Quote:
Originally Posted by live2ski66
Hi Yougurtz, just addressing a piece of your post
As of now I sometimes work more than 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, until I have collapsed even, and I am still thousands of dollars away from making my deadline for August-September, 2014. If I don’t do it this summer, I have to wait for next summer, because it can’t be during the colder months.
I know how exciting it is to pick the coolest place in the world to visit. I admire your tenacity, but I worry about how much time (20hrs/day) you are spending to meet your goal. You may be able to pull this off for a while, but it is very difficult to sustain, even if you are the perfect specimen.
Have you thought about expanding your goal to accomplish your trip from one to two years? I assumed you calculated the costs based on accomplishing your goal in one year and how much work it would take to get there. Crunch the numbers if you use a two year target date. My guess is you could back off on work and enjoy your life today. You may be able to save a little more so you can stay longer or upgrade your ticket to business or first class. Long trips in the back of the bus are horrible, you are cramped in like sardines, screaming kids, no leg/arm room, and you might have to buy you in-flight McDonalds at $20. In Business Class you sometimes get the sleeping pods/cocoons with movies and video games, good food and booze all free. First class is even better. If one of your goals is photography once you get to your destination, you could spend a little money studying/practicing techniques, you might want to invest in a second camera so you have one with a close up lens, the other a distance lens.
My bet is if you back off just a little, you will have a trip you will never forget.
Do you remember the Hare and the Turtle story? The hare takes off like a bat out of hell, but gets easily distracted and instead of picking a direct route to the finish line, the hare visits everyone and everything. The turtle, knowing that he is slow by nature, knew he had to be methodical, one foot after the other. The turtle refused to get distracted, stuck to his plan and wins the race.
I have no doubt if you give your planning and savings efforts a little more time, you will have a far better experience. Hell you might even look on match.com for the location you want to go do, develop a long distance pen pal and when you get there you'll have your own private tour guide.
Just a thought from someone who has done the 20hrs/day and when I got to the vacation location I spent the first four days catching up on my sleep.
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The countries I would like to visit will all be done in a private tour setting because not enough tourists visit these places and some of them are somewhat unstable. (Please don't ask about this!)
What frustrates me about waiting longer to accomplish these kinds of goals of mine is that the longer I wait the more behind I become. Everyone else is already doing this, already accomplishing things, and I've accomplished
nothing.
Everyone I know has degrees, travels, and have accomplished all these major milestones in their lives, and what have I done? I have no formal education, I've never travelled, I feel like I have accomplished nothing at all in life. Something doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me when everyone else has already accomplished that as well and more.
An excellent microcosm of life and how I feel was the vocational training I took. Of the whole class, I was the
only one to fail the final test, and I not only failed it, I failed it
twice. What a humiliation it was for everyone to know this. Sure, I might have eventually passed the test, but at that point it no longer felt like an accomplishment, it felt like a less extreme humiliation.
Always I feel like I am the one that fails, struggles, comes last, etc., and I want to be and feel successful. I want to be an academic and smart like those with a formal education, not a drop out that people look down on; I want to tell stories of my worldly adventures, not sitting on the sidelines with nothing to contribute; I want to accomplish and do the things everyone else does.
Instead I have to accept that I can't accomplish anything that I would like, or I have to alter my goal to make it more realistic but lose the sense of accomplishment that would otherwise come with it. Another example: school! I'm not smart enough to do well in the intelligent level classes, therefore to achieve high grades I take a dumbed down class, but then I don't feel accomplished because I know that I am in an easier class for dumber students.
I don't like who I am