Far Beyond The Stars: The Archives

Many people don’t succeed for a simple reason: they set their sights too low.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

If you caught me a year ago and asked me whether I could have left my job, started a very small business, and would be earning enough passive income to live in New York City in only one year’s time, I would have told you that you were crazy.

And yet, here I am, doing all of those things.

In July of 2009, I set a series of seemingly unrealistic expectations, (to myself at the time), all of which have come true in a remarkably short period of time.

The reason is simple: it’s lonely at the top.

99% of the people in the world are content to exist within the confines of their own settled mediocrity. The boredom of sitting under florescent lights all day begins to set in over time. Their current situation burns into their psyche, and they stagnate.

The thought of rejecting the status-quo scares the crap out of them.

It starts with the idea that you have to be realistic. Everyone knows a horde of people who either are being realistic or will tell you to be realistic. Well, these people are wrong. They’re blinded by their own passivity.

They’ve given up. They’re walking zombies. You don’t want to be one of these people.

And more importantly, don’t listen to these people.

They call them worker drones for a reason. These people are not being compared to busy bees, they’re being compared to The Borg.

Does this sound familiar? When you look at yourself in the mirror are you beginning to see the last remnants of life seeping out of your soul?

It’s never too late to start having unreasonable expectations for yourself.

You can make a change, you can make a difference in your own life and the lives of others.

Since I’ve already achieved my “unrealistic” goal of living and working from anywhere and earning at least $30,000 a year (by current approximations) it’s time to up the ante.

Here’s my new unreasonable goal: By this time next year I want to earn $100,000 a year, in addition to all of the other accomplishments I’ve unrealistically achieved over the last four months.

I don’t want to do this so I can spend it all on hookers and plasma TV’s. Because of my minimalist lifestyle, I’ve estimated that I can live comfortably making around $25,000. When I make this unrealistic amount of money, I will use it to help as many people as I can achieve exactly what I did. This blog will teach how to achieve everything that I’ve accomplished.

But enough about my unrealistic goals, and more about yours.

Here are 13 ways to start thinking about achieving unrealistic success.

1. Set at least one unrealistic goal to achieve in the next year. I’ve become a firm believer that everyone should set unrealistic goals for themselves. Take a moment and think, draw, write down your unrealistic goals. For reference: last year my unrealistic goal was to work from anywhere, quit my job, and move to another city. Done. Done. Done.

2. Map out your ideal life. So you’ve set your unrealistic goals, now you need to visualize them. Tim Ferriss calls this practice Dreamlining. It’s the idea of mapping out your unrealistic ideal life. On that piece of paper, start adding more details to the unrealistic world you’re creating. Do you want to be sipping margaritas on the beach? Swigging wine with Colin Wright in New Zealand? Training to run marathon? Ask the girl of your dreams out on a date? Write it all down: but please, do NOT be realistic.

3. Change your career. Have you always wanted to be a writer? A photographer? A chef? Now is the time to make that change in your life. Now, I don’t want you to be an ordinary member of these careerists. I want you to think unrealistically: contemplate how you can rise to become the best in your field in just one year, using very few resources. It’s hard, but possible.

4. Remove the floor. Many people exist with a constant safety net to catch them if they fall. What if you remove that net? Take it away, and then start to have unreasonable expectations for yourself. The Bahamas or the gutter, which will it be? You’ll have no choice to fly to the top, because there are no other options.

5. Be unrealistic about what you don’t need. Just like thinking about what you unrealistically want, but the opposite. What can you survive without? Basically, everything. You can live in a room, eat Brussels sprouts and be happy. It’s very hard to hit the bottom when you have big ambitions. Trust me, I’ve tried to hit the bottom.

6. Learn a new skill that you never thought you could master. When I was 16, I decided that I had to go to New York. The only way I could see to do that, at the time, was to become a professional ballet dancer. So, I took 14-17 dance classes a week for months on end. I lost 40lbs and became a vegetarian. Eventually I auditioned for NYU’s Tisch dance department and was one of 24 dancers accepted into their program. I did the same routine with this blog. What can you train to do that’s theoretically impossible?

