today's video is sponsored by intel hey everyone i'm here in guatemala city i've been in guatemala
for about a week now creating videos showing all the things this beautiful country has to offer
but today i have something a bit special i want to step back and share the journey of how i got
to this position at least once a week i get a question from one of you asking how to become
a youtuber or how to travel full-time or how to get into this lifestyle that i've been living
it's not an easy answer but there is an answer and in this video i'm going to share that with you
but first i want to talk a bit about the technology that makes all this possible
this laptop here is the acer swift 3. it was sent to me recently by intel and i've had a lot of fun
exploring everything it has to offer you know it's great for traveling this thing
only weighs 2.2 pounds and when you like to travel with only carry-on bags like i do
every pound counts but it's not just light it's powerful as well you see this laptop is powered
by the new intel evo platform it has battery life which is about as good as any laptop i've ever had
it's rated as nine plus hours of normal usage and i've been editing videos i've been editing photos
i've been planning the next stage of my journey on this on this travels through guatemala
but you know it wasn't always like this in fact by a pretty incredible coincidence
it was 10 years ago exactly that i took my first big international trip
it was a trip to guatemala this was back in 2011 and it was actually a program through
my university me and 18 other students spent six weeks traveling through guatemala
it was a different kind of traveling you know we were we were students so we were studying
we spent a lot of time reading and taking notes and writing essays all that student
stuff but you know what's funny 10 years ago i didn't even have a laptop
i mean i had a laptop but i didn't have it with me in guatemala
because back then laptops were too big they were too heavy they were they're too slow they were too
yeah they were too everything oh my god some of these ports i literally don't know what this is
but technology has changed a lot in the last 10 years and i've changed too so i want to tell you
about that journey and how i got to the position i'm in today but first let's take a little walk
in some ways that guatemala trip is challenging i mean i remember writing 3 000 word essays
with pen and paper no wikipedia no spell check nothing you kids these
days don't know how lucky you have it but no seriously that trip really opened my eyes
to the world around me and i think it was there 10 years ago that i fell in love with traveling
what is this
and so a couple years later in 2013 when i was done school i moved to south korea i
took a job as an english teacher and i lived just outside seoul for the next eight months
now korea is an incredible place and it was a great experience i saved money and i took that
and i was able to travel i went through southeast asia and i learned what backpacking was all about
but one of the most important things that happened to me was i met these people in thailand who
called themselves digital nomads you see they were from california
but they were working with laptops and they were running their businesses online
this was mind-blowing to me you know i didn't even know that was possible i remember my high school
guidance counselor you know become an accountant become a plumber i don't remember anything about
thailand but this planted a seed in my mind which would continue to grow over the next few years
i didn't know how to get there but i knew that one day i too wanted to be running my own business
and creating my own lifestyle and so after asia i continued to travel in 2014 i moved to france with
a working holiday visa i wanted to do something i was passionate about but i didn't know how
with my visa there weren't many jobs i could get i ended up in an irish pub shout out to o'sullivan's
irish pub i worked there with some other english speakers and i served jaeger bombs to uh
american tourists for the next six months and on the side i did something i'd always been
passionate about writing i started a travel blog and i started telling stories about my experience
traveling to these different places and you know some of the blog posts did okay i started to get
a little audience but i wasn't making any money i didn't know how to make any of this a business
and so every night i would work at this bar sometimes till four in the morning
serving drinks cleaning tables telling drunk people it's time to go home now and during the day
i would write try to write anything really that could get me out of this life situation and into
something i was really passionate about in 2015 i left france and i started to travel i traveled
through western europe eastern europe scandinavia i even went to morocco in north africa that was an
unforgettable experience and more than ever before at this point i was addicted to traveling like
there was nothing else i wanted to do in the world but continue to explore but you know paris is an
expensive city and i didn't save much money at all this time i had to go back to canada i had to
work a different job i had to move in with my mom again in my mid-20s and uh you know in some ways
i was a few steps behind some of my friends who had followed more traditional career paths but
i lived at home and i worked a marketing job for a while and i saved money and once i had enough
i booked a one-way ticket to vietnam and this time i was fully committed to the writing thing i was
going there with my laptop and not much else and you know my blog continued to grow it was by this
point making a few dollars a month but after six months in vietnam i kind of felt like a failure
my blog hadn't taken off the way i wanted it to and i was just wondering what am i doing with
my life how much longer can i continue just bouncing around from place to place this was
a dark period i left vietnam and i came home to canada thinking that i was done with travel
but i will say this there's one other thing i started doing in vietnam i picked up a little
camera and i made videos not even trying to make a business but just just trying to record my
memories you know i thought one day when i'm old maybe i'll want to remember the the year i moved
to vietnam and tried to make it as a writer so i just started filming anything that interested me
and a funny thing happened pretty soon the videos were getting more views than the blog so again i
returned to canada in some ways feeling very lost and with some credit card debt by this point but
that seed i had planted was starting to grow in an unexpected place it had started to grow
with the videos i was now making so i moved home to canada this time to vancouver i had
a girlfriend by now and we moved there together i got a job at a typical startup company where you
get pizza parties every friday and you have a beer fridge in the corner of the kitchen it was okay
but on another level it wasn't okay because i'd experienced something i was passionate about
and now going back to the nine to five was just
i couldn't do it so in 2017 i quit that job and i moved again this time to costa rica
me and my girlfriend left our apartment behind we put some things in storage and we we flew down
and for the next few months i lived on the edge of the rain forest in manuel antonio costa rica
and i did something i'd never done before i fully committed to the video stuff i wasn't
doing things anyone else wanted me to be doing i wasn't chasing another job i was fully committed
one two
a funny thing happened in costa rica the the video started to take off
he started to get more views than i could have ever imagined
other people who lived there were reaching out and wanted to talk about video
i was just someone who picked up a camera not knowing what i was doing and now i was having
conversation with other videographers about video i couldn't believe it it was it was happening
in late 2017 we left costa rica and we moved to mexico city i didn't know how long we'd be in
mexico city at first i thought maybe a month and then we'd go home to vancouver and i don't know
it was just the next stage of the journey but as soon as i moved to mexico
my channel exploded i got way more views than i ever had before and by early 2018 i was now
earning enough revenue through youtube through the ads on youtube videos to sustain myself in mexico
it had finally happened that digital nomad dream that i discovered four years earlier
in thailand i i had made it i was doing it i was living it
and listen there's more to my story that i'm not going to get into it's it hasn't always
been easy i've been riddled with self-doubt i've been riddled with impostor syndrome
you know that feeling that everyone else is good and you don't have any idea what you're doing
sometimes i still feel that but i can tell you that when things really opened up to me
is when i fully committed and i decided i'm going to be a full-time video creator even before
anyone else thought i was you know it's a mindset shift that at some point any self-employed person
has to take and after a lot of years of trying and a lot of odd jobs along the way
you know i also was a painter one summer i worked for a landscaping company once
the journey is never straightforward there's always ups and downs but you just need to make
sure you're moving in the right direction your path won't look the same as mine
but i can tell you one thing that will be the same you need the technology that can support
you on your journey that's why i'm really grateful to be making this video with intel
because the intel evo platform is supporting creators like myself allowing a lifestyle
that really wasn't possible 10 years ago but with smaller devices better batteries better processors
better wi-fi connectivity we can now dream in ways that we couldn't dream before
it's just up to you what you want that dream to be do i sound like one of those corny uh
inspirational quotes on instagram it's up to you what you want your dream to be okay okay okay
if you want to learn more about what intel is up to with the intel evo platform
check the link in the description as always i'm dan from the new travel thanks for watching
you