Vagabonding By Rolf Potts {Book Review}

One of my favourite movies of all time is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street with Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen.  In this movie, Charlie Sheen a very promising talent in the stock market told his girlfriend about his dreams and why he is hustling on Wall Street so much.

“I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I’m thirty and I can get out of this racket, and I’ll be able to ride my motorcycle across China”.

This scene, to me, very much captures the essence of how the western world sees long-term travelling.  We see travel as some kind ultra-luxurious recurring dream that is only reserved for the ultra-privileged.  Rolf Potts makes a brilliant calculation in his book Vagabonding.  He shows that if Charlie Sheen would have cleaned toilets for seven months, he could have made his dream a reality and have had enough money to start his adventure.  And, with three months more of cleaning toilets, he would have enough money to buy a new bike as well.

How is that possible?

We believe that long-term travel is something that we can only do after we have become super successful.  Coming from a psychological background, I have a natural curiosity to find out what people really want to do and why their behaviour differs so much from what they want.  One of the questions I am asking people a lot is: “If you were to be given $2,500 every month of passive income, what would you do with your life”?

The answer that I got most often is that they would quit their current job and travel the world.  Growing up in Europe, this mental fallacy is most manifested in our view of retirement.  We kind of believe that we have to work our behinds off until we are 65 and then we can do whatever our heart desires.  The idea that you invest and sacrifice the most valuable years of your life to do what you really want, in the least valuable years of your life is just a bad idea.  If you are sick and tired of waiting for your life to start, then this article is for you.

As simple as this sounds, this really rattled my cage.  The dreams of most people are accessible today!  If you are resourceful enough and do not mind eating some beans from time to time, then travelling is constantly available for you.  As a broke student, I managed to travel to 50 plus countries so far, and I had a kick-ass adventure on every continent.  And if I can do it, you can do it too.  So who is the author of Vagabonding?

Who Is Rolf Potts?

Rolf Potts is an American travel writer.  He is best known for his book “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel”, which was translated into several foreign languages, and “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There ( Travellers’ Tales, 2008)”.  Potts rarely stays long in one place.  He feels at home in Bangkok, Cairo, Pusan, New York, or anywhere on the six continents.  He is a true traveller, and I highly recommend that you check him out.  Click here to get to his blog.

The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries”.  — Rolf Potts

What Does Vagabonding Mean?  What Is The Book About?

Vagabonding is a term for taking time off from your normal life, even from yourself, this can be four weeks, or four months, or four years.  The goal is to discover the world on your own terms.  A vagabond is not a tourist but a traveller.  It is a philosophy of life that you are a curious observer who explores whatever is desirable to you.

According to Rolf Potts, vagabonding consists of 3 things.

1. The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time.
2. A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasises creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, good humour, and the growth of the spirit.
3. A deliberate way of living that makes the freedom of travel possible.

A tourist does not know where he has been.  A traveller does not know where he is going” — Rolf Potts

Watch this video to get a short summary of the book.

In the book Vagabonding, Potts writes about:

• Financing your travel time
• Determining your destination
• Adjusting to life on the road
• Handling travel adversity
• Coming home from travel and re-assimilation back into ordinary life.

3 Lessons I Learned From Reading Vagabonding

Become A Stoic

Being a vagabond starts a long time before you reach the airport.  It starts at home.  Every trip starts at home.  If you have declared to yourself that you want to travel long term, it starts with changing some of your habits.  In the video below, Tim Ferris explains how to apply the Stoic philosophy to your life.

From this hour I ordin myself loos’d of limits and imginry lines,

Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,

Listening to others, considering well what they say,

Pausing, searcing, receiving, contemplating,

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself

of the holds that would hold me.

— Walt Whitman

Stop Expanding

There are only two ways to have more money.  The first is to earn more, and the second is to spend less.  If you radically reduce what you are spending, you will earn the required money for your trip much faster.  I started, for example, to stop buying new clothes.  I have eight jackets; I do not need a 9th.  It is ridiculous how much people are obsessed with making more money, and how little they care about handling the money they already have.  Click here to read my article about money management.

Start Saving

Instead of going to the club every weekend, stay at home and have an amazing time playing games with your friends.  Instead of being lazy (and unhealthy) and ordering a pizza, cook for yourself.  For example, in Germany, ordering pizza costs about 15 euros.  For that amount of money, you could live for three days if you cook yourself some minimalistic food.  Make some sacrifices that enable you to live your dream.  Find out what you spend your money on, and cut out some of the bullshit you do not need.  Sell everything you do not need.  Old video games, old clothes, that second laptop you are never using.

It Changed How I Viewed Work

As a student, I had a lot of shitty jobs.  Working in construction, distributing pizza, and so on.  By far, the shittiest job I ever had was a job for the biggest bank in Hamburg as a mascot.  I was dressed as a mouse and needed to dance for children in this costume.  Being a 2-meter tall giant, basically, every child was afraid of me.  My co-worker was an old Chinese hag that continuously gave me hell that I need to dance more and better.  Looking back at it, it was hilarious, but at that time it was the worst!

But what kept me going and motivated me, was that I had booked a flight earlier that month to Asia.  So that humiliating job was the first part of my adventure, and viewing it as such made it not only bearable but also fun for me.

This is why I believe that everybody should have a Why, and if your why excites you enough, you can bear almost any how.

I believe that to grow; travel is a necessity.  Humans are explorers, and I believe that the world would be a better place if we all would travel more and explore the world, and within that, explore ourselves.

So start vagabonding!