7. Gatejump your way to unrealistic success. The last 150 years were defined by Gatekeepers. These were the head honchos in charge. A few television networks, newspapers, and publishing houses had all of the power. But no longer: everything has changed. If you’re still waiting for a Gatekeeper to come along and let you in, you’re going to be waiting a long time. We now live in a bottom-up media society, and everyone has the power to develop a following on the Internet. These Tribes are the basis for our existence. These people who support you are your power. How can you harness your tribe to Gatejump your way to success?

9. Leave your old life behind. Over time we humans get sedentary. We have our old friends, our old habits, and we keep returning to them. Where do you want to go? Who do you be? I’m going to live in Oakland California, and I’m going to be a blogger who earns $100,000 a year.

10. Ignore everybody. People will nay-say you into oblivion, and they are not to be trusted. Do not listen to negative opinions or influences. You are able to accomplish anything if you put your mind to it. And ultimately, it doesn’t matter anyway, because nothing you do matters. Man has gone to the moon, you can leave your day job, trust me.

11. Concentrate on existing systems to amplify your unrealistic success. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re being unrealistic is to try and build everything from the ground up. Don’t! There are tools available to amplify your success. Use social media to have a 1:100 connection with your Tribe. Use a blog to publish big ideas. Use automated services to make your income come without effort. Nothing can stop you if you use tools that already exist.

12. Quit early and often. If you’re unrealistic and it’s not working, don’t be afraid to change course. There’s a huge difference between being unrealistic and being a stubborn numb-nut. Set your sights above 99% of the population, but don’t be stupid. If you’re in The Dip, push on, if you’re just failing constantly, learn to abandon your projects and focus on ones that have a chance of success.

13. Read books about achieving unrealistic success. I owe a great deal of my success to the work of a couple of authors. I’d suggest reading these books, as they will help you start to think bigger about what you can actually accomplish. There are no doubt many more books that will encourage you to think unrealistically, these are just a few of my inspirations. Linchpin by Seth Godin. The Power of Less by Leo Babauta. The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

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It’s my birthday today. I’m 25. The best gift you could give me is to purchase a copy of The Art of Being Minimalist. It’s only $9.95.

If you’ve already purchased the book, thank you so much. I’d love it if you could email your copy to five friends.

Thank you.

How to manipulate your use of time to focus on the important.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter

The idea that time is your most valuable commodity is not new, but it is often overlooked. I’ve done a lot of research on the importance of focusing your attention in the last year.

There are a number of very successful people, such as Timothy Ferriss, Seth Godin, and Leo Babauta who use their time very effectively in order to accomplish greatness.

I call this emerging science Timejacking.

The idea is that you don’t exist within the accepted constraints of time as other people in the world do. These people don’t let the unimportant eat up their time.

When compiled, designed, and published The Art of Being Minimalist in under 2 weeks, I also employed a number of Timejacking techniques for greater effectiveness. I plan on writing at least one more ebook in the next two months, so Timejacking is on the forefront of my mind.

Many people choose to spend their time in ineffective ways:

• Watching TV
• Paying off bills they shouldn’t have acquired
• Working at low-paying jobs
• Multitasking
• Checking email every 35.5 seconds
• Reading information that doesn’t matter out of obligation

I could go on forever about the ways you can spend ineffectively spend time, but that wouldn’t be an effective use of my time.

The Timejacking manifesto is simple:

• I will value my time to the highest potential.
• I will not engage in activities that do not contribute value to my life.
• I will focus my attention on creating great work which changes the world.

Here’s one Timejacking case-study:

When I was living in Portland, there came a moment in time when I didn’t have any money at all. I had moved there with $3000, and around November 1st I realized that I had reached bottom. I had very little income coming in at that time, and none of it automatically, like it does now.

Then I walked by a Starbucks, and they had a help-wanted sign up in the window.

