Full-time travel is ambitious. Not only is the traveling itself ambitious, but traveling unlocks doors to more opportunities than we ever thought it would. With each new place we travel to, we find new opportunities to take on new challenges and cross things off our bucket lists. All of those  opportunities are exciting, but they demand a lot of responsibility to follow through and keep them from slipping away. And one thing we’ve found with full-time travel is that it makes it painfully apparent when we’ve let opportunities slip away – if we delay too long, we find ourselves leaving a place without having done all that we wanted to do.

Patience and ambition go hand in hand in an odd way. A concept we love that has been coined by Gary Vaynerchuk is ‘micro speed, macro patience.’ In other words, we want to strive to work hard to achieve a lot each day, while not worrying about how fast we’re progressing or when we will reach our goals.

Another good way to think about this is that, in general, we overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in a day. When we’re focused only on our goals, it can be easy to fall into impatiently wanting all of our ambitions to come to fruition immediately. Not a great mindset for happiness. Good things take time. This ‘micro speed, macro patience’ mindset helps us understand how important it is to find the balance of patience and working our asses off on a daily basis to get to take part in all of our ambitions. Right now, we’re focused on creating days that can allow us to get after everything we want to do.

Nutrition

To get through our ambitious days, we have to focus on our nutrition (and if you’ve been following along with our story, you’ll recall that we cook everything for ourselves. Being dedicated to our nutrition is ambitious in itself!) Nutrition has been the backbone for how we maintain energy throughout our day. We have experienced what types of food and amounts of food work for us, but the main rule we always follow is to eat only whole foods.

We love to  work out in the morning while we are fasting and then eat a big breakfast with lots of meat and fruits, stay a bit hungry throughout the middle of the day, and then eat a big meal with lots of meat, healthy fat, and whole grains or sourdough for dinner. 

Workouts

Working out for us is not just confined to cardio or weight lifting. Our philosophy is about making it functional and fun! By finding hobbies and sports that are a great workout and also enjoyable, we feel more like we are doing something that is a part of who we are rather than just working out to work out. Luckily, we have found a ton of workouts that we can intertwine with adventures so that we are exploring and working out at the same time! Our favorites are rock climbing, jiu-jitsu, hiking, and archery.

We love to use these workouts/adventures to break up our day and keep up our energy levels throughout. Sometimes we’ll do a morning yoga workout, and other times we’ll get out and go on a long day hike. The more energy we put toward our exercise and physical fitness, the more we have come back, which gives us more energy to keep up on our ambitions! 

Avoid Time-Sucks

Time-sucks are just that – sucky. They can really take an ambitious day and turn it into a very unproductive day. Before we get into this, we’ll come clean and say that we are definitely NOT perfect at this. TV and social media definitely get the better of us sometimes. But lately, we have gotten better at avoiding time-sucks by planning out times for them. We love to watch a movie or TV show with dinner, and since we know we have a movie-night planned, it makes it easier to avoid TV throughout the day.

We try to make some similar rules for social media. When we inevitably pick up our phones habitually throughout the day, we try to turn to apps like Duolingo or Kindle instead of social media so that we can continue to be learning and bettering ourselves, even if we do need a break to disappear into our phones for a minute. If we do these types of things throughout the day, we have found they set us up for a better day overall. Another way we do this is by filling our day with exciting activities. The more we fill our day with interesting things, the less time we have to get sucked into doing things that don’t make us happy.

Get Ahead

Planning our travels ahead of time allows us to be more productive once we get to our next location. It also has made traveling a more enjoyable experience because we get to actually sit down and plan exactly what we want to when we have the time to do it, instead of at the last minute when our reservation is almost up. When it comes down to the last second and we have to find a spot to land, it can be super stressful. We like to avoid this by making reservations as soon as we confirm dates with our work so we can instantly begin planning what we want to do in those new locations and not waste time. Which brings us to our next point…

Don’t Delay When Traveling

We have learned from experience that if we want to do something in a certain location, we have to get on it right away. Time moves so fast when we travel that sometimes it can feel like we blink and it’s time to leave! Seizing the moment is a must. By the time we are pulling into our new home, we already know what hikes look fun, what podcast guests Tyler will be talking to, what gyms we want to join, and more! Another thing we do is unload the motorcycle out of the back of the truck. If it sits in there for even one or two days, we’ll start making excuses as to why we don’t need to get it down. Cutting out the excuses helps us stay on track to meet all of our ambitious goals for life on the road!

There is a lot we want to do, and we’ve found that travel fuels the fire to all of our ambitions. We can either rise to meet the challenges of making these ambitions a reality, or let them drop and continue in a perpetuating cycle of wishing and wanting but never fulfilling. We’ve done both, and we like the first one a lot better 😊 But to do it requires finding our rhythm and energy to rise to the challenges. Pushing ourselves to conquer our time has been hard, and we have found our limits for sure, but when that happens, we don’t give up, we just take a step back and reevaluate what we need to do to make it all happen!