topagraphy

Hello World. 

**** 

About eight years ago at the age of 30, I took a sabbatical from work and spent three months traveling Southeast Asia. It was an incredible journey, and while I met great people on that journey and a friend joined me for two weeks, for all intents and purposes that journey was alone. And with solitude there is no one to remember that journey with. As that trip ended I told myself I would only do extensive traveling again with a life partner—someone to remember all the experiences with, good and bad, for the remainder of our lives. 

As every year passed my desire to travel grew, but I was no closer to finding my person. I wanted to travel the world and told myself that I would have to make this journey solo. I set a tentative target age to travel starting somewhere between 38 and 40. This would allow me to hit some professional benchmarks I had, but this would likely mean that I wouldn’t find my person, wherever they were, until my mid-40s. 

Then something unexpected and great happened. I met my future wife the day after my 35th birthday. Somehow my off-brand humor and loud socks weren’t too much for her, and our relationship moved faster than I ever thought one would. We moved in together around six months, talked about marriage shortly thereafter, and about 14 months later, while visiting her parents in her home country of Brazil, I proposed. After some shock, light cursing, and laughter, she said yes, and we married in April 2024. 

Travel, culture, and new experiences have always been a large part of our lives. Her life experiences and travel led her throughout South America, Central America, and Europe, and mine mainly had been in Asia. We had talked about extended travel early on in the relationship, but coming to the decision jointly to take a year off to travel was not quick or easy. Our lives had become more complicated with a house, our son Zuni (a spunky cowboy corgi), and a comfortable life and careers.

In the beginning of 2024 though, we started discussing this more seriously. Work hadn’t been fun for a long time, and while I could easily get another job, I wanted to do something big before I made that transition. We discussed at length for about eight or nine months and eventually agreed that there was no time like the present to achieve our dreams of travel. 

So, in a matter of weeks, we packed up all of our possessions, put our place up for rent, got a travel bag for Zuni, and hit the road (or sky)! 

While we don’t have a strong itinerary yet, we’re working on it, and the first part of the trip will be in Brazil, staying with my wife’s family and exploring the country (don’t worry, Zuni’s home base will be Brazil).

Outside of enjoying the time off and other cultures, I want to experience both personal and professional growth for this year. I want this to be an incredible trip around the sun that will impact our lives across multiple aspects, and document my experiences to the best of my ability. 

My underlying thesis for this year is as follows: 

Language: My primary goal for this experience, and most likely the hardest, will be to have a base level of proficiency in Portuguese, my wife’s native tongue. While I would equate this to around a B1-esque level of knowledge for CEFR, what’s most important is to have a solid foundation where I can build proficiency over the next three to five years. First and foremost, this is important to understand my wife, her personality, her humor (she swears she’s funnier in Portuguese!), family, and friends on a deeper level, but there are also professional elements as well. 

Brazil is a hotbed of technology and a leading country for near-shore intelligent development work. While many people in the US know Spanish as their second language, much fewer Americans know Portuguese (and the inverse is true for Brazil, more people know Spanish than English). There is projected to be continued demand in Brazil, and having this skillset will further set me apart in the job market when I return. 

Health: Not exactly a hot take, but I’ve always felt that extended travel does so much good for both mental and physical health. Throughout my life, I’ve struggled with mental health challenges, and in the last several years I feel that I’ve finally jumped that hurdle with my life through behavioral and environmental changes. This is not that type of goal, and while mental health issues never leave you completely, I am satisfied with that part of my health and want to prioritize my physical health. 

I’ve always been amazed at how weight falls off during prolonged travel, and I become an expert on putting that weight back on within six months of my return. I want to leverage this time to build a better foundation core health metrics – fat loss. 

More than ever, I’ve come to realize over the last several years that health is your greatest asset.  I am very active, regularly weigth training, cardio with running / biking / hike, and more than capable on a snowboard. However, I carry a decent amount of extra weight and the fact is arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. are independent of activity. You can lower your blood pressure through exercise, but those effects are more nominal then losing weight + proper diet + exercise combined. I don’t want to be spending my latter years on a couch due to muscle loss or arthritis, so now is the time to further solidify my foundational health. 

Financials: From early on in life, independent financial responsibility was hammered into my psyche, and since my first ‘real’ job I prioritized saving and investing. This mindset, smart behaviors, and overall great markets for stockholders over the past 10 years have allowed us to take a step back this year and focus on new experiences on this blue dot we call Earth. 

My returns for 2024, pending any crashes or significant gains for the remainder of the year, are around 28%. These are objectively great returns historically, especially considering I leverage a conservative 7% annualized return for my projected 30-year forecast. That being said, these returns weren’t abnormal for 2024. The return beat the three markets, but I know plenty of people who had returns of 40% or more this year. 

I don’t attribute these gains solely to skill, nor to luck, but rather a mixture of the two with an addition of timing and good, repeatable behavior.

Quantitatively, my financial goals are to not ‘spend’ any money this year, or phrased differently, have our net assets in 2025 be 0.0001% greater than they are today. My true quantitative goal is more aggressive than that, but I will save that number for my own personal analysis.

Qualitatively, I want to further increase my knowledge of the markets: books, real-time research, and identifying trends for the future. While I am aggressive in my portfolio, I feel as though I sometimes lack conviction, and can be passive on timing when choosing stocks, which has led to missed gains. Increasing my knowledge and confidence won’t eliminate bad picks entirely, but it will help grow our portfolio faster to a future date where we don’t have to work anymore.

Technical: 

I’m a big believer in continued development, both personally and professionally. I’ve spent all of my life in technology sales, but have also pushed myself to continue learning. 

Several years ago, I pursued and achieved my Master’s in Business analytics / AI. It was the hardest and most rewarding achievement of my life. For an entire year, on top of working ~50 hours a week and traveling, I was also studying 30-40 hours a week and attending classes on the weekend. To say it was tough was an understatement, but having this knowledge has been great, and has allowed me to understand topics and theories across AI, Statistics, Decision Making. Gaining this deeper understanding was invaluable, and was able to collaborate successfully both internally with AI teams at work, as well as have deeper conversations with CIOs and Ph.D.s of Analytics at my customers.  

Today, it’s evident that everyone will need to learn additional skill sets with generative AI if they don’t want to be left behind. Partly because of this, over the next year, I want to enhance my skillset in app development, primarily focused on generative AI, and build several apps. While I originally thought I should learn ‘proper’ coding languages from a foundational sense, recent conversations with past colleagues have shown that it’s entirely possible to build great apps, ableit with lackluster interfaces, to solve key business problems. 

Many people are fear-mongering and hypothesizing about what jobs may be lost and how our world will change, and the true answer is nobody knows. I believe that much of the jobs lost will be low-cost development jobs in places like India, as well as a drastic reduction of call center employees and entry-level sales (SDRs & BDRs). 

That said, I don’t think there’s a better time to be alive for intelligent, creative, motivated people. A gap I’ve always felt for entrepreneurship for myself has been hard skills like coding, but I have great problem-solving skills and am highly creative. Like many people, I have seen ‘ideas’ for technologies that I’ve had come to reality by people with those skills. Now, people like me who lack those coding skills can start to build apps that have a meaningful impact, whether that’s B2B, B2C, or even personal use. 

*****

I want to use this site to document my journey across the world and the preceding thesis and to help those struggling with figuring out the ‘how to’ aspect of travel or learn tips and tricks across language, technology, and finances. 

Give me a follow, leave a comment, and above all, enjoy your life. There are too few trips around the sun.