For a brief moment, perhaps 17.7 seconds, I considered taking that job. (I’m confident they would have hired me, because I’m badass.) It probably could have been paid fairly well for what those jobs pay, around $11 an hour I imagine. I could have made just enough money working part time to pay rent and buy food in Portland. I would have been ‘set.’

If I had taken this action, it would have ended my writing career before it began.

By putting that safety net in place, I would not have had the incentive to start growing my small business online. I would not have hunkered down and spent a number of months banging out valuable content for my e-book.

Anyway, I don’t mean to say this to put down people who are working for 11 dollars an hour. For me, it just doesn’t make sense. It is a very safe way to live, you can pay the electric bill. However, it isn’t a way to be find artistic success.

The rationalization for me was simple:

If I spent the next two months working on creating what is essentially, a digital work of art, it will pay me indefinitely. The truth is that my e-book made far more money in the first month of launching, than I ever would have made working at Starbucks for the last four months.

I had timejacked my way to success, and I want to help you find the skills to do that as well.

I’ve written more about my success through minimalism in my e-book The Art of Being Minimalist. I highly recommend reading it, if you haven’t already.

The nearly complete Timejacker manual for success.

1. Reduce your email usage.

Internet communication is one of the biggest problems manifested in our era. Everyone feels they need to be on the internet all day long answering stupid requests and keeping in touch. The problem is, when you’re on email all day, you never get anything done. If you sit at your computer all day, hitting the refresh button your gmail, you will never get anything important done.

Stop checking your email please. I know, this is one of the biggest crimes that I commit as well. I’ve wasted countless years of my life checking email, and I’ve made the resolution recently to make it stop. I value my time too much to waste it the endless time-vortex that is email.

This should be a separate article, and I’ve written about a healthy approach to email before. But, here are a few basics:

Do not check email first thing in the morning.

This can ruin your whole day, because you might get an email criticizing you, or requesting a massive amount of information. Suddenly, it’s all you can think about.

You know what I’m talking about, right? It’s so easy for email to take control of your life.

Start by checking email twice a day.

Set two times per day that you check email. The 1st time should be around noon. I’m doing 2pm today, because I woke up at 10am, and I need at least 4 hours to write at least 4000 words of content. The second time is around an hour before the end of your work day. Anywhere from 4pm-6pm, depending on how long you work.

If you have a boss, which I know many of you still do. (You won’t for long if you start to apply these techniques.) Explain to your boss that you will see a huge productivity bump if you start to adopt these techniques.

Offer to do a trial period, where you check email twice a day for one week. Present evidence to your boss that your productivity has skyrocketed. If it hasn’t actually boosted your productivity, be sure to prepare enough material in advance so that you can successfully demonstrate that it has.

A Timejacker isn’t afraid to fake the evidence. It might take up to 4 weeks for you to see the results of this experiment, so it’s important to have enough time to see actual results.

Compose an auto-response to train the people who email you.

Write a very nice formal message explaining to the people who email you that you’ve started a Timejacking experiment. You’re free to copy and paste this one, if you need.

Dear friend,

In order to produce the best possible results in my work, I’ve adopted a policy of only checking email once per day at 12pm EST. Email is a huge time-suck and I’ve discovered that by not spending all day checking it, I become a much more effective individual. If this is an emergency, please contact me at my phone number 555-555-1212. I hope you understand.

Thank you for your time,
Insert your name here

Quickly move to checking email once a day.

Once you’ve established the barrier of only checking email twice a day, move as quickly as possible to a schedule of checking email only once per day. This will double your productivity instantly. Choose the middle of the day option, because it will give you time to respond to email that require action without spreading over into your off-time.

2. Automate social media.

I do NOT use Facebook or LinkedIn, but I have a presence there. Because of my work, it is absolutely essential that I have as many outlets as possible for people to find the work that I’m doing. However, this doesn’t mean that I spend endless hours poking around on Facebook.

