Early Sunday morning, two brothers will pick me up from my hotel in Kathmandu. We will drive several hours to a place called Sole Bazaar and from there I hear it’s an eight-hour hike by foot, through areas infested with leeches, to the remote village where the project is located.
This isn’t a photo expedition or a mini-vacation. If the weather holds out, I will be taking plenty of photos but that’s not the purpose of this trip. I’m doing this for the kids like those in the photo above. Continue reading →
This entry was posted on July 30th, 2010 and has 45 reactions. Join the discussion!
My bladder was about to burst.
Just a few more minutes, two more pages and I’ll stop and run to the restroom.
OK, back to work. I’m on a roll. No time for lunch today.
And so went the three weeks that I spent putting together my first ebook. When it comes down to it I can be very stubborn, even obsessive. It’s a quality I struggle to put to good use, but when it finds good use it’s amazing what gets done.
The staff at the cafe knew me by name — some of them even have my phone number. When I arrived, they knew what I would order and where I would sit. Sometimes they would inquire as to what I was working on. Sometimes they would leave me notes telling me how impressed they were by my diligence.
When the cafe closed at ten, I would walk back to my hotel room, past the crowds of drunken tourists who were loudly making their way into one of several clubs, where even louder music was blaring, filling the streets of Kathmandu with sounds that didn’t quite fit with my idea of rugged and romantic Nepal — a country at the top of the world, home to the tallest mountains on the planet.
I would plug in my laptop, lay down on the bed, and continue working until two in the morning, wrestling with unreliable WiFi and the occasional power outage while the sound of monsoon rains trickled in through my window. Five hours later I would wake up and repeat the entire process again. Continue reading →
This entry was posted on July 27th, 2010 and has 33 reactions. Join the discussion!
Exactly three weeks ago, I started working on a collaborative project that had no name. I sent out dozens of emails requesting participation and quickly realized that I needed some way of organizing the emails so they wouldn’t get lost. So, I created a tag in Gmail for this project and I named it with the first thing that came to mind: “Change the World”.
Every time someone replied to an email for the project, the “Change the World” tag in my Gmail account lit up and it put a smile on my face.
Every time I got an contribution, it reminded me why I was doing this project. It reminded me that there are so many people all over the globe who genuinely care about this world and who have ideas for how to make it a better place.
In just three weeks, over 40 bloggers contributed more than 100 ways to live more sustainable, to live happier and healthier, to get more out of life, to inspire and share, to reconnect with our true selves, to be a leader, to exist more intelligently.
More than 100 ways that you can begin setting an example to be the change you wish to see in the world. More than 100 ways to make a difference in the world right now. Continue reading →
This entry was posted on July 23rd, 2010 and has 97 reactions. Join the discussion!
He looked noticeably older, a little worn, but utterly calm with a presence that seemed to exude experience, awareness, and most of all a sense of confidence. He seemed a lot more laid back and easygoing than my present self.
I was sitting at a small coffee table in Kathmandu, Nepal and I had looked up from my laptop to find myself, twenty years in the future, sitting right across from me.
As I stared in disbelief, he leaned back and eased into the chair. His eyes smiled and he looked over me, as if he was inspecting a rare artifact.
“I’m you”, he said with a bit of humor in his voice, “twenty years in the future. I only have a few minutes and I’d like to hear what advice you can give me.” Continue reading →
This entry was posted on July 21st, 2010 and has 56 reactions. Join the discussion!
She smiled and asked in a somewhat sarcastic tone, “Do you live here or something?”
For her, dropping $250 in a single day was no big deal. For me, that’s my whole budget for food, transportation, and lodging for an entire month.
Over the course of the past week, we had both spent several hours a day at the same cafe in the backpackers district of Kathmandu and on several occasions exchanged glances without speaking a word.
The free wifi and excellent coffee made the cafe a great place to use my laptop and for the past week it has been my home while I work during the day on my upcoming ebook, Small Ways to Make a Big Difference.
I returned the smile, simultaneously surprised and happy that my out-of-control facial hair — which I refuse to cut until the end of my initial six-month journey — had not scared away yet another person.
Continue reading →
This entry was posted on July 16th, 2010 and has 67 reactions. Join the discussion!
