Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

We Bought A Van and are Becoming Travelling Hippies

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iniartworksmallA lot of people are unhappy in life and do nothing about it. We, instead, decided to buy a van and travel Australia with our three kids.

We Bought A Van and are Becoming Travelling Hippies

We all know those people who kind of go through life and are not really happy, but they don’t really do anything about it. Well, my wife and I decided not to be those people and we made a pretty drastic decision. This is going to be our new home.

There’s not a lot going on at the moment as this is a completely empty van. We actually stripped it out. It was a people mover and had about 15 seats in there but it is no longer. I just painted the floor and I stood on it.

I’m going to have all white feet now. I wanted to take this episode to talk a bit about making unusual decisions or what seemed like unusual decisions that are actually going to be the right decisions. So let’s go ahead and get some privacy.

This is something I find really hard to communicate – the decision to move into a van to fit myself, my wife and my three kids, all of us to live in a van and go traveling.

For so long, online business for me was a goal that I wanted to make a decent living online. I wanted to achieve stability for my family and to achieve financial freedom. I want to be rich and all those sorts of things. But when it came down to it at the end of the day when I actually achieved what I set out to achieve I wasn’t really happy with the result. And it made me realized that online business isn’t the point or running a business isn’t the point.

I want to be rich and all those sorts of things. But when it came down to it at the end of the day when I actually achieved what I set out to achieve I wasn’t really happy with the result. And it made me realized that online business isn’t the point or running a business isn’t the point.

The point is always going to be something else. It might be family. It might be adventures. It might be experience. And often we just spent so much time trying to achieve some goal that we set for ourselves that we don’t actually realize what it is that we’re looking for. I’ve achieved my goal of pretty much financial freedom. My business pretty much can run itself if I want to. It does require some maintenance but no way near the nine-to-five job that most people work.

My business kind of pays us enough to get by and I’ve achieved that goal but yet life isn’t fulfilled. I’m not completely happy because I’ve achieved that. And I think I thought in my mind that if you achieve your goal then you click your fingers and you’re just happy every single day. And the fact of the matter is that we are not.

It’s just not as fulfilling as we thought it would be just to achieve financial freedom and continue living a pretty standard life. We rent a pretty standard three bedroom house in a pretty standard neighborhood.

It’s a nice neighborhood on the Gold Coast of Australia about five minutes’ drive to the beach. There are lots of parks around us and stuff like that but it’s not as meaningful as we would have hoped for both me and my wife. We get a lot of time to spend with our kids. We home-school our eldest daughter and I do a lot of that which is great. But all-in-all it’s just not what we originally thought it would be and so we’re looking for something else.

We are both not happy and so we decided that instead of just staying unhappy or creating some other goal for ourselves to become even richer to actually try and explore this concept of what is going to make us happy.

What do we want our lives to look like actually? Because we spend so much time trying to pay the bills and so much time thinking about the shopping to buy, the cleaning that has to be done, the house to maintain, getting a nicer house, a nicer car, just everything to maintain your lives. And when that stops like when I didn’t have to keep working ten-hour days in my business because it was doing alright and we didn’t have to keep doing all the school trips because we decided to home-school we have a lot of time and it makes us think about things. And there’s no clear solution.

It is like you think someone would have figured this out by now and talked about it and stuff like that but I don’t know. We are kind of at the point where it’s like well we’re not happy with what we’ve got. We have no idea what is going to make us happy but this is a good start.

What do we want our lives to look like actually? Because we spend so much time trying to pay the bills and so much time thinking about the shopping to buy, the cleaning that has to be done, the house to maintain, getting a nicer house, a nicer car, just everything to maintain your lives. And when that stops like when I didn’t have to keep working ten-hour days in my business because it was doing alright and we didn’t have to keep doing all the school trips because we decided to home-school we have a lot of time and it makes us think about things. And there’s no clear solution. It is like you think someone would have figured this out by now and talked about it and stuff like that but I don’t know.

And there’s no clear solution. It is like you think someone would have figured this out by now and talked about it and stuff like that but I don’t know.

We are kind of at the point where it’s like well we’re not happy with what we’ve got. We have no idea what is going to make us happy but this is a good start.

So let’s go ahead and try something. We’re going to try to renovate this van, moving it and go travelling and see if we like it. The back-up plan if we don’t like it we’ll just come back and get another house and the van will be used for weekends or for school holidays when we go away as a family. Therefore it will still get used and it won’t be a waste. But we’re going to try something and see where it takes us.

I don’t know where we’re at. I don’t know how this is going to go but I’m excited for the adventure. I’m excited to do something different. And it just really makes me think that online business isn’t just about online business. It isn’t just about achieving financial freedom because really you get there to the end of that and you’re not super happy anyway.

So you’ve got to have something else in your life that is going to make you happy. And generally we just spent so much time working that we never actually get to that point where we can assess what makes us happy. Therefore I’m really grateful that I’ve gotten to this point.

Again, I’m frustrated at the way that I communicate this because I don’t really know what’s going on in my head and so it’s hard to communicate it to you guys. So at the moment in my business I’m still continuing to work on it but I’m putting more time into the van. So I probably spend about an hour to two hours a day on it – no that’s not true. I probably spent about an hour a day on the van.

I spent more time because my dad came out recently. But I do that so that’s an hour less of work a day so I’m probably doing about six to seven hours work a day still but I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Yes, to grow my business, to continue to have passive income but it’s becoming less and less motivating because I don’t need to work. So finding something that I’m passionate enough about to actually work really hard on is a challenge that I’m having right now and hopefully something that I can work out in the near future.

As we travel I’ve got stuff to do that keeps me fulfilled but that continues to add to society and continues to have a positive impact on people’s lives. Because that’s what I really love – having a positive impact on people’s lives.

I hope that I can find a way to do that through my work because I feel at the moment that I’m not necessarily doing that. I don’t know who I need to be or the skills that I need to have to do that but I’m definitely excited to explore new things and to find out what meaning do I want to create in my life and how to want to add value to other people’s lives above and beyond the internet businesses that I already run.

So that’s where I’m at today. I am still not 100%sure where I’m going to be moving forward. I’ve got a whole bunch of websites that I can work on but it’s just whether or not I will work on them or can be bothered working on them or feel like that’s going to move us forward in our lives in terms of happiness, fulfilment, etc.

That’s where I’m at in the journey. Not everything is always great. There are always so many questions and so many things that you have to learn along the way. And as the motto of this show goes Instructions Not Included in this so I am working out along the way. I wish you the best in your business today and in your life as well.

There are always so many questions and so many things that you have to learn along the way. And as the motto of this show goes Instructions Not Included in this so I am working out along the way. I wish you the best in your business today and in your life as well.

Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture


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