How to automate social media:

1. Turn off all notifications except incoming personal messages from real people.
2. Make the Wall on Facebook 1-way. People often leave messages on your wall, and you don’t want to have to spend time policing that location. My wall is one way, and only displays my blog posts. This way, anyone who visits my Facebook page is almost guaranteed to read my blog, instead of interacting with me on Facebook.
3. Program LinkedIn to pull in your Twitter feed and your blog feed. This will funnel people into interacting with you at your blog (your home base) and your Twitter, which limits their ability to write you five paragraph long emails that don’t say anything.
4. Delete any profiles that you have to work very hard to find value from. There are a million social networking sites out there, if you’re not seeing significant returns from them, you need to delete your profile. For instance, I used to be on a photographer forum/social network called Lightstalkers. I recently deleted my profile because it wasn’t contributing any value to my life. Stick to the powerful social networking sites that give you results.

3. Value your time properly.

A Timejacker doesn’t do work unless they’re being paid at the absolute highest rate. This might sound like laziness, but it’s not. A Timejacker isn’t using their off time to watch TV or eat chips, instead they use the time when they’re not working to train, learn, and grow their strengths.

For instance: I value my time around $100 an hour. This means I can do ‘work’ around 10 hours a week an make at least $1000. This is more than enough to cover all of my expenses for that week. I plan to grow this amount until my time is worth at least $500 an hour. This way I can earn around $5000 a week for 10 hours of work.

In the above mentioned Starbucks story. No matter how hard you work, you can never reach the potential of earning $5000 a week. Pushing the Frappachino button just doesn’t scale into high-impact income.

4. Don’t do meetings.

Once you interact with more people than yourself, you introduce the concept of bureaucracy. This is why many bigger organizations have a hard time maneuvering and growing, because you need to sit a committee down on a Friday night for four hours in order to endlessly debate whether or not to order a new snickers bar.

Simply avoid interacting with other people when decisions are being made. The section details how to solve this problem:

5. Make decisions on your own.

Take initiative and make important decisions for yourself.

The reason for this is one of a Timejacker’s biggest strengths. If you introduce an idea to another person, they will almost always have some reason to argue about how it can be done better, or how they think it will fail.

For most average decisions, you can reasonably assume that you can make the logical decision yourself, and get the minor decision done and out of the way. This way you can move on to the next decision. For important decisions, or ones that might potentially lose a lot of money, you may need to interact with other individuals if you’re working in an organization.

Knowing the difference between important decisions and squabbling over stupid decisions is one of the most important elements of any successful Timejacker. Act on decisions that have simple answers without asking for an opinion.

6. Eliminate as many unnecessary tasks as possible.

Many people simply do things because someone told them to. Don’t accept the status-quo; if you can eliminate or automate a task you must make the decision to do so.

For instance: if you’re still updating a spreadsheet that lists all of your business expenses manually, you must stop doing this and outsource it to an automated financial program.

I don’t care if you really enjoy the task of reading all of your receipts for coffee last week and typing them into Excel, doing this is effectively killing hours of your time. Use an account at Mint.com for your personal finances, and Outright.com for your business expenses. These services automatically keep track of cash flow and budgets for you, and you can see your exact net worth in a matter of seconds.

This can apply to any number of tasks though. Do an audit of your time and see where you’re wasting it, then destroy those time wasting elements. I did this with email, and it’s helping my ability to focus on the important immensely.

7. Focus on your strengths.

A Timejacker acknowledges that they cannot be good at everything.

Many people spend their entire lives trying to be as balanced as possible. We’re encouraged in schools to get high math scores, even though 80% of us will never have to do algebra again after high school. Why are we wasting all of this time learning math, when our cellphones can do it for us?

Focus on becoming the absolute best at your good abilities, and stop focusing on fixing your problems.

We all have problems, and I know we can be very insecure about them, but it’s okay. There are other people who are better at these things.

If you’re bad at giving haircuts, don’t try to fix your hair-cutting ability, instead find someone who can cut your hair for you. There are a million other ways that people focus on fixing problems instead of focusing on becoming the best at their strengths.

All of this is wasted time. You could pay someone to do the little things, or not do them at all.

