Digital Nomad Adventures: Lessons from Overpriced Beers at the Airport

Moving to a new country for a month-long digital nomad experience is exciting, but it also comes with some anxiety. 

Laura (my wife, business partner, and infinitely better half) and I are in our second year of movement focused living. In 2023, we spent 59 days living and working in new places, which included a 5-week stint in Porto, Portugal. This year, we are chasing warmer weather, lower costs of living and new business opportunities in Merida, Mexico.

Planning the trip was exciting, but as our flights approached, the nerves definitely started to kick in. Neither of us speak Spanish and we don’t know a single person in Merida. In the days leading up to our departure we yo-yoed between eager anticipation and hard-to-hide anxiety.

The night before our flights we met some friends for dinner, and to help calm my nerves I had a couple pints of Guinness (they cost $9 each).

When we got home from dinner I finished packing (Laura had been packed for days), then I grabbed the last Guinness from the fridge and enjoyed it while hanging out with our cats Earl and Florence (hanging out / gently weeping into their fur). That Guinness cost about $3.50. My nerves started to settle (probably a mixture of the beers and the solid cry with the cats - doesn’t everyone cry when leaving their pets?!?). 

The Laura School of Flying dictates that we get to the airport at a time that some (not me) might describe as wildly early. We breezed through security at YYZ and had almost 4 hours before our flight - plenty of time to grab a bite to eat and a pint or two (this time the drinks were more celebratory in nature, rather than an anxiety management system) - those beers were $15.50 each. 

We touched down in Merida and made the short trip to our hotel. After checking in, we found a patio and mimed our way through ordering dinner, which was accompanied by, you guessed it, another couple of pints. This time they cost 25 pesos each - about $2 CAD.

$9, $3.50, $15.50, and $2.

What's the value of a pint of beer? It depends on where you are.

The same rules apply to your skills - the value isn't fixed, it changes as you move. 

We chose to design a movement centric life for a number of reasons, but a primary driver was being undervalued in the southern Ontario markets where we normally played with our businesses. 

Embracing mobility has allowed us to witness firsthand that the same skill sets can be valued differently in different markets. In the 59 days we spent abroad last year, we saw that our skills in providing educational experiences that support side hustlers and digital nomads to work and live differently were assigned higher values in different places (we closed new business opportunities that totalled a 10X return on our investment to work and live in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the spring of 2024).

Blending work and travel in new places is that beautiful mix of exciting and terrifying, it pushes you outside of your comfort zone, and it creates opportunities for personal growth. And, maybe most importantly, it allows you to uncover that the value of your skills, knowledge, and expertise, can increase significantly by changing one variable - your location. 

So, if you are feeling undervalued in your current circumstance, and you are willing to walk that line between excitement and fear, re-designing your life around movement might be the key.

We’ll be unpacking how we redesigned our life around movement in our upcoming webinar, Digital Nomad 101. And, we’ll be sharing a step-by-step starter guide to help you to embrace the power of location freedom to stimulate career mobility. If this speaks to you, we hope you’ll join us for this free session on March 27th.