Want to Work from Anywhere? It’s Vital to Do This First

An Anywhereist is someone who’s decided, for whatever reason, to position themselves to do their best work from anywhere.

As an Anywhereist, your life needs to be nimble and light, so you start by getting rid of whatever’s slowing or weighing you down.

That starts with getting rid of baggage, which we talked about in our last two issues. There’s the physical baggage, and the mental baggage. If you missed those newsletters, you can find them here and here.

The next thing you need is a growth mindset.

Carol Dweck defined a growth vs fixed mindset in her book Mindset: The New Psychology for Success.

Someone with a fixed mindset believes that ability, character, personality, creativity, and intelligence are fixed. We can’t change them, and any success we achieve recognizes that innate ability.

A growth mindset, however, posits that failure is not evidence of any innate lack on our part, but is a springboard for growth and improvement.

Where someone with a fixed mindset will avoid ”failure” at all costs, because they see it as a reflection on who they are, someone with a growth mindset will recognize that “failure” is merely a marker on the road to accomplishment.

Someone with a growth mindset is open to learning, and recognizes new opportunities even if they’ll require stretching, while someone with a fixed mindset will avoid anything that could lead to “failure.”

When my husband was in high school, he joined the track team. However, he didn’t practice because he believed that success depended solely on innate talent. It was only later in life he recognized that training leads to improvement, and that someone who works to get better can surpass someone who relies only on raw talent.

He moved from a fixed to a growth mindset, took up cycling, and at 60+ he made the twenty- and thirty-somethings he rode with in Panama work hard to keep up with him.

Creativity, exploration, and innovation require a growth mindset.

The explorer Christopher Columbus had a growth mindset, believing that he could reach the riches of Asia by sailing west, rather than south and east around Africa. He wasn’t the first to think so, but it wasn’t until a king with a growth mindset was on the throne that the voyage took place.

Here are a few ways to tell the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset:

• Where the fixed mindset avoids challenges, the growth mindset embraces them.
• Where the fixed mindset gives up at the first obstacle, the growth mindset figures out how to go up, over, or around it.
• Where the fixed mindset sees making an effort as futile, the growth mindset knows it’s the path to mastery.
• Where the fixed mindset feels threatened by others’ success, the growth mindset learns from others’ success.

Someone with a fixed mindset will find it very difficult, or even impossible, to create an Anywhereist lifestyle.

Fortunately, there are ways you can retrain your brain to develop more of a growth mindset.

Dweck lays it all out in her book.

Read: Mindset: The New Psychology for Success

Tips & Tools

Mindset

Here’s an excellent summary of Carol Dweck’s book, from Brain Pickings, complete with a helpful infographic.

Read: Fixed vs Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets that Shape Our Lives

Location

Looking to make a move but want to stay in the US? Here’s a semi-helpful list of the 10 best states for remote work.

Why is it only “semi helpful?” Because I have one beef with the criteria used to determine what makes a state the “best.”

While infrastructure and fast internet are super important, I believe the way a state is handling the pandemic today is at least equally vital. This isn’t even mentioned in the article, and their top choice for “best” state is also a state where COVID is raging and vaccination rates are low.

Read: These Are America’s 10 Best States for Remote Work

Numbeo is a company which tracks all sorts of data from country to country. One of their rankings is for quality of life.

According to their mid-year ranking of 83 countries, Switzerland tops the list, while Nigeria is at the bottom.

Their quality of life numbers take into account:

• Purchasing power
• Safety
• Health care
• Cost of living
• Pollution index
• Climate index
• Commute time
• Property price to income ratio

Of the top 13 countries, 12 are in Europe – the only outlier is Australia. The US comes in 17th place.

Read: Quality of Life Index by Country: 2021 Mid-Year

Habits

This article by Ash Jurberg is interesting, because it shows he has a growth mindset – he’s willing to try something new that he’s initially skeptical about – in order to improve his results.

In it, he demonstrates how posting on LinkedIn every day for 30 days made a big difference in his business.

Read: Posting on LinkedIn Every Day for 30 Days Taught Me 7 Powerful Lessons

Tools

Are you familiar with Zapier?

Zapier creates little micro apps to help you automate specific tasks on the web. For example, you can connect your favorite note-taking app with Trello to save ideas in both places when you type it into one. Or automatically send an upcoming calendar event to a Slack channel. Or save email attachments to the cloud.

It’s a handy tool on its own, and they also provide some good information about other tools that can help businesses of all sizes.

Here’s Zapier’s take on the best project management tools for small business in 2021. (You know my preference, right?)

Read: The best project management for small business in 2021

Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links. That means, if you click and purchase, you pay exactly the same amount and I’ll earn a small commission. These fees help me to keep the free information flowing.

In Case You Missed It. . .

Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes.

Lots of people start blogs that serve as personal diaries or journals that they share with family and friends. At the other end of the spectrum are people who blog as part of an actual business. Bloggers are people who want to:

• Share their personal experiences with friends and family
• Share their personal experiences with the public
• Share knowledge about a subject
• Make some side income sharing their knowledge
• Run a business, which includes a blog

As you can imagine, a website that’s appropriate for someone who wants to share personal experiences is quite different from what the business blogger needs.

Read More. . .

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