8. Use existing infrastructure.

I went over this in depth in my article on simplifying your start-up. It got a huge positive reaction, and I can understand why. Everyone thinks they need to reinvent the wheel, but the truth is that making that decision can keep you in Starbucks-land for a very long time.

Be aware of the applications and services that are available to you, and use them to Timejack effectively. One way that I do this in my business is by using e-junkie to handle all of my transactions. My digital goods are transmitted, and payments are received instantaneously with no interacting from me. I can simply check my cash flow every night and adjust my strategies properly if I need to.

The old way to do this would be to rent a space in the real world, hire someone to run your cash register, and have them manually handle all transactions. This is costly, and ineffective in the modern world. A Timejacker doesn’t do brick and mortar unless absolutely necessary.

9. Make it hard to contact you.

With my new-found minor fame over the last month, I started to receive a huge amount of email every day with questions from readers. I love interacting with readers, but many of these questions could have been resolved by the person if they had just sat down and thought for 30 seconds.

In order to cut down on the amount of email I received, I installed a ‘contact me’ form that lists a couple of expectation that I have for incoming messages. For instance: keep it short. Don’t email me asking me to promote stuff. Contact me on Twitter first.

I plan on writing a brief Q&A for some of the most frequent questions that I receive.

If you make it more difficult to reach you, it will make sure that only the people who really need to contact you will. This way you can get more important work done, and spend less time answering mundane questions.

10. Avoid consuming information for information’s sake.

The majority of the information on available, especially on the internet, is valueless. Do not consume it for the sake of feeling like you’re reading something.

You are not reading anything of value.

Chances are you won’t remember what you just read. I only subscribe to 15 blogs, and these are the blogs that contain information that is incredibly valuable to me.

I suggest, as I did in my article on focusing your digital attention, unsubscribe to as much information as possible. Do not follow people on social networks just because they follow you. Focus your digital attention on only the sources that create worth for you.

How to stop reading newspapers (they’ll be dead in two years anyway.)

I recently stopped reading newspapers entirely. I used to have a sizable New York Times addiction, because I felt like I needed to read that information.

I did a month-long experiment in order to see if the information in the New York Times was really contributing to my life. I simply stopped reading it. After a week, I no longer missed reading the endless flow of useless information that comes out of the Times.

Instead I dedicate this time to reading books, because the level of information contributed is significantly higher in value quality.

I found that when important things happened, like the quakes in Haiti and Chile, my Twitter friends did their best to notify me. If something happens that actually effects me personally, I imagine I’ll be able to walk out my front door and ask a bystander what’s going on, and they will tell me.

I think when the New York Times puts up their pay wall, they will see just little society values the information that they contribute. Which is to say, not very much at all.

What information are you consuming that doesn’t contribute value to your life? Turn it off.

11. Only work when you want to.

A Timejacker doesn’t work for the sake of working. They focus their attention on activities that are incredibly important. If you find yourself sitting at your computer, and no ideas are coming to you, stop sitting at your computer! Go read a book. Go outside and sit in the park. Go to a yoga class or to the gym and exercise your body. Cook yourself a healthy lunch.

There are a million things you could be doing besides sitting in front of your computer with a glazed over look on your face waiting for ideas to come. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that the ideas won’t come in when you’re in front of the computer.

I wrote this entire article in my brain yesterday as I walked down west side of Prospect Park. I stopped at the bookstore and pursued the stacks. I got a cup of coffee and watched people do what people do.

I decided that Timejacking was the most important element of success as I was NOT sitting in front of a computer. The next day, I simply sat down and wrote a nearly 3500 word article in an hour. Because this article is so valuable, it will no doubt return an incredibly high value to my business.

If I had spent yesterday staring blankly at a computer screen, I never would have written this article. Take this to your own life though; how often do you sit at a computer screen just waiting for ideas to come?

Go out into the world and experience what it is to be alive.

