the ability to travel at will, you will discover a life of endless surprises, opportunities, and memories. Travel will help you:
Connect with your audience/customers
Understand the truth behind headlines
Change your perspective
Celebrate life
Connect with your audience/customers
With the rise of technology, and especially social networks, an entrepreneur in the 21st century is automatically in the global marketplace. Even if you run a small neighborhood restaurant, people who visit your area will likely search online for places to eat, and even if you do not have a website, they may end up leaving reviews or recommendations about you on restaurant forums.
If you have an online business, your reach is set by virtue of having your business operating on an Internet open to the world’s seven billion people. If you travel, you will develop an understanding of how people in other countries live, the taboos and restrictions governing their choices, the trends and opportunities growing their marketplace.
The outreach may help you write e-mails or articles that appeal to wider audiences. At the least you will understood the global audience map you can see in Google Analytics or Facebook for business, and give yourself an experience related to targeting specific customers in different markets.
Understand the truth behind headlines
The 24/7 news cycle presents you with headlines designed to attract your attention and drive your emotions. Often these headlines feed on fears and stereotypes that exist about places for other reasons. Without travel, you cannot verify these stories for yourself.
Of course, you do not need to travel into a war zone to find out if the war is real. But in other less volatile places you can walk in the streets, talk to the people and understand their situation. When you prepare for travel and read the history about the place you are visiting, you may also better understand why the civil situation has turned out as you see it, and perhaps how you can help change the perception about places that do not have good reputations.
Change your perspective
Your view of the world is formed by the life you are living. The way you absorb facts and understand details comes from the context in which you live. Well-off people throw glass and plastic bottles into the trash, poor people pull those bottles out of the trash to exchange the products for money. If you travel to where the poor people are and look at how their lives unfold each day, you come to understand the value of the plastic bottle when a person has little else. In some countries, throwing your plastic bottle into the street is acceptable behavior because you are providing a poor person a chance to make some money.
When you see people live in different types of housing – straw, ice, cardboard – you see the range of human ingenuity where people have adapted to their local environment and developed materials from the products they had available.
The same is true with food. When you travel you realize why certain areas have specific foods, because of geography, history and influences. People eat the foodstuffs they can source locally.
Capturing knowledge by walking around and absorbing another culture is rarely difficult, and almost without fail, enlightening.
Celebrate life
The world has more than 200 nation-states, hundreds of islands, and hidden atolls. Each geo-political unit has a history told in religious places, museums, art galleries, and dirt-filled city streets. There are hundreds of languages and local cuisines. Dances, singing and the work of artisans. Setting yourself up to see it all simply means you never run out of things to do and look forward to.
If you give yourself a travel destination that you are always looking forward to visiting, you give yourself a goal, an objective for your work or business that you can prepare for over a fixed period of time. You are never bored because you are preparing for your trip by researching – read books, see movies about your destination. You are not discouraged because you have an exciting trip ahead.
You can be celebrating life at every minute when you are a traveler because the pursuit you have chosen for yourself is one with few limitations and endless openings. You should not run out of something to do.
The value of travel is in its ability to give you more to see in this world than you might have known. You can travel to the town next door or to a country halfway around the world, but either way you are opening up to new possibilities that create memories that could provide you with excitement and joy forever.