12. Don’t do things you hate doing.

A timejacker doesn’t do things out of obligation. If you’re sitting at your desk right now, just waiting for the clock to strike 5pm. Stop, get up, go outside. The best decision you could ever make is to stop doing anything that you hate doing. Especially for a pay check as small as $11 an hour. If you hate your job, you should be working towards finding a way to leave your job, instead of just being a zombie.

13. Focus only on what is truly important to you.

A timejacker recognizes exactly what activities are important. Almost all of my income comes from writing professionally at this moment, so that is one of the most important activities to me.

Take a moment and determine exactly what is important to you. I like to pick four areas of my life which are most important. Right now I’m focused on writing, cooking, yoga, and reading.

Make a resolution to only focus on your areas of interest on any given day. Many people choose to spend their days focusing on many different things. Like they spend five minutes tinkering with an art project, and then they spend five minutes shopping for shoes, and then they spend five minutes thinking about philosophy. This leads to a day worth of little useless activities.

A timejacker focuses only on the important, and harnesses their strengths in order to become incredibly successful.

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If this helped you, the most important thing you can do is to hit that retweet button, so more people can be helped by this information. Thank you.

Did you know you can save $8,000 a year by not having a car?

Interview by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

If you don’t know Tammy Strobel already, you should get to meet her. Tammy blogs about social change through simple living at her blog Rowdy Kittens. She is also a photographer, and gives away all of her photos under an Uncopyright license.

Tammy and I first met months ago, when I was living in Portland and she in Sacramento. It was my first week publishing Far Beyond The Stars, and she emailed me and basically said: “your blog is awesome!”. I emailed her back and said “no! your blog is awesome!” Since then we’ve kept in touch almost every day over Twitter.

Truth be told, this blog wouldn’t be anywhere without Tammy; the inbound links from her blog drive almost as much traffic as a guest post on Zen Habits. Why? Because she only delivers remarkable ideas.

I’m happy to announce the release of Tammy’s first-ever e-book, Simply Car-free: How to Pedal Toward Financial Freedom and a Healthier Life.

Tammy sent me a preview copy last week, and I’ve read the entire book cover-to-cover. It’s one of the best resources on quitting the car-addiction and discovering the liberation of riding a bike.

There’s also a guest chapter by me! I wrote a little lifehack on how to rent a bike in any city for free, based on my experiences buying and selling a bike in Portland. Tammy included it in her book, and on her blog, which is just awesome!

I made the decision to ditch the idea of ever having a car and moved to New York City almost 7 years ago, so I had no idea that I was saving around $8,000 a year by not having one! It’s true though, cars are expensive. I never want to have one.

Well, anyway, enough of my fawning over Tammy’s awesomeness, and onto the interview:

Tammy Strobel on how going car-free allowed her to quit her job, start her business, and gain financial freedom:

Everett Bogue: Tammy, going car free was a big decision for you. What inspired you to make this choice?

Tammy Strobel: Dee Williams’ tiny house and the idea of a simpler life inspired us to try something new. Simple living challenged us to eliminate our unnecessary stuff and to prioritize our life goals.

Selling the cars was a big decision for us because we were afraid that our dependence on cars was actually an essential need. By going car-free we realized we didn’t need to depend on cars and we were able to save money, improve our health, and gain the freedom to pursue our life goals.

Everett: By going car-free, you saved a huge hunk of money. How much do you estimate you save by not having a car?

Tammy: By selling both of our cars we save, on average, about $15,000 a year. It’s amazing how much money and time cars suck up. You have to deal with car payments, insurance, fluctuating gas prices, maintenance issues, parking or speeding tickets and the list goes on and on.

We also saved a lot of emotional and financial strain. Owning two cars resulted in strain because we were always short on cash after we were paid. We couldn’t figure out where all our money was going and didn’t realize it was being poured into our cars. Owning a car was something we felt like we “needed.” It turned out we didn’t “need” a car and we wasted an incredible amount of money on non-essential assets that depreciated over time.

Thanks to selling our cars we were able to pay off all our debt, which added up to $30,000. If I still had 2 cars, I don’t think we would have paid off our debt or saved any money. The average American spends $8,000 a year on one car. Imagine what folks could be doing with that money instead of spending it on a car!

Everett: How has that enabled you to do other things with your life?

Tammy: I have the money and freedom to focus on my dreams. I don’t say this lightly. We exchange time and life-energy for money. Time and energy is non-renewable resource in our limited life-span. It’s something we never get back.

I’m using my extra time to volunteer and connect with friends and family members. Also, I was able to start my own small business, a dream that I thought would never come true. I believe going car-free is one way to find freedom from the burden of debt, poor health, and transition to a new career. I’m extremely grateful for the time I’ve spent doing non-profit work, but I knew I had to escape my cubicle. I wanted freedom. Freedom to focus on my writing and photography full time.

I have also improved my health. I used to spend a lot of time in the gym, but wanted to get outside more. Even with all the time spent in the gym, my waist line kept getting a little larger. Spending time sitting all day, then driving home from work and sitting more didn’t help. An hour or two a day at the gym wasn’t cutting it. By selling the car, I’ve literally pedaled toward good health and lost about 15 pounds too.

Everett: What was the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome when you first decided to give up your car?

Tammy: Fear. We kept imagining: “What if a family member gets sick? What if we get sick? What if the cats get sick? How will we do basic errands, like picking up groceries?” I could go on and on with the list of fears.

All of the “what if” scenarios we worried about never came true. In fact, the opposite has occurred. We’re living our lives with intention and awareness.

Everett: Going car free is definitely a huge decision for most Americans. How can they test the waters before they give it all up?

Tammy: Change is scary and uncomfortable, but being uncomfortable leads to growth.

If you’re on the verge of going car-free or car-lite you can do a number of things:

• Write down a list of your fears. Ask yourself, why you’re scared of being without a car. And if you went car-free, what is the worst thing that can happen?
• Don’t drive your car for a week and see how it feels. Go grocery shopping by bike, meet your friend at a coffee shop, and start taking notes on your observations.
• Connect with your local biking community in your neighborhood and online. Even if you don’t think your community has a local biking group, I’m sure they do. More and more grassroots biking organizations are popping up in towns across the country. Seek out your community and they will help you make the car-free or car-lite transition.
• If you don’t have a bike, buy or borrow one that fits. If you aren’t sure what kind of bike is right for you, ask for help from your biking community and you can always send me an email too.
• Look into alternative transportation options, like walking, riding the bus, or taking a light rail train.

Everett: I’ve lived in Portland, you’re living in Portland. It’s one of the greatest cities on earth. How does living in Portland make your car-free life easier?

Tammy: I agree! Portland is amazing! We’ve been in Portland for about a month and it is an incredible city. Free city bike maps, ample bike parking, bike lanes and accessible public transportation makes being car-free very easy. Additionally, Portland is very walkable. I’ve been walking, biking and riding public transit to all my destinations with no problems.

It’s my hope other U.S. cities will follow Portland’s lead regarding sustainability policies. If cities don’t make it easy for people to get around without cars, they will continue to drive.

Everett: If you could wish for one fundamental change to occur because of your e-book, what would that be?

Tammy: My wish is to address the fear of change on everyone’s mind. It’s so easy to be hindered by fear. I think it’s important to remember that anything is possible. When we sold our cars we didn’t get much support from friends and family members. We were told that our decision was crazy and austere.

After seeing the great outcome of our decision many of these same people have complemented us on our courage. Questioning the status-quo and what it means to live the good life is challenging. However, the end result is worth it. You’ll have extra money in your wallet and your heart will thank you. Reducing your dependence on cars yields tremendous results. With this e-book I want to share our wonderful experience with car-free living and give people a tool to help them start pursuing their life goals.

Everett: Thank you so much for talking with me Tammy, I’m so excited for people to read this e-book!

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You can preview the first three chapters of Simply Car-free: How to Pedal Toward Financial Freedom and a Healthier Life here.

Don’t forget to check out Tammy Strobel’s blog, Rowdy Kittens.